Psycho Bunny

Kamil Luna

At 9:53 in the morning of May 5th, 2023, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, declared an end to the COVID-19 Pandemic.  A day later, CBC News published an article discussing the push by big employers to return to the office.  This push will likely result in a shift towards bringing back in-person interviews as part of standardized recruitment processes in most organizations.

Moving interviews back to the office will allow employers to show off trendy office spaces and all those company perks in typical office tours for potential candidates.  I remember doing those when I first started my recruiting career.  I did so at a University Hospital.  It was a fantastic experience where I was able to develop competent interviewing skills in many clinical and technical disciplines.  I loved every minute of it, every minute, except for the handshakes!

Everyone says hospitals are a breeding ground for infections, which sounds like a nightmare to a germaphobe like me.  But then, what to do?  Handshakes are vital to the interviewing experience, are they not?  I remember professors in the MBA program reiterating the importance of a handshake and the lasting impression it can make on an interviewer.  A proper handshake would make or break you at an interview.  A quick internet search on how to properly prepare for interviews will yield many results expounding on how to properly handshake, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to properly train yourself to shake the perfect shake.

The pandemic solved this problem for me, and several articles discussed the end of the handshake as a cultural practice for greeting.  I was elated.  But the shake is coming back.  Don't get me wrong, I have overcome my issues with microbes and viruses, and they in no way impede me from partaking in established or expected work practices.  Still, this is an opportunity to rethink how the act of clasping hands with a stranger may affect your decision to hire or not.

"Choosing the right person is crucial for business success, and doing so should be done to minimize potential selection errors."

As a talent acquisition professional, I understand recruitment and selection is about choosing the right candidate for a job.  Choosing the right person is crucial for business success, and doing so should be done to minimize potential selection errors.  It is the standard practice of talent acquisition professionals to use measuring tools to that effect, whether standardized interviews, assessments, work samples or tests.  Using these selection tools helps recruiters avoid gut-driven decisions.  These measuring tools need to be valid, reliable and free from bias.  Let us analyze these criteria as they pertain to the behaviour in question.  Does a handshake tell me anything about a candidate's capacity to perform job-related functions and its predictive validity, or otherwise, what is the correlation between the grip and job performance?

I was introduced to the concepts of validity and reliability when I was first learning about recruitment and selection practices in university; in other words, does an assessment yield consistent results over time and across raters and accurately measure what it is supposed to measure without bias?  Only some studies derived from experience or experiments have delved into the validity and reliability of handshakes; one of particular interest looks at the handshake and its correlation with the big five personality traits, specifically on how they affect first-impression accuracy.  The study concluded that sharing someone's hand does not increase the accuracy of first impressions except regarding conscientiousness.  This finding begs the question: what does this mean for a recruiter?

Conscientiousness as a personality trait is an indicator of self-discipline.  It is a good proficiency predictor for complex skill behaviours that improve through practice, like playing the piano or performing work-related tasks.  Researchers have determined that a quarter of the behaviour-related performance in these complex skills is attributable to the personality trait.  But is this predictive validity free of bias?

To answer this question, we need to understand what bias is.  Behavioural economics has identified over a hundred types of bias ranging from heuristics to my all-time favourite, the Dunning-Krueger Effect.  In essence, biases are beliefs, judgements and assumptions that skew an observer's perceptions of ideas, things, or people in positive or negative ways.  Observers mediate biases through lenses of identity and culture.  Thus, the inter-rater reliability of the independent observers' assessment of these will remain consistent if they look at the world through similar lenses of culture and identity.  Furthermore, unless the candidate and the observer share those identity and cultural lenses, the meaning of the gesture will be different for both.  The notion of intersectionality adds an extra layer of complexity to this analysis when we consider that markers of identity such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability, religion, socioeconomic status and culture, whether this be high or low touch, monochronic or polychronic, can significantly affect a  candidate's performance of shaking hands and further amplify how they perceive discrimination.

As an LGBTQ+ person of South American origin with a disability, I am very much aware of how intersectionality plays a role in the dynamics of privilege and oppression.  This awareness is one of the reasons why I like to champion diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in my professional practice and with my talent acquisition team.  It is the same reason I encourage other talent acquisition professionals to train themselves to become aware of those differences and how these impact hiring decisions. Being unaware creates systemic discrimination in recruitment practices.