How to spot if your bias is showing during the hiring process and the steps to take to mitigate the issue.
While bias is slowly starting to be acknowledged as an issue in the tech hiring process, it is typically addressed – consciously or unconsciously – as bias against certain groups of people. But there is another type of bias that is just as common, but less frequently discussed: bias toward individuals who look, act, or think like you. This is known as affinity bias and can have a significant negative impact on your hiring process.
Just what is affinity bias, and how does it play out in the engineering hiring process? A definition I like states that “affinity bias is the tendency to favor people who share similar interests, backgrounds, and experiences with us.
