When "Feels Right" is Wrong
- Paul Hobin
- Mar 27, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 29, 2025
Comfort Is an Unreliable Hiring Tool
Photo by Radachynskyi Serhii/shutterstock.com
The premise of this article: Bias is a natural, every day, useful and dangerous part of life. Unnoticed, bias can evolve into prejudice and discrimination, damaging people and impairing our ability to make the right decisions for our company. My bias did that. Fortunately someone was there to ensure my mistake didn’t propagate into reality.
There are a few prominent employment prejudices:¹ skin color, sex, age, sexual orientation and identity, accent and national or cultural origin. We’re aware of these because they are well known and discussed in the media.
We go about our lives indifferent to these common differences among us. We are without prejudice…aren’t we?
We can be, but none of us is without bias because it’s necessary and normally harmless. We like one color over another, one food over another. We have preferred genres in film and TV, favorite hobbies and vacations. Without these preferences – these biases – we’d be paralyzed by the effort of making hundreds of trivial decisions each day.
The danger arises when the same automatic biases that help us choose lunch spill over into the interview room and other places where we change the direction of peoples’ lives.
“Maintenance Dan”
Before we can be unbiased we must first know what our biases are, which means we must actively look for them.
I lived in a student co-op while at university and served on its Board of Directors. The board had to choose a new general manager. There were several good candidates. Our president’s choice was the maintenance manager, and he was adamant.
Dan from maintenance? Slightly unkempt, shirt untucked, somewhat blustery Dan? General manager? Really?
The president was in his thirties; the rest of us were in our early twenties and easily influenced. The president remained firm: Dan was the best choice. We acceded.
After graduation my first permanent employment was administrative assistant of the co-op where my contact with Dan went from two hours per month to all day, five days a week. That’s when I learned how subtle bias can be, how well it can hide, and how fiercely it can act while remaining completely invisible.
“Maintenance Dan,” the guy one called when the toilet was plugged or someone dumped garbage in the laneway, Dan to whom I would not have given a chance based on my own judgment, was one of my best managers.
Dan understood respect. He made everyone feel good about themselves. He had no visible ego, no pretense. Dan wrote letters by hand, tossed them on my desk and said, “Fix it,” knowing his writing was only passable, and trusting me to make his thoughts take flight. He knew his strengths and weaknesses, valued the people whose strengths complemented his own, and ensured we knew of his appreciation.
Dan never raised his voice. In the years I worked for him I made one significant mistake. He called me in and explained it gently. No more was needed. I would rather fall on my sword than disappoint him in the smallest way.
Dan’s biggest impression on me was personal, but he was also an excellent business strategist and corporate leader.
This isn’t about Dan being exceptional; it’s about how bias obscured that fact. Unwittingly acting on bias I was ready to deny Dan the opportunity he had earned. The bias was invisible to me; the lesson was I have to always watch for it.
That “Comfortable Feeling”? Often Bias At Work
When we choose the people with whom we have work relationships, whether for lunch, a team project, or when hiring, there are people with whom we feel comfortable and there are people with whom we do not.
Have we asked ourselves why we feel that way? Are those feelings rooted in objective, legitimate reasons, or something else?
I saw one aspect of a person and had a feeling about it. Having a feeling is okay, even if it is unkind. What was prejudiced and wrong was allowing that feeling to define Dan’s entire potential for me, allowing it to limit him to bathrooms and garbage bins. He was “Maintenance Dan.” Bias said he could not become “Executive Dan.”
I now understand that questioning these automatic feelings must be an intentional, regular habit. Otherwise, our subconscious will supply a convenient story that hides the bias and makes our feelings seem rational. These biases had the capacity to have me discriminate against a white, straight male, someone we assume to be immune from prejudice.
Now I question my feelings – habitually, not occasionally. If we don’t we are directed by comfort and discomfort, leading to acts of prejudice. Acts we never intended, offensive to who we want to be.
¹ My first draft used the word “prejudice” exclusively and “bias” never. Two colleagues suggested I should understand the difference and differentiate between them, and they were correct. My portrayal of bias was informed by several sources and owes the most to these two:
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