Nothing like a crisis to force change 

In the current world, websites like LinkedIn have become a great platform for people to seek out new job opportunities. Same for organisations.

The Best and The Worst of Social Media

Given the current COVID-19 crisis, almost daily I come across 2 or 3 posts of people seeking to find a job as their company let them go, due to the economic situation.

Such posts are very popular. The power of social media is really unravelled in these times with a clear case multiple strangers coming to rescue to the person who starts the post. This help is extended either in case of connecting for an opportunity or by simply commenting so that more and more see in their personal feeds and the post goes viral.

I am sure many prospective candidates or affected people may have found their job of choice or compulsion with this. Great effort indeed!

But this also brings out the fact that many people (and companies) may be little hasty in making the job decision.

Given that hiring is an expensive process, HR leaders and hiring managers have often struggled with the possibility of the candidate leaving the job in a few months or years from joining.

Problems become more complex with the fact that the current breed of young workers rate company loyalty relatively lower in their ranking of traits of a dream job. A better brand, a better culture or better compensation can sway them to the other side of the door.

Another study found that in some sectors, the average stay in the company is reducing rapidly due to the high attrition.

What are Job Hoppers?

People who move from one job to the other very often are popularly known as ‘Job Hoppers’.

One study says that in 2018, the turnover cost was $680 Billion in the US economy. Here is the link to the study.

As a phenomenon, job-hopping has been an area of significant interest for both industry and academia.

How do you recognise ‘Job Hoppers’?

Now a new study may have found the solution to this problem with the help of Artificial Intelligence techniques.

The study titled ‘Predicting job-hopping likelihood using answers to open-ended interview questions’ scanned through over 45,000+ interview responses to correlate them with personality types using multiple AI techniques to lead to conclusion.

The personality types were identified using the following model –

1. HEXACO Personality – Link here

The correlation models used for assessment of the personality types derived from the interview responses with the propensity of job-hopping are below –

1. Doc2Vec – DM (Gensim)
2. LDA
3. LIWC
4. TF-IDF
5. Word Embeddings

The conclusion of the study is –

1. Candidates with ‘Openness to Experience‘ personality type on HEXACO are most likely to indulge in job-hopping
2. And candidates with ‘Agreeableness‘ trait dominant in their personality type are least likely to indulge in it.

The full study with details of the future work prospects in the area can be found here.

Amitesh Tyagi, Grow Daily, 25/07/2020 

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Right now there is an opportunity for our profession to show even more empathy for the thousands that are looking for work.

Even with all the hiring freezes around, we are seeing many organisations use this time to get ready for the bounce back and the inevitable volumes coming from the changing employment landscape.

Gone are the days of screening CVs, followed by phone screens to find the best talent. A 5 to 10x increase in the number of people applying for jobs makes this no longer an option.  And no-one’s time is served well by screening thousands of CVs.

Given that humans don’t scale, automating your screening and assessment criteria is an important job for the right technology.

Imagine offering to candidates an interview that feels nothing like an assessment.

• An intuitive, human and fast interview for the role – 5 free text questions via chat. They can do this anytime, anywhere, anyplace.
• Receiving immediate feedback – personalised, motivating and constructive. Coaching tips to help them perform at their best whatever their next role.
• Having candidates feel comfortable to be who they are, without fear of being judged by a video, or pressured by a time-bound assessment.

It’s the automation of your interviews – with heart ❤️

And importantly – with fairness. Because an interview via chat is blind. So, everyone gets a fair go.

Technology that puts the candidate’s experience first is: 

• RELEVANT: CV’s don’t tell you whether someone has the qualities that matter the most – grit, curiosity accountability, critical thinking, agility, or their communication skills.
• RESPECTFUL: Gives everyone a first interview and never ghost again.
• DIGNIFIED: Value the time candidates give you, by giving them personalised feedback.
• FAIR: Video amplifies bias, so you need to have an approach that is 100% blind to gender, age, ethnicity, and all those irrelevant markers of job fit.
• FAMILIAR: Text is intuitive. It’s natural. It’s what we do every day.

By embracing new technology you can change candidate experience.

And by changing candidate experience, you can change a life.

“Wow, this was not at all what I expected, a great surprise to get a reply such as this, your appraisal was absolutely correct, and the coaching tip will be utilised in many aspects of both work and private life”

You can’t argue with candidate feedback 🙂

Understand how we can help you deliver on these promises and download the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook here.

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?