Biases in recruiting posted on 23 June 2024

There was an interesting thread on LinkedIn about writing “ex-” on your LinkedIn profile. A few recruiters were saying that they wouldn’t hire any ex- people because they didn’t move past their previous employer, were arrogant or some other reasons.

As far as I can tell, all the recruiters making assumptions on ex- people that weren’t based on any statistics or even their own past experiences interacting with these people. These were essentially unfounded biases.

With that being said, I’m not here to criticize the recruiters. They sometimes have to triage thousands of candidates for a single opening, so they must do it quickly – meaning relying on simple rules, rough filters and biases.

One interesting consequence of this fast triage stems from the fact that recruiters are all different – they all have their own biases/interests. The same for a company’s culture – every company is unique. This means that

  • You can’t be a good fit for every company – apply to many openings and don’t fear rejections
  • You don’t have to take one recruiter’s words (or anyone) as the source of truth – they all have their own preferences that may or may not apply to other recruiters/companies (e.g. whether your resume should be one page long or not, whether you have enough large scale experience etc.)
  • Diversity is hurt from this triage – biases from current employees are not helping build more diversity in the tech industry. This is where I’ll give a massive kudos to the few recruiters I know that manually review tons of applicants even if they don’t fit the standard mold – they spend a lot of time making sure that we don’t miss good non conventional applicants

Similarly to my previous post about rejections, don’t fear them, apply to every openings you are interested in – all that matters is that you get at least one offer you want.

LinkedIn post