In our so called knowledge economy, you would be forgiven for thinking it perfectly rational for organizations to do all within their power to ensure they get the best candidate for the job.

A couple of recent studies highlights how this seldom happens however.  The first explores the way recruiters tend to make decisions during the interview stage.

Why time matters for your interview

It’s common to think that the first few minutes of your interview are crucial to its success, but what you may not realize is that the time of your interview is equally influential.

The study suggests that your position in the schedule is hugely important for how recruiters are likely to judge you.  If you’re one of the early candidates then there is no ‘benchmark’ upon which to compare you against, so recruiters appeared to make judgements more objectively.

As more candidates came through the door however, the task of storing all of the information put before them led many recruiters to resort to simplistic heuristics to make their decisions.

Not only did it emerge that snap judgements about a candidate were incredibly rare, it emerged that recruiters were taking ever longer to make their analysis the longer the day went on.

The authors contend that this is because of the increase in information that they had to process.  Once a certain point had been reached, they began falling back on heuristics to allow them to make snappier decisions.

“One implication is that interview order may place some applicants at a disadvantage,” the researchers conclude. “For example, applicants interviewing later in the schedule might not get as much opportunity to perform as those earlier in the schedule.”

Getting the right candidates to the interview

Of course, making the right decision at the interview stage is often predicated on getting the right people through the door in the first place.  It’s an assumption that a recent Carnegie Mellon study casts significant doubt upon.

Researchers analyzed the online ads appearing on Google for help in securing very well paid jobs, which were classified as having an income of over $200,000.

The authors developed a tool, called AdFisher, that creates a number of profiles through which they can run experiments.  It found that women were much less likely to be shown such adverts than their male peers, regardless of other aspects of their character.  What’s more, there is little real understanding of just why such discrimination occurs.

“Many important decisions about the ads we see are being made by online systems,” the authors say. “Oversight of these ‘black boxes’ is necessary to make sure they don’t compromise our values.”

The AdFisher tool created hundreds of distinct user profiles that allowed the researchers to run a number of browser-based experiments to try and identify the various elements that influence what ads are shown to whom.

Half of the 1,000 or so profiles were set up as male, with the other half female, with each of the profiles programmed to visit around 100 of the leading employment sites online.

When the ads that appeared on the sites were reviewed, it was significantly more likely that ads for highly paid jobs would be shown to the male profiles rather than the female ones.

“The male users were shown the high-paying job ads about 1,800 times, compared to female users who saw those ads about 300 times,” the authors reveal.

Suffice to say, whilst the experiment highlights the discrepancy, it doesn’t provide any insight into why this might be happening.  It does seem to suggest that there may be issues in attracting as wide and diverse an audience as possible to an opening however.

With the securing of the best talent increasingly of competitive importance, maybe it’s high time organizations began to iron out these issues.