Learning to Avoid Unconscious Bias in Job Interviews

There is a growing consensus about how diversity drives creativity, profitability, growth and ultimately, success. Workforce diversity is currently at the top of the agenda for leading companies.  Diversity is key to understand customer needs and it is critical to attract and hire individuals with diverse backgrounds that bring different skills and experiences. 

One of the main issues to achieve a diverse environment that allows to get the maximum out of each person is unconscious or implicit bias.

I have recently read the book "The Person you mean to be: How Good People Fight Bias" by Dolly Chugh  published by HarperBusiness in 2018. The foreword is written by Laszlo Bock, former senior vice president of People Operations at Google. Laszlo Heard Dolly make the question at a conference: "How can it be true that some of the time all of us act in ways that aren’t perfectly ethical, but amazingly every one of us believes him- or herself to be a good person?” 

Career Management Cycles to Succeed in the Labour Market

The career is organized around what we call Cycles, that is, the different roles and jobs you have during your professional life. 

There is not a magic number of years you should stay in one job, but the time you spend in each place is meaningful in terms of building up your professional profile.

You will need to make decisions and then execute without looking back. Once you feel the cycle is completed, you will evaluate if the job has fulfilled your expectations, and continue down that road or change course.

If you are a recent graduate, it is not a surprise if you change job as you try to figure out what you want to be. Later, recruiters tend to look for consistency. The average  number of years that workers stay with their employers has decreased during the last decades but changing professional role too frequently will not be positive for your job interviews. When you start in a new job, it is not advisable to abandon or seek a change when the first setback appears. You learn a lot from difficult situations and it is advisable to stay on track during a reasonable period of time, unless there is an exceptional circumstance that advises otherwise.

Why Becoming a Lifelong Learner is Key in Your Career

Let us start with the global trends to explain this Viking Rule, as Technological Innovation and Demographic changes are transforming the world of work.

On the one hand, automation, robotics and artificial intelligence are changing the production processes and business models in all sectors of the economy. The labour demand is being modified according to the new skills and knowledge required by the new business environment. Against this background, the workforce must be trained to adapt to the new market circumstances.

On the other hand, we have demographic trends, which in developed economies translate into an aging population that puts pressure on the social welfare systems. The solution in many cases is to extend the working life to maintain social security systems. In a nutshell, we will foreseeably have to work a greater number of years in the future.

In summary, we have two major trends in the labour market: a continuous innovation process that rapidly changes the skills and knowledge required to remain active in the labour market and workers with a longer working life. As the OECD Employment Outlook published in 2017 points out, one of the keys to help workers navigate this rapidly changing market is to enable them to build the right skills throughout their working lives to adapt in response to the market needs.