A few weeks ago, I confessed my imposter syndrome on social media. That I was, and still am, the least likely candidate to run an Ai tech company. I am a former CHRO, I am female, I am neither an engineer nor a data scientist. I also have no sales experience, and yet I find myself spending 80% of my time in sales (although we don’t call it that of course).

When I was Head of HR at BCG back in the noughties, the firm was going through a growth period. Due to the way teams were sold into engagements, having senior people who could execute on complex change programs in areas that were quite new to the firm (digital, etc), meant looking externally for ‘lateral’ hires.

These were people who could be trusted to uphold and amplify the firm’s strong values and bring much-needed expertise by virtue of their seniority and transferable skills. It was hard.

‘Organ rejection’ is a term I learned in my next gig, as CHRO at the then-largest digital company in Australia, the REA Group. Organ rejection is what happens when a lateral hire fails miserably – for both parties.

So, here I am 2.5 years into my current role. The one I feel professionally ill-qualified for when I realize I’m a lateral hire. But despite my self-doubt, there hasn’t been any ‘organ rejection’.

When I reflect on my life and the things that mean I might (there’s that imposter syndrome again) make a great CEO, I realize that so much of what I bring to this job is what I experienced outside of education. Born out of a need to be resilient from a young age, and a bit of serendipity.

Background

In 1980, when I was 10, my family immigrated from Zimbabwe to Perth, Australia. We arrived, a family of six, with little else than each other. Anyone who’s done it knows the uncertainty of immigration. Most of us do it to risk a better life knowing very little beyond what is a glossy brochure-like version of the new land we are sailing to. It wasn’t as easy as we had been sold, but we survived and adapted to our new home country.

At 18, I moved to Melbourne from Perth to study my undergrad. Not because I wanted to make a bold move again, but because I wanted to get as far away as possible from my stepmother. My mother had tragically died at a very young age a few years after we immigrated and my dad remarried within 10 months.

I took law as my undergrad because a friend a year ahead of me was doing it and she seemed to like it. I then took a wild punt on doing an MBA and managed to get a full scholarship. Which meant I could take my time to figure out what exactly I would do with an MBA.

Fast forward three kids, and a divorce in the middle. I decided I needed to be in a creative environment. So I took an executive role in the arts knowing nothing about the two areas I was responsible for nor the sector.

Perspective

I accepted an opportunity to be Deputy Chair on a board because someone believed in me. Not because I had a grand plan to build a portfolio career. I’ve never planned my life really, but I have often taken a punt. After all, I found my home by knocking on the front door because I just loved the look of it from the outside and thought ‘what the heck?”

I landed in this job because a close friend recommended me. I found the whole idea of figuring out how you find the best lateral talent so fascinating – without realizing until right now, I was a good example of just that.

I’d say that very little of my formal qualifications and work experience has really equipped me for the rough and tumble of being the CEO of a startup. The sheer unknown of building a new product in an emerging market, and the stress of checking the bank balance daily to make sure we can make this month’s payroll.

Most of what got me here came from the lessons I learned away from the workplace. From immigrating, losing a parent when I was young, leaving a city that I knew well on my own, learning to follow my whims, take chances, and constantly look for meaning.

None of that makes it onto my CV.

My mission is to make those things matter the most when it comes to finding the right people for the right job. I’m also making peace with my imposter syndrome by accepting that it’s the different perspective that I bring to the table that makes my contribution so unique.

I’d go so far as to say we should all hire “industry imposters” if we can. And I’m here to help you find them.

Barbara Hyman, 03/08/2020

Source: https://recruitingdaily.com/an-unlikely-recruit/

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This research paper is part of our accepted submission to SIOP, and will be presented at the 2023 SIOP Conference in Boston.

Faking is a common issue with traditional self-report assessments in personnel selection (Levashina et al., 2014). The major concern with faking is that it may affect construct and criterion-related validity (Tett & Simonet, 2021). Concerningly, some research reports the prevalence of self-report faking to be as high as 30-50% depending on the assumed faking severity (Griffith et al., 2007). 

In this paper, we examine a parallel adversarial input type in modern text/chat-based interviews: plagiarism. Plagiarism poses a threat similar to faking in self-reports impacting construct and criterion-related validity. Furthermore, both plagiarism and faking impact fairness. The rank order of applicants may be altered by both practices, thereby changing the hiring decisions (Levashina et al., 2014). 

While not studied exclusively in the selection space, plagiarism has been a major concern for the education sector and extensively studied in the literature (Park, 2003). One aspect that has received considerable attention is gender differences in plagiarism. Results remain inconclusive, with some evidence that men are more likely to plagiarize than women (Jereb, et al, 2018; Negre et al., 2015). 

We also explore differences in plagiarism rates across different job families and device types (i.e., mobile vs. desktop).

Data from over 200,000 candidates (56% female) who applied to various organizations across the world. Candidates participated in an online chat-based structured interview, answering 5-7 open-ended questions on the Sapia Chat Interview™ platform. Over 1 million individual textual answers were checked against answers from past candidates (over 6.4 million answers) for plagiarism. Plagiarism detection calculates the Jaccard similarity coefficient between the new submission and all existing answers, and answers resulting in a Jaccard coefficient (Wang et al., 2013) over 0.75 were marked as plagiarized and flagged for hiring manager review.

Results show that 3.28% of candidates plagiarized at least one answer, which is significantly lower than the up-to 30-50% of candidates estimated to be faking self-report measures (Griffith et al., 2007).

Consistent with previous findings on self-report faking, males plagiarized significantly more than females. Plagiarism rates also differed significantly across role families, with the highest level of plagiarism observed among candidates who applied to ‘Call center sales’ roles and the lowest plagiarism rates observed for ‘Graduate’ roles. Additionally, we found candidates answering on a mobile phone plagiarized significantly higher than those using a desktop computer.

This work represents an important first step in investigating plagiarism detection in online, open-text chat interviews. While the prevalence is much lower than faking in self-reports, there are still fairness implications, especially given men are more likely to plagiarism than women. This is why it is so important to flag candidates who plagiarize so the hiring manager is made aware and can manually review their responses.

References:

Griffith, R. L., Chmielowski, T., & Yoshita, Y. (2007). Do applicants fake? An examination of the frequency of applicant faking behavior. Personnel Review, 36(3), 341–355.

Jereb, E., Urh, M., Jerebic, J., & Šprajc, P. (2018). Gender differences and the awareness of plagiarism in higher education. Social Psychology of Education : An International Journal, 21(2), 409–426. 

Levashina, J., Weekley, J. A., Roulin, N., & Hauck, E. (2014). Using Blatant Extreme Responding for Detecting Faking in High-stakes Selection: Construct validity, relationship with general mental ability, and subgroup differences. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 22(4), 371–383.

Negre, J. S., Forgas, R. C., & Trobat, M. F. O. (2015). Academic Plagiarism among Secondary and High School Students: Differences in Gender and Procrastination. Comunicar. Media Education Research Journal, 23(1).

Park, C. (2003). In Other (People’s) Words: Plagiarism by university students–literature and lessons. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 28(5), 471–488.

Tett, R., & Simonet, D. (2021). Applicant Faking on Personality Tests: Good or Bad and Why Should We Care? Personnel Assessment and Decisions, 7(1).

Wang, S., Qi, H., Kong, L., & Nu, C. (2013). Combination of VSM and Jaccard coefficient for external plagiarism detection. 2013 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 04, 1880–1885.

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There’s a lot expected of recruiters these days. Attracting candidates from diverse backgrounds and delivering exceptional candidate care whilst selecting from thousands of candidates isn’t easy.  

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Sapia + SnapHire

Gone are the days of screening CVs, followed by phone screens to find the best talent. The number of people applying for each job has grown 5-10 times in size recently. Reading each CV is simply no longer an option. In any case, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.

You can now streamline your SnapHire process by integrating Sapia’s interview automation with SnapHire.

We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.

1. Create a vacancy in SnapHire, and a Sapia interview link will be created. 
2. Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
3. See results as soon as candidates complete their interview. Each candidate’s scores, rank, personality assessment, role-based traits and communication skills are available as soon as they complete the interview. Every candidate will receive automated, personalised feedback.

By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.

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Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai is available to all SnapHire users. You can automate interviewing, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort! Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

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The interview that all candidates love

As unemployment rates rise, it’s more important than ever to show empathy for candidates and add value when we can. Using Sapia, every single candidate gets a FirstInterview through an engaging text experience on their mobile device, whenever it suits them. Every candidate receives personalised MyInsights feedback, with helpful coaching tips which candidates love.

There are thousands of comments just like this …

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The feedback is also great. This is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves.

The response back is written with a good sense of understanding and compassion.

I don’t know if it is a human or a robot answering me, but if it is a robot then technology is quite amazing.”

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Recruiters love using artificial intelligence in hiring

Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in SnapHire as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and SnapHire deliver an approach that is: 

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Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results. 

Together, Sapia and SnapHire deliver an approach that is: 

• Measurable—DiscoverInsights, our operations dashboard that provides clear reporting on recruitment, including pipeline shortlisting, candidate experience and bias tracking.
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