To find out how to interpret bias in recruitment, we also have a great eBook on inclusive hiring.

It’s the start of the football season in Australia, and I’ve been thinking about how damn hard it must be to coach. Every week you need to revise your game plan, pick the best team to get the match-up right and galvanise your players behind your decisions. You’re constantly adjusting your approach depending on who you are up against, picking different players to counter your opponent’s strengths.

I have heard it said by people who are more football savvy than me that the best coach is the one who can rid him/herself of biases at the decision point of picking the right players for the match.

The well-known Nobel Laureate behavioural economist, Dr Daniel Kahneman, made the same discovery when he first started to work in the space of ‘human decisioning’.

As a young psychologist in the 1950’s, he was tasked with figuring out which recruits to the army should be allocated to which units, infantry, air force etc. 

All the generals of those units strongly asserted that there was a different type for each unit, and they wanted to make allocations that reflected those differences. What Kahneman found over time was that there was no difference between the best soldiers in each part of the army. 

What he observed was the intrusion of the interviewer’s own intuition when interviewing for these roles. Expert judgments were less reliable than they thought. The right algorithms might have solved this.

Accuracy is not correlated with experience. We rely on heuristics, rules of thumb, mental models that rely on similarity with our own past experience. 

The more likely the individual in front of you looks like your mental model of the person you hired last time that “was a great (insert role)”, the more likely you are to see them as a great (insert role).

Confirmation bias is something we see every day in the stock market. A stock price increase does not mean a company is successful. These buying decisions are emotional, not rational. People decisions suffer from the same human frailty.

That’s why Nobel Laureates like Dr Daniel Kahneman and many smart HR leaders are recognising that the only way to interrupt our own biases is with the right technology.

In case you missed it: The other week, Sage CEO, Stephen Kelly, sat down with Sapia’s Steven John, number 45 on the Sage Top 100 list for 2017, and asked him his thoughts on AI and just how important he feels it is to get it right.

Stephen Kelly: “I’m really pleased to be engaging today with Steven John… an absolute expert in recruitment and people development.”

“So, Steven, tell us a bit about what you’ve done. You’ve got a massive following, 18,000 followers on Twitter. You’re a renowned expert. Tell us a bit about that.”

Steven John: “Well, my background is technology and recruitment. As a lot of recruiters do, I kind of fell out of university with no real idea of a career path and landed in tech recruitment. I spent 13 years as a recruiter and then more recently had the opportunity to take my professional skills that I learned in recruitment and bring them into a business that’s using AI to help businesses make smarter hires.

“I’m a customer success manager for an AI business called Sapia.

“In terms of what we do, we use predictive models to help businesses make smarter hires so they can identify who might be a better or more likely to be a better salesperson or deliver a better customer service experience to their customers.

“Whatever the metrics or the KPIs that their business is using to understand how its people are operating, our solution can help you understand, from the candidate market, who should we be spending our time with, who should the human beings within our talent team be spending time talking to.

“Because of the model, the algorithm has helped us sift through quite a large number of candidates. I’m sure you guys get hundreds of thousands of candidates here. So how do we identify those shiny pins in the haystack? So that’s what our models do.”

Smarter hiring using AI

SK: “Well, I think that’s brilliant, Steven. And obviously, kind of the relevance and gems of this Facebook Live session is to bring it down to all the entrepreneurs out there who are thinking about growing their business, living their dreams, pursuing their passions, and we all know the fuel of that is talented people.

“You mentioned artificial intelligence – AI, machine learning, predictive analytics aimed to make smarter hiring decisions that will really boost your business forward. What is your current experience of where we are on that journey?”

SJ: “I think a lot of businesses are ready. I think more businesses are ready than they probably realise. If I think about the numerous engagements that I’ve had with numbers of businesses, prospects and current clients, the things that strike me as quite interesting are the amount of data that businesses have.

“Surprisingly, some of the businesses who I would have thought would be incredibly data-heavy, will have a lot of data on their people, haven’t been quite so. But the good news for those businesses and even the smaller businesses is that there are solutions available in the market that can help many companies get started on that journey.

“Sometimes I am surprised by how other businesses or some businesses invest their time, money and effort in technology solutions, in buildings, in lots of infrastructure and pieces of kit. But what they don’t necessarily do is invest as much money in their people.

“The encouraging thing is there are now lots of solutions available to businesses of all shapes and descriptions that will really help them start to make smarter decisions for their hiring processes.

“The people are the lifeline of the company. The cost of people is probably one of the most.”

SK: “It’s worth noting most of our customers who are in the services business, about 70% to 80% of their cost base is the people they hire and manage. And we believe in people science.

“So certainly, when they’re here, we want to be pretty scientific, but the recruitment of them could be as scientific as that so we get the right person with the right skills, the right attitude, and the right competence to be successful.”

Sage Advice: How AI and Smarter Hiring Can Boost Your Business

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If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.  If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.

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It is widely thought that Thomas Edison invented the concept of the job interview back in the early 1900s. To screen candidates, he would ask them to join him at a restaurant and eat a bowl of soup while he watched. He could pick out the losing candidates by their tendency to season their soup before eating it. According to Edison, premature salt-and-peppering speaks to a person’s over-reliance on assumptions. If you’re a true visionary, he posited, you leap into your soup face-first.

The soup test is definitely out there. And, given what we now know about psychology and candidate experience, it is not, strictly speaking, scientifically valid. But this exercise was first tested more than 100 years ago, so maybe we can forgive Edison for filling the holes in his data with social experiments. 

Funnily enough, though, things haven’t changed much since Edison souped up his hiring game. Initial face-to-face job interviews remain the predominant tool of hiring managers. There are benefits to in-person interviews, but the deficits certainly outweigh the benefits. Simply put, the practice is infused with all manner of biases, unfairnesses, inefficiencies, and oddities. In the early 1900s, we had soup – now we have inscrutable corporate-isms, and bizarre group tasks with arbitrary scoring criteria.

We’re naming names: The ‘pen-drop’ test

Let’s say you’re looking to fill a position where quick thinking and adaptability are the two most important skills. You want your candidates to think fast, and think smart, especially when faced with sudden adversity. How do you find these people?

There is no perfect answer. People are people, after all. But there are far better ways to find out than dropping a pen in the middle of an interview to see whether or not a candidate picks it up for you. The ‘pen-drop’ test assumes that the quickest candidates are the most adaptable, and are the highest in empathy. But we have more reliable predictors for these, predictors subject to far fewer variables. The quickest pen picker-upper on a given day may not be the best lateral thinker, or the most open – they may have merely been the shortest candidate, or the most flexible candidate, or the candidate closest to the pen. Because you don’t have a control, or any way to account for variables such as these, can you really trust the findings?

Yes, the pen-drop test is an extreme example of a screening exercise that is only tenuously related to its desired outcome. But we have all, at some point in our working lives, participated in strange tasks and odd jobs during interviews. The greater point is this: Even the best-planned exercises are not a viable substitute for sound scientific measurement. 

The fairest way to conduct job interviews AND get candidate data you can trust

The HEXACO personality inventory has at least three major dimensions relating to the test of a quick-thinking, empathic person: Extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. If you can assess a candidate using the HEXACO inventory, you might learn that the candidate is:

1. High in trait extraversion, which makes them more likely to take the lead in social situations, and interpret social cues
2. Low in trait conscientiousness, which makes them more likely to go with the flow, and adapt to unexpected situations
3. High in trait agreeableness, which suggests they are more ‘willing to compromise and cooperate with others’.

And that’s only the start of what you might learn. By using an Ai-based recruitment or hiring tool, with a HEXACO personality modelling function, you have a simple, trustworthy, accurate, and fair way to sort your quick thinkers from your leaders, your leaders from your long-term planners, and so on. 

That’s the essence of what a smart interviewer can do, and why we developed the world’s first smart interviewer. You no longer need to think up some strange post-interview exercise where you pull unsuspecting candidates into an impromptu indoor hockey game. You can simply:

• Entrust your first interviews to Smart Interviewer, our quick-learning Ai smart interviewer
• Receive a full report on each candidate, including their responses and where they sit on the HEXACO personality scale
• Instantly match candidates against the values you desire most (for example, ‘quick-thinking’ or ‘adaptable’.)

(We’re not the fun police, of course. If your approach to offering first-rate candidate experience involves a blind-folded three-legged race, count us in. Just make sure you have a smart interview waiting at the finish line. Fun, then statistical validity. Best of both worlds.)

We all want a world filled with better, fairer, simpler interviews. How will you go about it? Data, or gut-feel? Soup, or science?