A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend Sir Ken Robinson’s opening keynote speech – ‘The Pulse of Innovation’ – at HR Tech World Congress in London.
(You might recognise Sir Ken Robinson from his Ted Talk, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’, which has been viewed almost 45 million times so far.)
As expected, Sir Ken’s speech was filled with equal parts of humour, inspiring stories and thought-provoking ideas around creativity and innovation at work.
Sir Ken opened by highlighting that the average lifespan of organisations is now shorter than it ever has been, and he stressed the importance of continuous innovation and adaptation to external factors in order for organisations to survive – quoting the famous example of Kodak as a company that failed to do so.
Given the context of his speech, it came as little surprise that he stressed the importance of HR’s role in facilitating innovation by identifying and refining talent, and he brought forward one key point which I found particularly interesting – human talent is often buried.
Sir Ken’s point is that talent is not something that we can easily identify, it is something that is hidden within individuals, and it is HR’s role to ‘mine’ for that talent.
“Human talent is highly diverse and it’s often buried. Human resources are like natural resources, you have to go and find them, cultivate them, refine them. If you do this you find that people are capable of extraordinary things.” Sir Ken Robinson
Everyone has potential but it can be quite difficult to see it amongst all the noise and stereotypes we bring with us.
To illustrate this point, Sir Ken cited his own experience interviewing Sir Paul McCartney and George Harrison, both members of a band I think you might know the name of.
During the interview, Sir Ken was surprised to find out that neither of these immensely talented musicians was recognised by their music teacher as ‘top of the class’ – yes, they happened to have the same music teacher in school.
This truly highlights the limitations of our ability to be able to determine what talent looks like (the poor music teacher must really have had to re-evaluate his assessment protocol!).
One of the reasons for this is that we are all inherently bias. While this bias is not conscious, it does affect decisions we make every day.
The ability to categorise or stereotype is an important developmental and evolutionary process that helps humans make sense of the world.
Stereotypes help us make judgements quickly without having to source all pieces of information, but it is detrimental when applied to identifying human talent and hiring decisions.
A basic example; in recruitment and talent acquisition, if successful salespeople in our organisation have all previously had red hair, we might decide that we should only hire red-haired sales assistants.
As human beings, when we try to identify what good ‘looks like’ we concentrate on a few aspects of an individual, and may end up ignoring other important factors that lead to success.
This was further highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, where it was found that 40% of individuals in their study of 1,964 ‘high potentials’ (employees in the top 5% of the organisation) were incorrectly classified as belonging in that category.
In other words, almost half of those identified by managers were not high potentials at all.
42% were below average, with 12% actually being in the bottom ranks with regards to leadership effectiveness.
The point clearly illustrated here is the inability of managers to correctly identify high potentials by not concentrating on the right traits and skills of an individual – they are only human after all.
Sir Ken Robinson spoke in detail about the success of the Beatles and how it was due to the diversity within their group – something that is almost impossible to achieve when allowing subjectivity to guide hiring decisions.
One way of addressing subjectivity and unconscious biases in the hiring process is to make use of data-driven technologies.
Using data to inform hiring decisions means HR can take into account the traits and skills that actually lead to performance, rather than keep focusing on hiring based on subjective stereotypes of success.
At Sapia, we develop predictive models, powered by artificial intelligence, that can predict the likelihood of candidates performing well in organisations based on their behaviour – not on the stereotype they fit into.
Our algorithms and questions are created so that everyone is given an equal opportunity to succeed and be considered, based on what actually drives performance – regardless of age, gender or nationality.
Through adopting AI and data science in the HR field, we can get one step closer to bias-free hiring and increased diversity within organisations.
Whilst AI does take the human out of some part of the hiring decision, the outcomes ensure the human is at the forefront with more opportunities for all.
If you would like to learn more about how AI can impact hiring outcomes in your organisation, feel free to get in touch with our sales team. You can also try it out here for yourself right now!
Over a six-month period, Sapia gave personalised, same-day feedback to 250,000 candidates after each completed a text-based interview using its AI platform, says CEO Barbara Hyman.
The candidates ranged in age from 16 to 80 and included people from non-English speaking and Indigenous backgrounds. The feedback highlighted their strengths, as well as tips on areas for development.
The outcome, Hyman tells Shortlist, is that 99% of candidate reported satisfaction with their interview experience; 70% said they were more likely to recommend the company as an employer of choice; and 95% reported they loved receiving their feedback and “found it empowering, constructive and ‘scarily accurate'”.
Recruiters using Sapia gain insights into each candidate’s personality and the quality of their response to behavioural interview questions.
Sapia realised candidates would benefit from receiving some form of feedback and insight into their traits as well, and so it began rolling this out 15 months ago. The feature has since won a UK-based candidate experience award.
The feedback specifically does not include information about whether the candidate is a good fit for the role, “because that’s not our job – that’s the client’s job”, Hyman says.
For AI to be trusted, she says, the candidate needs to trust it, and so the candidate needs to get something out of it – including “the ability to understand themselves”.
Candidate experience isn’t simply an automatic email that says, “thanks, we’ve had lots of applicants, but we may not get back to you”, Hyman says.
Rather, a good candidate experience is “when everybody gets something out of it”.
“There really isn’t any excuse now for ghosting. And the feedback that companies give when they do it through humans is not that constructive. Getting a phone call saying you’re not a great culture fit – what’s that telling you? That’s a big cop-out.”
When Sapia first deployed the candidate feedback feature, its clients were initially too scared to use it, says Hyman.
“They thought that if you give candidates feedback, you’ll risk a whole lot of candidates calling up and asking, ‘why didn’t I get the job?’ or candidates would disagree with it and it would undermine their trust in the process. This might diminish their employer brand,” she explains.
But these fears proved unfounded when recruiters started reading the responses candidates were invited to give about their feedback, which included whether they agreed with the feedback and whether they would recommend the organisation as an employer or retailer (most of Sapia’s clients are consumer brands).
“The fact we were able to show to clients what candidates thought about it really disrupted that fear and killed the notion feedback is a ‘risk’.
“In fact, what candidates feel is feedback is a gift, and that gift is really playing out in terms of employer brand,” says Hyman.
Reference: Shortlist 2020 | https://www.shortlist.net.au
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It’s now well established that a wider talent pool means more opportunities for recruiting diverse candidates and this results in higher returns, increased productivity, and creativity benefit companies with a diverse workforce. The issue isn’t that we need these thighs to be proven anymore, but rather that nothing we’ve been doing to create the change we need has worked.
Though well-intentioned, DEI has not delivered. Companies have been motivated by the optics of their DEI programmes rather than taking consequential actions to bring about change. Unconscious bias training has been proven ineffective because it cannot address the systemic issues that lead to bias in the first place.
Companies have also spent large sums of money and resources improving their cultures that celebrate belonging, but neglecting their recruitment metrics because they excuse lack of diverse talent as a ‘pipeline problem’.
To address this we need to do something radical. Because what we are doing just isn’t working.
This is where Ai is, where the power of technology can really have a positive impact on the world.
You need to find undiscovered talent.
Undiscovered talent is the talent that you overlook when using traditional hiring practices that rely on CVs, which are limited in communicating real skills, and job interviews, which are beset with bias and limited in their insight. By using radical new talent intelligence that uncovers people for their job fit, based on science-backed insights, you start to uncover undiscovered talent. These are people who might have been dismissed because of things like age, past experience, ethnicity, gender or other preconceptions and biases that we have about who we think is a good fit for a job.
Our technology has uncovered some amazing talent for the companies that we work with, that they would have otherwise missed out on. This is a massive advantage when it comes to making an impact on this issue.
This is how we start to move the dial on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Want to know if technology can give everyone a fair go?
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Eighteen months after we were all forced abruptly to work from home, it seems as the world cautiously opens up and employers are looking to return workers to offices, having the flexibility to work from home is an increasing demand that people aren’t willing to give up.
Earlier this year, Amazon laid out plans for most of its 60,000 workers in the Seattle area to return to the office later in the year. But, it wasn’t good news to everyone with hundreds threatening to quit. Microsoft, at Redmond in California, took a softer approach saying employees could work from home, the office or in a hybrid arrangement. Google, Hubspot and Intuit are some of the other companies that have opted for hybrid models going forward.
Others like Atlassian, Twitter, Shopify, Spotify and Slack have decided to become fully remote. Recently, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield declared that digital life has moved too far forward during the COVID-19 pandemic for companies to return to former ways of office-based working, even if they wanted to.
While these are some of the world’s most influential companies, it’s a conversation that almost every employer is having right now.
The reality is the demand for remote or hybrid work is fast becoming part of hiring negotiations and compensation packages. For many, work flexibility has become more important than pay.
This has created a new dilemma for hiring managers that’s much deeper than offering strong commitments on flexibility as part of a job offer.
While it’s easy to guess some of the ideal attributes of a remote worker – that is they need to be autonomous, self-motivated, productive and able to collaborate online – there is another key characteristic that has proven vital to strong performance.
What we’ve seen from companies that have prioritised remote working for a long time such as Automattic, GitLab, InVision and Buffer is the importance of strong written communication. This is because you are no longer relying on face-to-face interactions that occur naturally or through formal meetings in an office. For remote work to be viable communication needs to be predominantly textual and mostly asynchronous.
When building a remote organization, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has said that at some point you realise how crucial written communication is for your success, and you start looking for great writers in your hiring. For this reason, Auttomatic job interviews are conducted via text only.
Mullenweg says the true asynchronous nature of a written interview reflects the remote work reality compared to real time video interviews, which are not scalable in an organisation. I think most of us found that out the hard way during the pandemic.
In order to be effective remote and hybrid companies we need to rethink our hiring processes. To be frank, current hiring practices are just not going to cut it. CVs do not reveal the soft skills we need them to, and video is so inherently biased and stressful for candidates that many companies which opted for this early on in the pandemic are abandoning it as a top-of-the-funnel filter. We have several customers who have explicitly ditched video interviews.
The risk of making bad hires when you throw remote work into the equation is higher than if you’re bringing people into an office environment. You need to trust them from day one without any of the ‘visibility’ you get from seeing someone everyday.
We need a new way of selecting candidates that can accurately identify soft skills like accountability, autonomy, drive and writing skills. Can a text based interview reveal these qualities, while providing a great candidate experience and being highly relevant to the remote work context?
Mullenweg’s idea of a text only interview is not as radical as some might believe. We do thousands of them every day across the world, for a number of varied companies. We are able to reveal people’s character traits with over 90% accuracy (we know because we ask them).
It’s scientific, based on data and is the only accurate way you can identify both the written communication proficiency and soft skills required to work remotely.
Our text interview includes open-ended questions on situational judgement and values, similar to a structured interview. When responses are analysed for skills that pertain to remote work it takes into account a multitude of features related to language fluency, proficiency, personality traits, behavioural traits, and semantic alignment.
This allows a recruiter to quantify and compare a candidate’s written communication skills immediately as well as their suitability to the work environment.
The revealing nature of text interviews is not just limited to the skill of writing, but also to the motivation behind expressing something in writing, which requires more effort and thinking than speaking it out. If someone is not motivated to express themselves in writing when a job is on the line, you can assume what it might be like once they are working in a role.
While many companies are already scrambling to update their remote work policies and rethink their office space needs, if they are not reconsidering their hiring processes as part of this inevitable shift, then they are exposing their company to risk.
Just because people want to work remotely, doesn’t always mean they can thrive in it. While you may be doing the right thing in offering flexibility for candidates, you also need to make sure that you are doing right by your company by understanding how well these candidates will thrive remotely.
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