Despite all the rhetoric, it seems that the world is becoming worse at removing bias from our workplaces, leveling the playing field for all employees, and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion.
COVID was tough for everyone, but the one good moment that seemed to come out of it was how people galvanized around the Black Lives Matter movement. Companies dedicated large advertising budgets to sophisticated promotional campaigns to convince us that they supported the movement.
At work, people demanded better from the companies they worked for. They demanded real and measurable progress on matters like diversity and inclusion, not just better benefits.
Employees weren’t going to accept the hypocrisy of their employer, a consumer brand spending millions on advertising about how woke they are when nothing changed internally. Bias was just not something that people were prepared to accept. It seemed like progress was being made, at least in the workplace.
Fast forward to 2023, and things have gotten worse than they were before the movement. What happened to push us so far backward on all the progress we’d made? The answer is video interviewing, specifically when it comes to amplifying bias in recruitment.
Video interviewing: Simpler, but not fairer
Video interviewing took off as a solution to the challenges of remote recruiting. However, video is a flawed way of assessing potential candidates as a first gate. It invites judgment, adds stress to the candidate, puts added pressure around hair and makeup, and turns a simple interview into a small theater production. Additionally, simply automating interviews with video doesn’t create any efficiencies for hiring teams, who are still watching hours and hours of interviews.
Video also excludes people who are not comfortable on camera, such as introverts, people with autism, and people of color. These factors do not influence a person’s ability to do a job, but using video at the start of the interview process puts them at a disadvantage. We are excluding a significant percentage of people by using video as a first gate.
We analyzed feedback comments from more than 2.3 million candidates across 47 countries using smart chat invented by Sapia.ai to apply for a role, and the overwhelming theme is that “it’s not stressful.”
As an industry, we must put a stop to this. Already, there is growing cynicism when companies talk about “improving candidate experience” because we like to say we care about something that will win us good PR, but we do little to hold ourselves accountable. We care more about optics than results.
However, you cannot say you care about candidates or diversity and inclusion and only use video platforms to recruit people. Frustratingly, there is technology that solves for remote work, improves the candidate experience, and truly reduces bias, and that is text chat.
Some of the most sought-after companies, like Automattic (the makers of WordPress), have been using it for years.
The answer is in chat
Chat is how we truly communicate asynchronously. It needs no acting, and we all know how to chat. Empowered by the right AI, text chat can be human and real. It can listen to everyone, it is blind, reduces bias, evens the playing field by giving everyone a fair go, and gives them all personalized feedback at scale.
It can harness the true power of language to understand the candidate’s personality, language skills, critical thinking, and much more.
Video should only ever be used as a secondary interaction, for candidates who are already engaged in the process and have been shortlisted. In that case, it does give hiring teams a chance to meet candidates, and candidates are more likely to be comfortable with video as they know they’ve progressed, and they’ve had a chance to present themselves in a lower pressure format already.
Why are we settling for video as a first interaction, when we can actually do more than make empty marketing promises to candidates? Why choose a solution that erodes all the hard gains we’ve made in diversity and inclusion?
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How Ai can build equity in hiring for the future
Traditional psychological assessment has reduced the hiring and promotional error rate in modern businesses successfully for decades. They have also been used extensively to identify ‘hidden talent’ or ‘potential’ in people with limited work experience such as graduates, and also applied as a means for identifying future leaders at different levels of seniority, as well as in succession planning.
Psych testing is essentially an old-school form of predictive analytics, but they are limited in insight, providing a test of your ability to do a test. That’s it. Traditional psychological assessments do not link to actual performance in the role, nor do they have any self-learning functionality. There is no performance data that feeds into psychological assessments and therefore they have limited predictive power and no learning capability.
The worst aspect of psych tests is that you need multiple tests to test for multiple attributes. This is because they are just not that smart. This is where innovation necessarily disrupts an old formula. The difference lies in the data – volume and variance. A psych test is usually multi-choice questions repeated in different ways to achieve validity. You and I might pick the same option for each question and the only way to distinguish between you and me is to ask us a lot of questions and hope we pick some that are different to recognise our differences.
Data that comes from free-text answers to open-ended questions is by definition going to be hugely varied. A question like ‘what’s a favourite experience of working in a team’ asks us to each delve into our own personal experience, a behavioural interview question which means our answers will naturally be different.
This formula of using data that is uniquely personalised delivers variance that psych tests just can’t deliver. Ever. When it comes to developing an Ai based assessment the questions that a candidate is asked, and the answers to the questions are suitably diverse, psychologically robust and designed with the same rigour in standardised Psychological assessments.
With the processing power and advances in Natural Language Processing (natural language being the origin of all psych tests) instead of having to force a candidate through multiple tests you can distil many attributes from one test. That test is usually 20 minutes, asks 5 questions, with up to 80 features able to be discovered about that candidate including their critical thinking, their drive, self-awareness, accountability and team orientation, their propensity to stay in a role or not, their HEAXCO traits and their communication skills.
The ability to better understand individuals based on their answers to questions means we can provide accurate and insightful feedback to everyone within a couple of hours. Feedback allows everyone the opportunity to be heard, understood and cared for. This is equity.
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We cover this and so much more in our report: Hiring for Equality. Download the report here.
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The North Star in Graduate Recruitment – Hiring For Values
When you search ‘hire for values’ on Google, about 424m search results come up. HBR, and every other respectable HR journal has covered this topic at length.
But what does it mean and how do you do it at scale? And then how do you signal your values to incoming applicants?
For some organisations, ‘hiring for values’ could translate as including your values video on your careers page, showing the video at campus presentations or do as Atlassian does and hand out your values as temporary tattoos!
None of those PR stunts helps you hire for your values. What CHROs and their CEOs crave is the ability to embed their organisation’s values in their key people processes – in hiring and promotion decisions where values-driven decisions make the biggest impact on your culture. In graduate recruitment, that can be challenging given the hiring rates can be 2-5% of your applicant pool. This is where technology can help. Read on to see how easy it is to embed your values in recruitment using AI-led assessment technology.
Embedding your values in your hiring decisions typically means hiring for traits, based on the proposition that who you are as a person counts for as much as what you know at any point in time.
In graduate recruitment, this usually means looking for qualities like grit, curiosity, drive, emotional intelligence and the willingness to take accountability to make things happen.
See how AI can reveal these traits for every graduate applicant from analysing text responses to 5 open-ended questions. Contact us here
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Businesses need to stop ghosting when recruiting
To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.
There is no doubt that older Australians have been hit hardest by the health impacts of COVID-19, but it is, by far, the younger generations that will bear the economic brunt. According to official figures, there are almost 360,000 fewer jobs than there were 12 months ago, and approximately 937,400 Australians are currently looking for work.
But, with more than 1,500,000 people on JobSeeker benefits (due to end in March), those unemployment numbers are likely to skyrocket in the next few months. And the majority of these people are under 35.
Government initiatives such as the JobMaker scheme and JobTrainer fund will of course help, but so much more needs to be done to support our young people through this difficult period.
Scaffolding for these initiatives that will determine their success is missing. And it needs to be implemented from the moment our young people begin thinking about their working future.
Barb Hyman, CEO Sapia
In my experience, career counselling is almost non-existent in many schools. Without a tailored, thoughtful approach to this, how can teenagers begin their careers well?
I’m not suggesting school counsellors are doing a poor job, but that they can do a better one with the aid of technology.
The next step of the career ladder is wobbly at best.
The interview process, whether it be for part-time school and uni jobs or for full-time employment, is one that discriminates against young people and, in many cases, shatters self-worth.
I am hearing stories from many parents of big and small companies alike ghosting when recruiting! For those not familiar with the term, it means, usually once an interview has finished, the interviewee never hears from the company or potential employer again.
No reasons are given as to why the candidate wasn’t successful, no suggestions as to how they could do better next time, no feedback at all, and no closure. This a bleak situation indeed and can be incredibly damaging for those starting out.
How has this situation evolved?
Is it fear of confrontation or lack of care or empathy?
Why can’t we tell an unsuccessful candidate where they can improve, to set them up for success, instead of leaving them guessing?
What I do know is that technology, particularly artificial intelligence, can play an important role here.
It can ensure that unconscious bias (often directed at young people) is not part of the recruitment process.
It can provide valuable feedback and identify candidate strengths and weaknesses which is hugely valuable to employers and employees.
And it can free humans to do the jobs that AI still can’t. We owe it to our young people to provide them with the kind support and mentoring that will help them become the future leaders that our country deserves.
This cannot happen without a commitment from the public and private sectors. Governments need to provide more than just funding. Business needs to provide more than just a rejection email. Taking the time to treat our young people with respect and provide them with feedback and answers is such a small ask. It is the most basic of human interactions and the return on investment for society will be enormous.
Technology can aid us with this process but humans need to be the driving force behind it.
Source: Barbara Hyman, Smart Company, January 21, 2021