Algorithms are Not Always a Straight Shot

As we all know, in the labor market we’re already using algorithms in selection. If done badly, they will increase bias, if done right they diminish bias.  

The right way to go about this is always to use scientifically validated tests that measure traits necessary for the job and ignore the resume as the primary pre-selection document.

When we’re talking about traits necessary for work, think about stress resilience for air traffic controllers, listening skills for contact centre employees, and at least some inhibition for security guards and bouncers. As talent doesn’t run by lines of age, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, when selection on relevant traits, diversity will always increase.

There is, however, a risk that using selection algorithms, even when well implemented, can lead to a monoculture. Because almost every job can be done really well in more ways than one. Some salesmen are great at building relationships while others excel in customer acquisition. Having both types of people in your sales team makes for a better team.

Team at Stake

Playing for England, Harry Kane delivers his way as a forward. Marcus Rashford, Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho, and Raheem Sterling all have their own skillset to perform. The differences between all of them are striking.

Not only physically or technically, but also in decision-making, anticipation, attention, and information-processing. Some of them match very well together, others to a lesser extent. When two strikers both excel at predicting and arising spaces, they will do so, together.

Filling those spaces by running into them at the same time isn’t what you want to see them do. When one of them anticipates and the other reacts by acting fast, they could form the crown couple. Foden acts more like the cockpit of the Three Lions’ jet fighter; Sterling is its deadly weapon.

A good team manager understands these differences and applies this in favour of the team.  

Even when co-workers do very individual work there are still multiple ways to excel. Let’s take a journalist for example. You have journalists that have a specific area of expertise and can talk in-depth with the experts in the field. You also have excellent listening skills and have high information processing speed and hence can ask really good questions. Both can produce excellent articles, but if you train an algorithm to have only one profile, one type will always be selected and you will end up with a monoculture editorial staff.

Diversity On the Ball

Back to sports: Southgate’s choice between the available options is determined by specific game needs. Metrics like ‘Number of goals in last season’ or the trending ‘expected goals value’ alone won’t solve his problem. Does he prefer excellent anticipation skills or extremely fast responsiveness? Will he prevail speed of action or positioning? It’s not about selecting the eleven best-performing individuals, it’s teamwork that makes the dream work.

The fact there are more ways to excel at the same job doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain baseline of specific traits for everybody in a job. Every journalist needs a minimal skill level of listening ability and linguistic knowledge. Every striker needs an above-average information processing speed and every stock market trader needs Indycar racer-like reaction speeds.

But when you are developing AI or any algorithm for selection, it should always have more than one perfect profile. There are always more ways to excel in any job.

Let’s use the diversity in soccer, in all facets, all systems that can be played, and all the ways we can play the same system to be a guide to our own hiring.

This article was written in co-production between Bas van de Haterd, consultant on modern selection tooling and Eric Castien, founder and CEO of Brainsfirst, a tool used in professional sports and business to match talent to opportunity based on brain profiles.

The post Professional Sports Give Us a Look into the Future of Selection appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

With all the controversy on facial recognition, it seems like a topic too controversial to touch.

Luckily some people dare to be controversial. Just like with micro-expressions, we don’t know enough about it to say it could work or not.

There is plenty of evidence of bias and problems, but the scientific research that was done usually shows potential.

But because of the controversy surrounding the subject few scientists dare touch the topic, even less gets peer-reviewed and nothing gets replicated.

Cognitive ability

So I was pleasantly surprised when this article came on my path. This research shows that your pupil size (the little black thing inside of your iris) can be a sign of higher cognitive ability.

And just to be clear, they are not talking IQ here, that’s just one type of cognitive ability.

We found that a larger baseline pupil size was correlated with greater fluid intelligence, attention control and, to a lesser degree, working memory capacity—indicating a fascinating relationship between the brain and eye.

As the researchers say, it’s very early days. It might just be a correlation. 

It might be a biased data set, but there might also be something there.

Personality

This newest research comes on top of the research in 2018 that showed that by tracking eye movement during random tasks, like E-mailing, scientists were able to predict the Big Five personality traits with pretty darn good accuracy.

So again, just by looking at someone’s eyes, in this case, the eye movement, it seems possible to predict something about that person and about that person’s personality.

More research

Both pieces of research are cool in themselves, but not by a long shot conclusive enough to start using it.

We need much, much more research to see what is and isn’t possible.

Unfortunately, the current climate on facial recognition in hiring and laws that are being passed specifically on this topic might prevent us from actually building better tools that help recruit on actual quality.

Wouldn’t it be cool if a video interview would give you data about a person? Actual, real data on that person’s cognitive ability and personality traits?

Then a recruiter wouldn’t need to guess if that Texas is a redneck or if that Californian is a hippie? Or a recruiter wouldn’t need to be turned off because of the accent someone had and relate that to intelligence, as research has shown humans do time and time again.

And most of all, wouldn’t this be a great candidate experience? Not filling out yet another questionnaire. Not having to play all kinds of games to get someone’s ability and traits.

Isn’t this a better candidate experience if it turns out to be viable and bias-free?

The post Just look into a candidate’s eyes (with AI) appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

All kinds of different research shows, on average, that Gen Z is more likely to go back to the office than Gen X and Baby Boomers, since building those relationships early on in your career is easiest done offline.

The one thing though everybody agrees on — getting the culture piece right in a remote or hybrid environment will be the biggest challenge.

So is this the time to start living our Employer Brand?

Company Culture

How do you keep your company culture alive in a remote or hybrid environment? How do you keep people engaged if they don’t show up to your building every day? How do you pass your corporate values to new hires?

Wait. Pass your values on to them?

Isn’t ‘not fitting the culture’ the number one reason for rejecting a perfectly suited candidate? And now you’re telling me we need to pass the culture on?

What is our employer brand worth if we cannot select based on our corporate values?

Hire on Value Fit

Every employer branding presentation I have seen in the past couple of decades, at every event I visited, started with “We did workshops in the organisation to learn the true values of our organisation.“

They usually end up with a pretty generic video that if you know the values you understand how they are in there.

In the ‘age of remote work’, this post-pandemic world — where we will be in the office a lot less — at least for most companies, shouldn’t we start living our Employer Brand? Our corporate values?

Shouldn’t we hire based on values fit — so our culture is embedded in the people not working at the office?

Why don’t we take Employer Branding to the next level and define the values like they really are? Not as a hollow term, but an answer to how do we deal with certain situations?

How do we expect a manager to react to a data breach or an employee mistake? Or how do we expect an employee to fix his or her mistake?

In assessments, we call these ‘situational judgment tests.’ You get a situation and you get three or four perfectly reasonable answers that show a totally different culture. 

To give you an example of culture-defining situations here’s one.

You get a call from your clients, the product is down. How do you react?

A) You gather your team right away and figure out what’s going on.

B) You look at what’s going on and try to fix it yourself.

C) You call your manager to decide if this is your issue or if the team needs to get involved

For all three answers, I have a client that will say that’s the perfect answer. It’s a very telling example of culture.

The new employer brand

The new employer brand is about the genuine values of the organisation. Measurable values that you can select on. Let’s stop rejecting people on cultural fit and start hiring or rejecting them on value fit.

Let’s get people in the door that share your corporate values and build a strong culture from there. In a remote or hybrid environment that’s the only way.

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Dutch insurance giant Achmea for example gives their applicants the opportunity to decide on the method of communication. The candidate gets to decide if the recruiter should call, WhatsApp, or e-mail.

Turns out 80% never changed the default status of phone.

Of course, this wasn’t tested in an A/B test, so maybe people like to be called. But we see this everywhere and there are actually a lot of good psychological constructs for this behavior.

1. The default sets the norm and most people don’t like deviating from the norm.
2. A conscious choice costs mental energy. If a choice is already made for us, that’s easy.

GDPR compliance

So do we see this on other aspects of the careers website as well? Yes. For example, GDPR compliance checks in Europe. Most companies have a “check the box” but some offer the candidate the choice of when to have their data removed—between 28 days or 1 year—after the application process is finished.

No matter whether it’s 28 days or 1 year, the default option gets selected about 70% across the board according to Dutch ATS Hirevserve.

Not just online 

In case you’re now wondering: maybe people just don’t care enough about these things. Let’s take a choice that could decide between life and death: organ donation. That’s an important one, and one you would think people care deeply about right?

Well, Germany and Austria have pretty similar cultural norms, yet the number of organ donors in Austria is twice as high as in Germany. Why?

The default option at registration in Austria is yes and in Germany is no. In Austria, you have to make a conscious decision to unregister. In Germany, you have to make it to register.

What defaults do you have? 

So what defaults do you have on your careers website? Do you have a range in your search bar? If so, what made you decide that is the right default?

Do you send job alerts at different time intervals? If so what’s the default interval?

And in case you think you don’t have a default because they always need to select something, you forget that the first option you offer is the one selected most often.

The effect isn’t as strong as a pre-filled default, but it’s still there.

Defaults matter

There is no wrong or right with defaults. But never forget you have the power to nudge people. Or actually, by definition, you will nudge people.

So whatever choice you make, make a conscious one, as your choice unconsciously affects those of many.

The post Consider Your Default Settings appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

And even though Taleo and Workday still have this as their default option thankfully more and more Talent Acquisition managers are changing the process and recent data shows this is the smartest move you can make.

Increase conversion

Career site system Attrax was kind enough to share some data with me recently on sites that used their system to get rid of the ‘register to apply’ option—and turn it into a decent application process. Here the applicant simply enters an e-mail address and then uploads a resume that is parsed for data. Or enters a few data fields.

With register to apply at engineering firm SNC-Lavelin only 49% of the people that clicked the apply button finished it.

That’s a loss of over half of all applicants.

After this friction was removed, 76% finished the process. That’s an increase of 55%.

This is the LOWEST conversion increase they shared with me.

Healthcare technology firm IQVIA: + 63%

Telecoms giant Vodafone: + 76%

Pharma company ICON: +68%

My assumption is because SNC-Lavelin recruits lots of construction workers, who might be willing to put up with a lesser candidate experience that their increase is the smallest, and still about 50%.

To turn this into actual numbers, SNC-Lavelin in 2019, pre-pandemic when the labor markets were still very difficult, got over 10.000 more applicants finishing their application because they got rid of the ‘register to apply.’

The Careers Site Multiplier

I’ve said it many times before. Your corporate careers website is a multiplier, either on your conversion or your budget. All your other recruiting efforts are affected by it.

Your advertising, your sourcing, your (virtual) career fairs.

Research shows over 90% of all candidates will at some stage look at your careers website. You’d better make it awesome.

Most careers websites I look at, especially in the US and UK, are all about looks. It’s more like a campaign with some good pictures and nice movies than about the stuff that matters.

An awesome careers website isn’t just about the looks, it’s about the jobs and the process. The job descriptions matter. Both in looks as in text.

My Dutch clients see on average between 70% and 90% of all traffic on job-related parts of the site.

Most people never see anything but the job description.

And after that, it’s the application process.

Your corporate careers website should be like Amazon—not just an interesting homepage, but nice product pages (job descriptions) and a really frictionless ordering (application) process.

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The One Recruitment Tech Solution I Would Buy Right Now

It’s the end of 2020 and there is good news about a vaccine. Hopefully this will be distributed from early 2021 on and during 2021 we can go back to normal as we knew it. Although I expect many things to never go back to the old normal, like everybody going back to the office all the time, but that’s an entire different subject.

The one thing all organizations need to do now is be ready for the great rehire and in the words of Winston Churchill: never waste a good crisis. So be better prepared for what will come than how you handled your recruitment in the past years.

What will come

So here’s what I consider to be the most likely scenario of what is to come. Although unemployment has been falling some in the USA, I expect there will be a lot more people looking for jobs. Many companies will fail in January after not being able to make the normal Christmas boom sales.

In Europe I fear 2021 will be a year of bankruptcies. Many governments have done everything they can to ease the pain and in the Netherlands for example we’ve actually seen less bankruptcies in 2020 than in any normal year because of the government help. We do see unemployment increasing and I expect we’ll see it increase a lot more in the first half of 2021.

Combine this with many companies that will have either full remote or partial remote policies that companies have in place and all of a sudden location will become less important. So the physical range to the office to apply will increase as well, as the long trips are acceptable one or two days a week.

Tech you want because of this

In September I’ve already wrote about why you need digital pre-selection tools because of this and I hope you have that installed by now. Right now I would like you to think about another piece that will help you move your recruitment strategy forward: Candidate Relationship & Tracking software.

You will be getting in a lot more applicants and I would even argue you want to start advertising in these times, even if you might not be looking for the candidates right now. You want to start building a talent pool. Oh how that word has been around for ages, but we now have the technology to actually build one.

Talent pool strategy

So make sure you have the right technology for this. I personally love Candidate.ID for this as it’s both really easy to use and it tracks candidates’ interactions so you know who has done what and looked at what so you can personalize the next automated actions and when you are looking for a candidate you know who has been most active and who for examples recently looked at your vacancy. But I’ve also seen a great in house tool build for this and if you never reach out to candidates anyway and you wait for candidates to apply, you can use any CRM system.

When the technology is in place, build a content strategy. Basically you need to find the balance between free content that’s out there for all to see combined with some special content as you want people to register. They need to tell you who they are before you can build a talentpool. This is a delicate balance, you need enough free content to win trust, but you need enough added value content behind the registration to get them to register. As this balance is different for every type of job and sector, you’ll need to experiment with this.

Then you set up the automated content strategy and start advertising to get people to sign up. As unemployment is higher than it has been for ages and people are more and more willing to work from further away, this should be relatively easy.

One example: Specsavers

Let’s share an example of what a great content strategy can look like. Optician chain Specsavers made their internal training content available for everybody who wants to upgrade their skills as an optician. Of course, they left out the company-specific things, but it’s still very valuable content. And it’s all free for those that register. They now have their competitor’s employees in their database. They can actually see how good they are when they do exams at the end of the training and they know how ‘hire ready’ they are because you see if they looked at a vacancy. Specsavers managed to increase the number of hires per recruiter by 50% in 2019.

Be ready for post-pandemic hiring

So make sure you are ready for post-pandemic hiring. Of course, you need pre-selection tools if the volumes increase significantly. But you also want to build a talent pool of all those excellent candidates that you don’t have a job for right now. And of course, if more and more people are willing to travel further as they don’t have to do it every day, this is probably a group that needs a little more persuasion. They will take longer to convince that it really is remote most of the time.

Make sure you are ready for 2021.

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As people who tend to read my articles on this website know, I’m a big fan of pre-selection software. I often however run into the die-hard old school recruiter or HR manager that believes we should be ‘more human’ and ‘have the human touch’ in the selection phase.

Sometimes they will admit that technology might help for volume jobs, but if you only get 5 or up to 30 applicants per job, there is no reason to use screening technology and it’s just a negative experience.

I disagree. 

The human experience

Let’s start by quantifying the human experience. The one that is supposed to be superior to a machine helping with the pre-selection. I research the candidate experience in the Netherlands for years and part of this massive research is a mystery application.

We apply every year to the 550 biggest and most well-known employers in the country. We apply in order to be rejected. Think a recent graduate applying to a senior management position.

As little volume jobs as possible. It could not be easier to give us a reason for rejecting us, sorry, but at least 6 years of experience is required for this job. Last year only 26% of the companies gave this type of feedback and over two thirds just said: sorry, we have better candidates.

And yes, there were those, about 6%, that called us. About 6% call every candidate to see if there is another possible fit. 

The machine experience

Now let me give anecdotal evidence on the machine experience. The first time I heard of pre-selection testing and the first company that implemented this on scale was a contact centre.

With a cognitive and personality test they tested every applicant and if an applicant scored below a certain threshold they would get an automatic rejection with their assessment report and the minimum values you need to score on certain traits.

I wondered how candidates would feel about automated rejections, when their head of recruitment showed me an e-mail they got.

It read ‘Thank you for this rejection, this is the most humane rejection I ever heard. Now I finally have the explanation why I am not fit for this specific type of job and I understand I need to look elsewhere’. 

Yes, the candidate actually said it was the most humane rejection he ever got, while it was probably the only one he had ever had that had no human touch it. 

Machine empathy

I’m not saying machines can be empathetic, they can’t be. Some can simulate it, but they can’t be. The problem is about 66% of all recruiters don’t even simulate any empathy when rejecting candidates. 

So not only do we select better, on actual important character traits and cognitive values, when we use pre-selection technology. Because of the data this generates, we can be clearer and more human in our rejection.

Let’s be honest, saying ‘from your resume I don’t see you have the skills’ sounds a lot worse than actually saying: I’m sorry, you tested 65% on this trait and the minimum for this job is 80%. 

The human experience

Let’s treat candidates more humane, let’s use technology to mitigate our weaknesses. 

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To be human is to be biased. It’s impossible to be unbiased. The best you can hope for is to be aware of (many) of your biases so you can mitigate them. 

The reason we have biases is because of how our brain works. We need to make shortcuts. Like seeing a big metal thing coming to us, we have seconds to understand it’s a car and if it hits us, that’s bad. Our automated recognition system in our brain also quickly recognizes an animal as being a cat or a lion and realizing a friend from foe. The problem is with humans it’s not so black and white. It’s used to be when we lived in caves and our tribe had the only people we could genuinely trust, but we’ve evolved. Unfortunately, the algorithm in our brains hasn’t kept up. 

In recruitment, our biases can be a big problem. And not just the stereotyping bias we focus most on when we talk about bias. Stereotyping is the bias where we attribute traits to a person based, well any stereotype. Like women are worse programmers than men. 

Other biases

But there are so many. One of the most important in recruitment might just be the just-world hypothesis. This is the reason we believe that a stretch of unemployment is a reason for rejection since if the person was any good, someone would have hired him, right? Or what about the anchoring bias, where the first candidate that applies sets the bar for all others? Or the decoy effect? When you have two different, but equally qualified candidates and a third one applies. That’s similar to one candidate in all aspects but one. All of a sudden the superior candidate to the decoy looks better than the one that was previously considered equal. 

And let’s not forget the Dunning Kruger effect. The incompetent are too incompetent to know they are incompetent and hence speak with much confidence. And as we also see confidence as a sign of competence, this could very well interfere with our ability to hire competent people. 

But what about the in-group favoritism and the out-group homogeneity bias you ask? Yes, very important as well and potential risks in recruitment, as we tend to favor those that are in our in-group, like those that play the same sports or even have kids the same age. And we tend to see all of the out-group as one because, let’s be honest, all developers are socially inept and all bankers are money-grabbing parasites, right? 

The list

The list of potential biases goes on and on and on. So I decided, with the help of Dirk Hulsberg to put them all in one place and make cards of all of them. The most important biases that might interfere with your recruitment and a simple example of how they work.  

With this bias cheat sheet, I hope we can all gain a little more insight into our own brain and be more aware of the biases we might have. You can download the entire sheet here. 

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The times are changing. The USA has never seen an increase in jobless claims like it’s seeing now. In Europe, the situation is a little less grim for now, as governments react differently to the crisis, and labor laws are much different. But there too, the jobless claims are rising and will rise even further.

In countries without a social net like India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippians the situation is even worse.

We are not in a candidate market anymore. Although many blue-collar workers will probably argue it never was, especially in the USA. The problem isn’t attracting applicants, it’s selecting them and treating the rejected well as they might be future customers.

The BBC recently reported on 1,000 applicants in 24 hours for a Manchester restaurant looking for a receptionist and many more stories of low paid part-time jobs getting hundreds of applicants in just a day in the UK as well.

In a recent case study from Captiva on using Game-based assessment technology, they said they got in as many as 12,000 applications on one customer service role.

Another supplier told me that in the Philippians recently one contact center job for 25 agents had 400,000 applicants. Yes, you are reading that correct 400,000 people replied to one job advert.

Pre-Screening Technology

In order to sift through that many applicants, you will need technology to help you.

The good news is: this technology is available and ready to go.

The bad news is: you’ll need to know what you are actually looking for in terms of skills, traits, and cognitive abilities.

A Few Case Studies

As I’ve been consulting on this for years, I’ve seen many case studies. Some published, others in my own practice. I know Foot Locker increased sales and customer satisfaction and decreased attrition in its U.S. stores a few years ago.

The case was presented at Unleash in 2016. Foot Locker then had 1.5 million applicants a year for its stores and decided to do a 200 question based voluntary assessment for current store employees. The results of the 55% of employees that responded were correlated with performance data, from sales to promotions.

Using this data they were able to determine top performers per role in the store and start hiring on both sales as well as growth potential. As the pilot was done in about half the stores, chosen on store manager’s willingness to try the system, they were able to see the actual results by comparing them to the stores using the old system.

Those stores had a bigger growth in sales and customer satisfaction than the ones that relied on the old resume based approach. They also had 10% less attrition, the number of candidates a store manager interviewed went from 8 to 3 per hire and the time for onboarding someone, the time before a new hire was productive was also reduced (in 2015) by giving all applicants a simple questionnaire-based assessment.

Judgment testing

Albert Heijn, The biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, recently presented this case study. They reduced the time store managers spend on hiring with 30% and reduced time to hire from 15 days to one week by implementing a game with a situational judgment test in their application process.

Contactless Recruitment

Blue Cross, an Australian elderly care organization, recently presented on Next Wave talent an awesome case study for contingent workers during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. They had to quickly double their care employees because when someone tested positive on the virus, this person was of course not allowed to work anymore.

They actually managed to get their digital assessment center online within 24 hours and set up a completely contactless recruitment process. I admit they already had paper-based assessments, so it was more digitizing it than figuring out the traits.

They also managed to fit the mandatory training/onboarding in the system and the worker just showed up for his or her shift at the right location at the right time. Joel Broughton, their Head of Talent Acquisition, told me hiring manager feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on the quality of the applicants that arrived.

Pre-screening with cognitive games

Dutch air traffic control started using a cognitive game as a pre-screening assessment a few years ago. Although they already had some screening work sample tests in place after initial cv selection, this game allowed them to lower the drop out rate in their traineeship by over half.

They were able to lower the educational requirements from university to high school diploma, as you don’t need to be good at learning for this job. It turns out stress resilience is the most important trait, combined with following procedures.

Aptitude testing

The UK arm of accounting firm Grant Thornton changed its hiring policy for trainees in 2013. One of the most important changes is they dropped the demand for academic requirements and replaced them with aptitude testing.

This resulted in hiring a lot more people from a very diverse background that had all the qualities to become a good account, just not the right education or even the right grades. School grades also depend on the hours you can spend studying. Something that’s a lot easier when you don’t have to work two jobs to pay for college and when you have a safe home environment.

Grant Thornton measured the results of these ‘diversity hires’ and it turns out they stay at the company longer and have more billable hours per year. In 2018 Grant Thornton won the Queen’s Award for improving social mobility.

Questionnaire-based assessment

A Belgium transport company presented a case study at Talent Acquisition Live in 2017 on reducing the number of accidents by truck drivers by administering a questionnaire-based assessment.

I’ve heard of several case studies increasing sales by over 30% for either hospitality sales and even car salesmen. I’ve seen the attrition in contact centers drop from over 100% to 20% with situational judgment games.

Fair Hiring Leads To More Diversity

The amazing thing is there are two really great side effects to using pre-screening technology instead of a resume as early in the process as you possibly can.

1. It will increase diversity
2. It will increase the quality of hire

Everywhere where these tools have been properly implemented I have seen an increase in diversity. I do want to emphasize the word properly here. Properly means no black-box algorithm, but based on a serious analysis of the skills and traits needed to do a job.

If you want to increase diversity, start hiring on quality. Because that’s what going to happen as well, the quality of hire will increase too. It turns out talent doesn’t run by gender or racial lines and someone’s religious views or sexual orientation tells you nothing about their ability to do a job either.

Personal Story

I want to end with a short personal story. I got a letter from the Dutch IRS recently, telling me I was going to get some money from them. Turned out I hired a ‘vulnerable’ person last year. She had been unemployed for some time and as I paid her above minimum wage, I got compensation for that.

I didn’t know that, as all my applicants do three cognitive tests. Based on those results I give them the job. She aced the tests and excelled at the job.

Would I have hired her if I had known she had been unemployed in the thriving labor market we had for so long? Probably not.

Why was she unemployed? My best guess she was a terrible applicant as she was introverted and insecure. Being terrible at being an applicant doesn’t mean a person can’t be a great employee.

Fun fact, I asked her to work for me again this summer. She declined, she found another job. Guess she had a better resume and more self-confidence now.

Conclusion

With everything that will be coming your way during the great rehiring after the pandemic, and the emphasis on fair hiring that will be even greater with the Black Lives Matter movement right now. I would strongly encourage everybody to start investing in pre-selection tooling as fast as you can.

It makes perfect business sense. Hiring better quality while spending a lot less time on it.

One last request, please don’t let the best sales pitch win. Make sure you know what you are buying and that the implementation is done properly.

If you don’t have the knowledge of how it should be done, find someone who can help you with that.

The post Why You Need Digital Assessments Now More Than Ever appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

As recruiters, we use proxies. A lot of proxies, not real data. We use a lot of proxies and usually, we’re not even aware of it. 

For example, we use education as a proxy for intelligence. In continental Europe, we look at a university degree, as in most countries there is no difference in quality.

In the UK and the USA, they even look at what university someone has attended. This is however a proxy with two problems. The first problem is that for many jobs the university does not measure the right traits and second, it’s a terrible proxy even for what it intends to measure.

Two examples:

Air traffic controllers are people that need to be able to handle sudden stress. At what time during your education is this tested? It’s not. So when the Dutch air traffic control started testing applicants with game-based assessments on their stress resilience, they did away with the educational requirements. Quality of hire went up as fewer people dropped out of the training, saving millions. This is an example of education not being a good proxy for being good at every job. 

One Dutch municipality had an overload of applicants for their traineeship and decided to use an IQ test to measure the quality, as they found based on earlier current employees that had finished the traineeship this was the differentiator between the good and not so good trainees. Turned out that 60% of all applicants with a university degree did not reach academic IQ levels according to an academically validated IQ test. So apparently you don’t even need to have academic smarts to get an academic degree. 

So an academic degree doesn’t guarantee a good hire and isn’t a great proxy. It does however exclude a lot of talented people. Another example. 

Accounting firm Grant Thornton in the UK stoped with educational requirements for trainees in 2013 and replaced them by aptitude testing. This resulted in hiring a lot more people from a very diverse background that had all the qualities to become a good account, just not the right education or even the right grades. School grades also depend on the hours you can spend studying, something that’s a lot easier when you don’t have to work two jobs to pay for college and when you have a safe home environment.

Grant Thornton measured the results of these ‘diversity hires’ and it turns out they stay at the company longer and have more billable hours per year. In 2018 Grant Thornton won the Queen’s Award for improving social mobility.  

Overqualified

This article by the BBC talked about the new hiring problem post-COVID-19. Too many applicants and many overqualified. This one retail shop had ‘people with Ph.D.’s apply, way overqualified’. But since when does a Ph.D. make you a great retail salesperson. The qualities you need for a Ph.D. have nothing in common with the qualities you need to be a great retail salesperson.

A Ph.D. might have these qualities, but there is no guarantee what so ever. This person isn’t overqualified for the job, she has qualifications that match different, usually better-paying jobs, better. 

Quality of English

Some companies in continental Europe that are very internationally oriented want every employee to speak at least a decent level of English. That’s why they use English job descriptions and demand an English CV.

This excluded a lot of people that just don’t search on Google or Indeed for the English version of a job title and of course no IT professional with 7 jobs to choose from will spend two hours translating his or her CV. Interestingly enough when I quested these recruiters if they actually tested the English of the candidate? If the job interview was in English? Or if the candidate had to do an English test the answer was no.

So they still had plenty of hires with poor English skills who had a friend translate their resume and write their cover letter. 

Let’s do better

Other proxies we use are former employers, job roles, courses, hobbies and we can go on and on. I remember one recruiter telling me she wanted to know the sports someone played as you could see if it was a team player or not. Soccer? Team sport, team player. Tennis and golf? Not a team player. 

We need to stop using proxies and start actually measuring skills and traits. There are excellent tools that can assess someone’s written and spoken English for example, fully automated and bias-free. AI doesn’t have a preference for certain accents like humans do.

We need to actually test a candidate on his or her competencies and traits with digital pre-screening assessments that are relevant for the job. So not general intelligence tests, as those are not legal in the USA either, but job-specific tests that measure the skills or traits you need. 

And you know what the amazing bonus is? Everywhere I’ve seen these tools implemented in the right way diversity has gone up. Turns out there’s a lot more diverse talent out there if we stop using proxies to assess talent. 

The post The Proxy Problem appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Unleash world was in Paris a week ago and it’s a great way to learn about the recruitment tech start-ups from Europe. I’ve talked to all of the start-ups that branded themselves as recruitment and to be honest, I was a little disappointed, so this time it’s going to be a short list. I don’t mind the same type of technology if it’s done different or executed better, but in most cases that wasn’t the case. And some French companies might have had a great product, but with salespeople that hardly speak English and no English website, I still don’t know what they do or how they do it.

So here are the ones that did stand out.

Recii

The first one I’d like to mention is Recii. Despite the terrible name, they have a great promise. I haven’t tested the product yet since the event was too loud, but basically they have a product that can pre-screen candidates from the interaction. They are a little like Robot Vera, I wrote about them last year, but probably better in English, with more AI in it understanding and responding to what the candidate says (that’s the promise at least) but most importantly, unlike Robot Vera, it puts the candidate in charge of the means of communication. So if a candidate wants to call, they will call. If the candidate wants to use Whatsapp, no problem. Even better. Imagine you being on a phone screen and entering a tunnel losing connection. You can even pick up later by Whatsapp if you want to and continue where you left off.

So this tool allows you to update your database by reaching out to candidates already in your ATS, pre-screen applicants for high volume jobs or do the first screen when sourcing, although I’m not sure if a robot call is appreciated there.

Develop Diverse

Develop Diverse is a Danish tool for job description checks on diversity. They screen your vacancy on words that resonate badly with men, women, certain ethnical backgrounds or sexual orientation. Although the company is Danish, the tool’s first, and up until now only, language it supports is English.

Develop Diverse, unlike for example Textio, isn’t based on data from applicants, but on academic research. Both have their pros and cons in my opinion.

Since I mentioned Textio already, it’s probably best to continue the comparison. It differs from Textio as it looks at many more forms of diversity since Textio only looks at gender diversity. Develop Diverse however, unlike Textio, doesn’t optimize the vacancy for applicants, it only signals non-neutral words and the group that this word has a bad connotation with.

Real Links

Real links is an internal referral tool that has two things that resonate really well with me. The first one is that it actively checks for potential matches in your (Linkedin) network and suggests the matches to the employee. Making it much easier for the employee to make the referral, yet keeping the employee in the driver’s seat. Not unique, but also not standard in every test.

The second part I like about real links is that they help the organization think about the referral program and they don’t have a ‘one size fits all’ approach. So an organization might want to reward just the hire, others might want to also reward the effort of making a referral. Any good referral program needs to fit the organizational culture and Real Links when implementing the tools insists on doing a workshop to make the tool and the program fit the organization.

Jobsync

Jobsync is actually something so simple it’s strange that it’s a start-up and not standard in the offering of for example Indeed. Native apply from the job board into your ATS. Not a click from Indeed to your careers website where a candidate needs to scroll trough the vacancy again and look for the apply button again. We know that every click you lose candidates. So they build a system that simply with one click, you can apply directly from Indeed and several other job boards and the candidate will go directly into your ATS.

It’s simple. It’s logical. It’s strange this isn’t in the standard offering of the job boards, but here’s a start-up that fixed that.

The post European Recruitment Tech Startups to Watch: Unleash 2019 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The Dutch Child protection board wants to innovate their recruitment process. So they started by innovating the way they recruited the new recruiter that is going to be in the lead of this innovation. Instead of sending in a resume and hoping you will get invited to an interview, the candidate decides if he or she is fit and just books a 30-minute interview at a specific date and time. 

Dutch labor market

For American readers, that might be used to phone screenings, you need to know a thing or two about the Netherlands and the Dutch labor market.

First thing you need to know is that the Netherlands is a small country. From the center of the country, Utrecht, where the pitches (as the interviews are called) are held, you can drive anywhere in the country in 2 hours. Hence phone interviews are uncommon here and we don’t usually pay travel expenses to candidates either.

Another important fact is that recruiters are in high demand. Maybe not as hot as IT developers, but still very hard to recruit. So it’s hard to find good applicants, especially for a government branch that doesn’t have a great reputation.

Requirements and process

So how did we come up with this idea?

The first thing was the premise of wanting to innovate the process. And in order to innovate, you need someone that has a different view than the existing staff. But we know from past experience in resume selection people do tend to always select the same type of people. So even if nontraditional applicants, probably the people we are looking for, would apply, they would most likely not be invited for the interview.

The second part was the tight labor market for recruiters. Will there be applicants? And since many people fear rejection, the probably won’t apply if they think they will not be selected.

So the first idea was a ‘walk-in information afternoon’. Candidates would be able to just come to the office at a certain afternoon and ask everything they wanted to ask. But in a tight labor market, that didn’t seem to be a great idea. So we said: instead of giving information about the job, why not give the candidates the opportunity to present themselves? Lower the risk of rejection to zero. You can just book a 30-minute spot in the agenda en pitch yourself.

Can anyone book a spot? Yes, they can. And no person will be Googled or has his or her Linkedin profile checked before the pitch. Of course, we did write down job requirements in the job ad, Formulated vaguely on purpose. The job requirements are things like:

• Thinking from a candidate perspective
• You know how to approach important target groups
• You have great cooperation skills
• You’re a leader when it comes to new ways of working

And experience with recruitment is a bonus, as well as experience within the childcare or judicial system.

The results

A day after the job opened, all spots for pitches have been claimed. So the next day the decision to extend the possible number of pitches. Currently, 22 people have registered for a pitch and 17 more have submitted a resume since they are unable to attend at the specific pitch date. That’s 39 applications for a job in a really tight labor market.

Of course, we do need to wait and see what the quality of the pitches are, but I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of well suited, and potentially unsuspected, talents in there. And I think many very well suited people might not apply, because of the fear of rejection, but would invite themselves to an interview.

The post Dare You To Try This: Interview Yourself appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Why modern assessment tooling?

Let me start with the why of my research. The reasons for this are two-fold:

First of all, we seem to select really terribly. How often is someone not doing the job you hired him (or her) for like expected? Very often. In most cases, we say the expectations were ‘totally unrealistic’, but were they really? Usually, they were unrealistic for this person, but probably not in general. So we need a better way to select people and guess what, the problem is that a resume doesn’t really give us the information we need to be able to select well. It doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of the work of the applicant or the circumstances of delivering that quality. And the interview? We only confirm our initial bias based on the CV. So we needed something better, assessments seem to be able to do the trick.

But questionnaires are over the hill. Why? First of all, because the more I’ve researched them, the more I found their scientific base is actually not that strong as many people claim. Second of all because they’ve only been tested and validated in ‘working’ environments, not in applying/recruitment situations. And guess what: people act differently. Research shows this time and time again. Third of all, a question can simply be answered differently if you think you will benefit from them, so you can manipulate them easily.

Games

Games were my first love in this sector and if you look at the stage of development, they have developed the furthest. I’d say they are in adolescence when you look at maturity. Within the games, there are several different types of games. Psychometric (that measure behavior), Cognitive (that measure potential skills, that also result in natural behaviors) and Situational Judgement Games. All are useful in certain situations, depending on what it is you want to measure. Games can measure just about anything, except for ambition and preferred ways of working. Different suppliers have different quality and different strengths and weaknesses. A browser-based game delivers a better candidate experience for example but is relying on a stable internet connection. Modular games can be shorter depending on the job, delivering a better candidate experience, but because they cannot measure certain traits in more settings, scientifically they are less robust. I’m not saying they are not valid, but it’s like the safety of a Volvo versus a Seat. A Seat is perfectly safe, but a Volvo is known for being super strong in a crash.

The great thing about game-based assessments is the fact they are really hard to manipulate. In all the games I’ve played in only a few instances I actually knew what they were measuring. In those cases, you might be able to manipulate a little, like when you have a chance to retry a game. You can derive from that they are measuring your endurance and tenacity and try a few more times than you might have normally. But the potential for manipulation is very limited, so you get honest results.

Linguistic

Linguistic assessments derive your personality from how you write things. What words do you use? How do you frame your sentences? There are about 70 years of scientific research behind this, meaning it’s in childhood phase.

The great things about this technology are that it takes very little time and you can do ask two things at once. You can ask questions you would like to ask anyway and read the actual answer, and meanwhile, you have an algorithm build a personality profile that gives you an unbiased report of the persons Big Five and other personality traits.

The main problem I’ve encountered with this technology is that it doesn’t compensate (yet) for professional writers. I write a lot so my writing style changed over the years to more suit my audience than my personality. Writing with headers, bullet points for example. Things I never used to do. This makes me more structured and the linguistic assessments see me as very structured. That’s a mistake. I also tend to not put myself in the middle as much, making me a little more introverted than I am. Professional writers might include lawmakers, policy advisors, journalists, scientists. So the use is currently limited as far as I’m concerned with high volume jobs.

The solutions may be in either using a chatbot (since in conversations you communicate naturally) or using social media postings.

Social Media

Social Media assessments are in their infancy, to be honest. I’ve only seen one tool that delivers pretty credible results. But all that actually give in-depth analyses seem to fail time and time again. Even though many seem to use linguistics and adjust by other behaviors, these adjustments are very often man-made. And men is full of bias. To give one specific example, my liking of Linkin Park made me unhappy and discontent with the world according to one test that was transparent about their algorithm. Clearly, there is some form of bias at play here. Many social media tools also ignored all Dutch pages I liked, so they ignored most data because they didn’t classify that yet.

I believe these tests have great potential but need many, many years of research before I would suggest using them.

Facial expressions

There is a lot of argument about the fact if facial expressions, mainly micro expressions, have a scientific base. In short, they do and they don’t. There is no peer-reviewed article out there. That’s true. The reason for this is because as soon as it’s submitted people start yelling Nazi-science. This technology has no link to the nazi-science of identifying jews based on looks, but nobody wants to be associated with it. However, there are plenty of scientists that have done really good research into this. And this year an article did get published that we can derive 4 out of the 5 Big Five traits based on eye movement alone.

When it comes to the candidate experience, that’s really great. With a few minutes of video, you can build a profile that you cannot fake. Because you do not control your micro-expressions. You can control expressions (like raising an eyebrow or blinking), but not the microexpression (like in my case my eyebrow vibrating in 0,4 seconds).

What I love about this technology it has the potential to identify traits many other tools cannot identify, mainly in communication styles. I love this tooling when for example you want to assess a team’s diversity of thought. For example, do we have enough action-oriented people or analytical people or human-centric people in a team? Or are we all the same and is that why we keep failing in the same part of the process?

DNA

DNA based assessments are just conceived. About 5.000 people have done one. Scary stuff right? Your genes cannot tell us anything about your behavior, so they cannot be used for recruiting. They can tell us things about your potential and future. Because we eventually end up being our most natural selves. Usually, that’s why most of us start looking like our parents. We revert to our natural selves. It is possible to identify if someone might have a talent for something, just not if this talent has been nurtured and developed. Someone with great potential for music that has never played an instrument will not be able to but will learn much quicker.

Not useful for recruitment. Or at least not for identifying current qualities or traits. If you’re hiring for the future it does have great potential. Since we all tend to revert back to our most natural selves, hiring a 40-year-old with a DNA profile you know the behavior he or she will be displaying in a decade or so. Scary as hell, especially if you think about Crispr, a way to edit our genes and turn them on or off. Really scary, but keep an eye on in the future.

Brain Scans

Like DNA it’s only just conceived. Great potential. Unable to fake. Could be used in highly sensitive positions. It’s possible to see one’s brain react to certain stimuli and know if someone poses a risk under certain circumstances. For example, all major swindlers have certain area’s of the brain lighting up under certain stimuli. It doesn’t mean you will steal from your company if that happens, it does mean you run a much bigger risk that people who do not have this trait. Maybe not make them CFO of the company?

Interesting stuff?

Would you like to read more about a specific assessment technology, let me know in the comments and I’ll write a more in-depth piece about that technology?

If this has your interest: this is just a very short summary of the White Paper I’ve written on the subject. Download it for free here: https://rdaily.co/2KP6YZz

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Now, this isn’t a prediction of success, since I usually look at the product, the quality of it and the potential of it and we all know marketing and sales tend to have at least as big, if not a bigger, influence than the product.

Assessments

For the past few years, I’ve been deep diving into all assessment tools I can find. I’ve tested dozens of them (and even wrote a white paper on that (www.ta-live.com/whitepaper). So it’s hard to impress me, yet some still did.

Owiwi

(www.owiwi.co.uk) is a Greek start-up I like. They made a game-based situational judgment game assessment that made the entire experience into a story. It’s an actual game with levels and a storyline. It looks like a game you might play on your iPad for fun. It looks like a role-playing game (RPG), although it’s an RPG from the distant past with only text-based choices, but great graphics. They focus purely on psychometrics by situational judgments and they have a semi-fixed model about right or wrong answers, but those answers can be weighed per organization or job.  I’m not too happy about that part, since the right answer isn’t the same in every organization, not even for a quality like leadership. They could also add so much more by using the full game potential, with checking certain cognitive skills, but the choice right now to have a focus and I can respect that a lot. They are not there yet, but I am keeping my eye on them since they have a few unique features I haven’t seen in the dozens of tools I tested before.

Capp

(https://www.capp.co/virtual-reality) is another assessment tool I loved. Just like Owiwi not for the place they are in right now, but for the potential they show. For the first time, and I’ve tried several before, I saw a virtual reality assessment using the power of VR. They didn’t put a normal assessment into a VR environment like I’ve seen often, they used VR to create a better assessment. They have for example a presentation room where you need to give a presentation for an audience. This could be used if, with one of my previous jobs, presenting is a big part of your job profile. They have a room that was a model of the actual machine park of one of their clients, you can fix these machines, show us. As I said, they are not there yet, since the entire assessment itself is done manually. There is no eye tracking yet when presenting for example. It’s all done by an assessor looking at the screen. However, it’s got huge potential when I see the way they are using VR to create better assessments.

Devskiller

(https://devskiller.com/) is a tool specific for IT testing I like. Although I’m no developer, so I can’t the validity of the tool, I look at the way they actually test and use common sense to see if it’s something that looks good. And in their case, it does. What makes them different? They made the tests more like actual programming and, and this is really important, they test the ‘understanding the business skill’ of the IT professional. What they do, more than most other tools, is make it ‘real life development’. Basically, it works like this: The business wants this, here’s the code we’ve got, make it work, there are no limitations in use of frameworks or googling for solutions, just like in the real world. This tests a few things. First: are you able to understand the business request? Very important skill. Second: can you actually develop good code? The code doesn’t just get tested on ‘does it work’ but also ‘is it efficient enough’ and of course ‘how long did it take you’. Third: it probably shows you something about the natural way of developing this specific programmer. Hence, it seems to give really good information you need to assess if a developer is not only good at his or her job but also a fit in development style.

Chatbot

Eva

(www.eva.ai) is a chatbot that does engagement and is a combination of Robo recruiter and Pocket recruiter I wrote about last year. Eva won this year’s start-up award, with Robo recruiter winning last years, you might start to think the judges have a preference for chatbots. But Eva is a great product. It basically has two options. You can either send it out to start chatting with people that uploaded their CV to a CV database and see if they are actually interested or you can have them re-engage with your silver medalists. The people that have applied before and are in your ATS. You might use it to make sure you are GDPR compliant if you want to keep them in your ATS. You can use it to see if someone would be open for a job is a new vacancy opens up. But you can also use it to engage with prospects that were ‘not experienced enough’ when they applied, but now might be.

The great thing about Eva is that you can very easily create different workflows for different people and positions. You can go as far as to 100% personalize it. For example, this executive wants to be called sir, but that’s probably to labor intensive to use. But you can use a different tone of voice for execs than you do for graduates. You can have an automated workflow for people that have been in your ATS for people that were not experienced enough when they applied the first time than for those that qualified but didn’t get the job because there was a better one. Since I’ve always stated, since I started in recruitment over a decade ago, that the most wasted capital of an organization were resumes in an ATS, I love everything that can help us re-engage with them in the right way.

Feedback

Starred

(www.starred.com) isn’t rock shattering, mind-blowing, extremely innovative, but it’s one worth a mention since they made something easy and accessible I feel we as TA professionals have not spent enough time and money on. Getting feedback from candidates in a structured way. Basically, they integrate with your ATS and let you build a workflow when a candidate, rejected or hired, should get a request for feedback about your process. So you can get this tool to ask every rejected candidate a day after rejection what they felt about the information in the rejection for example. With a simple 5 star rating and a comment option. You can ask every candidate a week after their interview about the quality of the interview. You can then of course combine this with internal information about the recruiter or hiring manager, and with the type of job or maybe the time between application and rejection. This gives you valuable information on for example well-performing recruiters and hiring manager when it comes to candidate experience and optimizing the time between application and rejection. As I said, it’s not rocket science, but I like the data this tool can provide.

Video

Videomyjob

(www.videomyjob.com) has been around for a while, but I’d never actually seen the product in action. And now that I have, I totally understand why so many people love they guys so much. I thought it’s just another video tool, but it’s not. It’s the most user-friendly intuitive video editing platform I’ve seen to date. It helps you create the best video but showing you where to stand because of lighting. It has the option to have a script running on your phone while making the video. It’s got really easy editing tools to cut out parts. It has options for branding logo’s in it, but also for putting pictures in the middle of the video or even a video in video. I mean, this tool was so easy to use, for the first time I even saw myself becoming a vlogger.

Let us know in the comments if you saw tech you thought worthy of mentioning and we will take a look also.

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The wakeup call: Chatbots now, voice soon

Remember in 2010 -- about three years after the iPhone was released -- you heard that mobile Internet was taking over the world?

That you needed to go mobile?

That recruitment was going mobile?

You said:

Read More

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