Written by Nathan Hewitt
Trust is the leadership and organisational trait for the times
A special Roy Morgan survey on ‘Trust’ and ‘Distrust’ of government leaders showed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern scores the highest ‘Net Trust Score’ of all. This means that the ‘Trust’ felt toward the New Zealand leader far outweighs the ‘Distrust’. New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has highest ‘Net Trust Score’ of all political leaders while Australian PM Scott Morrison has a ‘Net Distrust Score’ to overcome.
At this very challenging time, Jacinda Arden has stood up to the task. Her ratings are off the charts. How did she do it?
She has built a trusted personal Prime Ministerial brand through her casual clothes and addressing of the people via youtube, whilst sitting on her couch at home, after putting her kids to bed.
It’s the trust that gets you through the dark times when you have to ‘furlough’ and somehow retain the commitment and loyalty of thousands of your people
For big-name consumer brands, your customers are both the people in the store buying your products and the people who want to work for you. When you only have so many jobs to go around and your candidates are an extension of your consumer reach, give them dignity. You can do even better and give them a hand up, just by changing how you recruit.
For any relationship, trust starts early. That means trust starts to grow from your very first interactions with your future employee – from your application process through to how you conduct your interviews.
In our current reality of having to work from home and to interview remotely, building trust can be even more of a challenge.
If your Recruitment and HR team are looking to grow trust fast, here are 3 shortcuts by which our customers swear.
1. It’s the end of the black box era – give every applicant feedback
With technology now in the market that ensures every single applicant receives fast automated personalised learning from their interview. There is no excuse for black-box recruiting.
Historically, recruitment is laden with ambiguity and secrecy.
Requiring a live conversation with an org psych if you ever wanted to know your results from sitting your 3-hour psychometric test
Receiving the ubiquitous reject email or call – you don’t meet the requirements of the role, or worse, ‘you are not a good culture fit’
The known unknown- that it could be weeks or even months until you know whether you get the job
2. Expectations have changed enormously for job seekers too.
Even a few years ago, we wouldn’t question the black box of recruitment, the lack of a reply. We wouldn’t expect to receive feedback from an interview. Or to be asked to give feedback
Any company can introduce a feedback request into their recruitment, but giving feedback requires real smarts if you don’t want to kill trust.
And that feedback needs to be meaningful, relatable useful and ideally immediate. A feature enabled only by AI and only by smart human AI.
Today you can access smart AI to give every applicant that learning opportunity. And why wouldn’t you make that a priority in a world of growing unemployment and more disappointed candidates?
Plus, for a consumer brand, their candidate pool is usually also their consumer base and the bigger the brand, the more rejections they give out. In some cases, they are rejecting candidates in 6 figures. Which makes the candidate experience vital for the business even more than for your EVP.
No matter how many candidates apply for a job opening, enhance trust by giving every one of them automated personalised feedback.
3. Kill the bias – commit to genuine blind screening
Barb or Buddhi? Who do you think has a greater likelihood of getting the interview? I don’t like my name much, but I don’t believe it’s ever been a factor in my career opportunities. Unlike Buddhi, my co-founder. When I interviewed Buddhi for the role, he said he had experienced the ‘name’ discrimination himself.
An NYT article reminded us that simply having a ‘white name’ presents a distinct advantage in getting a job. Call-backs for that group being 50% higher. We have already written about the fact that no amount of bias training will make us less bias.
We worry intensely about the amplification of lies and prejudices from the technology that fuels Facebook. Yet do we hold the mirror up to ourselves and check our tendency to hire in our image? How many times have you told a candidate they didn’t get the job because they were not the right “culture fit”?
The truth is that we humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. This means we are often not accountable for our biases. And bias training has been proven not to be an effective guard against biased hiring.
Enhance trust with your applicants by committing to blind screening, at least at the top of the funnel. While it’s tempting in a world of ‘zoom everywhere’, video interviews are the opposite of blind screening.
Similarly relying on AI that uses deep learning models to find the best match, also don’t endear themselves to building trust with your applicant pool. They make explainability a real challenge for the recruiters.
Suggested Reading:
https://sapia.ai/blog/age-discrimination-mature-hires/
To book a discussion with Sapia – click here – we would love to chat
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Recruitment Platform Sapia shares its ethical framework for AI
Addressing valid concerns in the HR industry about AI, Sapia has released an ethical framework to encourage transparency in the sector
MELBOURNE, Jan 18, 2021 – Sapia (https://sapia.ai/), an Australian technology company that has pioneered transparent AI-assisted hiring solutions, today announced the global release of its Fair Ai for Recruitment (FAIR™) framework to educate HR executives in assessing Ai technology for use in their organisations, as well as act as spark conversations for Ai developers in the space: https://sapia.ai/fair-ai-recruitment-framework/
The framework has been released to begin conversations around transparency in HR technology against an explosion of Ai solutions in the sector, with many using algorithms that operate in a ‘black box’. The absence of any form of accreditation of vendors, and the fact that regulation is light years behind tech innovation, has meant a lack of collaboration among vendors to champion Ai ethics in the sector, something Sapia hopes to help change.
The Fair AI for Recruitment (FAIR™) framework :
– Focuses on establishing a data-driven approach to fairness that provides an objective pathway for evaluating, challenging and enhancing fairness considerations.
– Includes a set of measures and guidelines to implement and maintain fairness in AI based candidate selection tools.
-For hiring managers and organisations, it provides an assurance as well as a template to query fairness related metrics of Ai recruitment tools.
-For candidates, FAIR™ ensures that they are using a system built with fairness as a key performance metric.
In launching the framework, Sapia CEO Barb Hyman said: “We have created a framework that we hope can be used as inspiration to ensure that Ai is being used to build inclusive teams – something humans are not capable of doing on their own because we cannot subvert our biases.”
“Our mission is to help HR leaders make bias interruption more than rhetoric, which is why we also published this guide to Making inclusion an HR priority, not a PR one”.
About Sapia
Sapia has become one of the most trusted mobile-first Ai recruitment platforms, used by companies across Australia, India, South Africa, UK and the US, with a candidate every two minutes engaging with their unique Ai chat bot Smart Interviewer.
What makes their approach unique it it’s disruption of three paradigms in recruitment -candidates being ghosted, biased hiring and the false notion that automation diminishes the human experience.
The end result for companies – bias is interrupted at the top of the funnel, your hiring managers make more objective decisions empowered by Smart Interviewer their co-pilot, inclusivity is enhanced, and your hired profile starts to look more like your applicant profile.
Media contacts
Barb Hyman, CEO
barb@sapia.ai
Blog
Thank you, Michelle Obama
Becoming, by Netflix tells the Michelle Obama story, and throughout the documentary, it is clear that other people’s stories resonate with her just as much as her story resonates with them. As inspiring as you would expect her to be, she spends much time mentoring and coaching young women, just by listening to them and sharing her story. Midway through the doco, as another young African American woman shares her self-doubt because she doesn’t have all the reference-able facts to open up the right doors, (the right college on her CV, the right GPA, etc. ). Michelle Obama says this:
‘We focus too much on stats and not enough on stories.’
Wow! That line just nailed it for us because your story of what makes you you. What shapes and motivates you is what matters not how you turn up to your education, to an interview, to your job.
It’s why CVs need to die.
It’s why so many organisations are investing in testing your softs skills, the real skills because hard skills can be learnt. Your openness to new ideas, ability to cope with change, humility to ask for help, are way more relevant than ‘your stats’ at any point in time. That means two things for HR: Finding technology that will help you understand the story and removing bias that gets in the way of being able to hear the story.
Finding your story
COVID-19 enforced WFH restrictions have created zoom fatigue. It’s a real thing.
Eight weeks and already we are so over video.
Text has been around for a decade. Ever heard of text fatigue? No, that’s because text is easy, it is fast (especially if you are a 16-year-old who texts in acronyms (our latest fav ‘POS’ (not point of sale but parent over shoulder)). It’s also safe. Safe for introverts, safe for people who might not feel comfortable on a video call or even worse a video interview.
Forcing your applicants to invest in impression management is not a good start to building a relationship of trust and authenticity with your newest employee. How many great introverts, deep-thinkers and high-integrity individuals are you at risk of losing when you force people to perform on a video interview?
And why would you make people play a game, answer 150 +multi choice questions, (many repetitive that gives your experience no platform at all), when you can make it easy and comfortable with a chat or text interview?
Do a text interview
Doing it by text gives everyone a chance to shine, without performance anxiety, without having to prepare or risk someone gaming it by googling the right answer. When you connect with people about them, using technology they trust, that lets them be themselves (without bias getting in the way). That is what a candidate first experience looks like. It’s why we get 99% + candidate satisfaction from 10,000 applicants a month.
Fall in love with a chat-based interview here
Blog
What can Ai help us discover?
We are asked often in customer meetings – What does the data reveal?
What can AI help us discover? How can we make better people and business decisions by looking at the data?
By using SOM maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map to map personality for more than 85,000 applicants using their HEXACO scores, 47/53% male and female, candidates spread across 2 regions – the UK and Australia, we identified 400 unique personality profiles.
It turns out that personality is somewhat more complex than the 16 types long promoted by Myers Briggs.
Following SOM’s show the percentage density of male, female and sales candidates across the 400 different HEXACO profile groups. The size of each bubble represents the total count of individuals mapped to each profile. Darker shades represent higher % of each category.
The ‘so what’
- People are different. There is a whole spectrum of personality. Even 400 groupings of personality don’t convey the variance in personality in the population
- Gender is less meaningful as a lens into personality than what role family you sit in. The genders are not that different when it comes to personality profiling
- Role family differences are noticeable. Gender personality differences at the role family level are negligible. “Sales” candidates come from specific personality profiles (i.e. HEXACO combinations) and it is clear that certain personality profiles are drawn to sales more than others. See the SOM on Sales that clearly shows some profiles are more likely to be sales candidates than others (the darker bubbles).
Why NLP is a better approach to discovering personality traits
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