Are you trapped by the similarity effect in your hiring decisions?
Have you ever preferred a candidate because of their similarity to you on various criteria? Did you grow up in the same village? Did they come from the same foreign country as you? Perhaps they also liked running or had four kids just like you? If you preferred and selected this candidate, then you were influenced by a bias called the similarity effect. This effect has shown that the more similar two individuals are, the greater the attraction between them. Wondering whether recruiters might be attracted to candidates with similar personality traits, we recently conducted a study to investigate this question, and you might be surprised by the results.
By Sébastien Fernandez, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, EHL