After testing my implicit attitude towards age, my responses suggested a moderate automatic preference for young people over older people. These results also prove that I have an implicit bias against older people. There is no doubt that if I were an HR in a company, such implicit bias would significantly affect my talent selection.
Simply put, an implicit bias would make me prefer a younger candidate over an older one when faced with a different age group of applicants with the same qualifications. Because I think young candidates have a broader development space, and can bring more profits and more creative development to the company in the future. While older people have the same or even slightly better qualifications than younger people, I still worry about whether they have some problems or lag behind in terms of physical condition, energy, and creativity, so they can’t perform as well as they should. Therefore, I would prefer to choose younger candidates.
Obviously, this bias is disadvantageous or even unfair to a significant number of job seekers. Therefore, I need to take some measures to prevent or counteract this implicit bias. In my opinion, maintaining a team of two to five people during the interview process, rather than just one interviewer, helps counteract this bias. Because when I’m on an interview team with different opinions at the same time, I start to rethink whether my previous choices were biased and come to a more rational conclusion, which may lead to a better choice for the interview.
Source:
Payne, Keith. “How to Think about ‘Implicit Bias’.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 27 Mar. 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/.
