Years ago, after observing my husband and his interactions with strangers, I came up with a disease that I think many people suffer with – I call it IDS which stands for Instant Dislike Syndrome. The main symptom of this disease really speaks for itself – you dislike some or most people immediately upon meeting them. The difficultly is that if someone is disliked by you, they must prove their likeability to you, and this can take a long time. If someone has IDS and they instantly like you, you will probably be in their inner circle for life and can do no wrong. If you are reading this and laughing, then I would suspect that you or someone you love probably has this “disease”.

The reality is that within 30 seconds most of us have formed an opinion about someone we have just met.  This opinion can lead to judgements that are difficult to break and can affect whether you become friends with that person and in the world of work can affect whether you hire someone or not.  We call this the first impression bias, and it can be dangerous when it comes to hiring.   

While I tend to have an intuition about people, I am not immune to this bias. Early on, I learned that sometimes the smooth talkers who drew me in and had an ability to charm the room could easily fool me and become a problem later. I’ve also been proven wrong about someone I wasn’t impressed with upon meeting them only to have them become a rock star employee. 

We all have biases that affect our opinion on whether someone will be a good worker based on our past experiences with people and this can be unfair to any individual. Everyone deserves a fair chance to put their best foot forward and its important as hiring managers that we can put aside our opinions and make an informed decision about someone. To ensure that you do this, here are a few suggestions when you are looking to recruit a new hire: 

1) Come up with decision criteria and create a scoring matrix before hiring that will allow you to fairly assess everyone based on their knowledge, skills and abilities required for the job.

2) Design an interview process that starts with a phone interview and ends with a panel who help you to make a final decision. Its important that this process is fair and consistent for all candidates.



3) If you are likely to form a bias based on a person’s culture, generation, or gender, think about having someone un-biased pre-screen your applicants and remove the names from their resumes so that you don’t form a first impression before even meeting someone. 

As New Zealand becomes more diverse, we need to recognise that our first impressions of people are not always going to be right, and we are at risks of making decisions on hires that are discriminatory in nature. By not recognising our own biases we can miss out on incredible perspectives, thoughts and ideas that are unique to our own. The first step is awareness. By setting up a good hiring process that treats all individuals equal, you can ensure that you are making fair and informed decisions.