Are you destroying culture through unscientific promotion decisions?
Who you hire and who you promote are the most important decisions you make as an organization.
And if you care about culture, these factors will shape your culture more than anything else you do to drive culture. If you’re not taking hiring seriously, you aren’t walking the most important talk.
Forget engagement surveys, team one-on-ones and other reactive exercises – without fair hiring, your people will see those measures as they band-aids they are.
AI for recruitment is about more than just efficiency
When we think about using AI for hiring, it’s usually to deliver efficiency, right?
We’re a bit obsessed with efficiency, and in a one-sided way. I understand why: It’s about dollars and cents. It’s measurable. For many recruiters, it’s the difference between keeping and losing their jobs.
But when you think about why AI can be powerful for promotion, it’s very different. It’s not about weeding through thousands of applications and doing that quickly.
It’s suddenly about more than just efficiency – it’s about measurable quality. Quality you can prove, and in a manner that people can trust.
Improving culture through fair internal mobility
You know, as a former CHRO, I fundamentally believe that your job is to build a culture of trust where your people feel that decisions are trustful and the organization is trustful.
How do you create a culture of trust?
You make sure that those important job promotion decisions are made objectively, not subjectively.
And unfortunately, the way they’re still happening in most organizations is people are making those decisions without any data.
So the power of using ethical AI for other internal mobility roles is a huge investment in your culture of trust. I say ethical very deliberately here, because ethical AI is the only way you can deliver a truly fair assessment of talent being considered for leadership roles.
Imagine the experience you have when you’re in an organization and someone gets promoted, and they’re promoted because they’re a friend of the manager.
It just completely diminishes your sense of engagement and kills trust that you have in that organization.
As opposed to a process where everyone goes through an application experience: an interview, and importantly a blind interview – one that is truly looking for the qualities that matter for the role. Things like cognitive ability, personality traits and behaviors.
And no-one knows where you worked in the organization. No-one knows what’s on your resume or the color of your skin or your gender. And when you ignore those factors, you will discover undiscovered talent.
That’s the key benefit of using blind, ethical AI for internal mobility: You will see talent that you, as a human being, are not seeing, because we’re all shaped by the prism of our own experience. We have biases we simply cannot escape.
And, most importantly, you’re putting a massive down payment on trust.
Your people will trust those outcome decisions more than when they’re just made by people.
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