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Your CV And Bias

The whole point of a CV is to land you a job interview.

You may have a brilliant CV that showcases your skills, experience and your achievements but you're still not getting job interviews. What's that all about?

It could be that there are things in your CV that leading to bias, things that give the recruiter or hiring manager a reason to not select you for interview based on their own, often subconscious, bias.

Some of those things you can't control, such as your name. Sometimes people will make assumptions about you based purely on your name, it may be gender bias, cultural bias or just pure racism.

And whilst that's completely wrong, your name is your name, it needs to be on your CV and you should never hide away from that.

But there are some other things that you don't need to include on your CV, that thousands of people do include which can lead to bias.

Let's take a look at some of them.

A Photograph

People will judge a book by it's cover.

By including a photograph on your CV you are opening up the potential for a hiring manager not to interview you based simply on the way you look. Over the years I've heard all sorts of assumptions from hiring managers.

Everything from "he's fat, must be lazy", or "hate his suit", or "what's going on with her hair", "she wouldn't fit in here", "he looks old" and other comments I won't repeat here.

Don't include your photograph on your CV, it really isn't needed. The focus of your CV should be your skills, experience and achievements. Not how you look.

Your Address

"That's a poor part of town, they won't fit in here" or "look how big their house is, we won't be able to afford her".

You don't need to include your full address on your CV. Some recruiters or hiring managers may judge you based on where you live.

You only need to include the town or city you live. Not your full address.

Your Hobbies

Are completely irrelevant and don't need to be on your CV.

Again people will judge you, you may not support the same football team as they do, or you may like gaming and the reader thinks that's childish.

They will find reasons not to interview you based on your outside interests.

Now a lot of the time, these decisions and judgements aren't being made on purpose. We all have subconscious bias, we all make unfair assumptions about folk based on factors that have no relevance to somebody's ability to do a job.

Don't include these things on your CV, they're really not needed and if you do include them you're leaving yourself open to bias.

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