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Recruiting Talent in the Age of AI

Amleto Montinari reviews two major obstacles in hiring and five ways to get past them.

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Barcelona today is a global hot-spot for technology and innovation. The city is a magnet for international and local entrepreneurs, innovators and start-ups, making waves across the digital and tech sectors. Business evolution is Barcelona’s calling card. Change is all around us and work has never seemed so exciting. How we bank (N26), buy food (Glovo) find our homes (Badi) have all evolved through technology. But how we hire people? It’s the same system since the 1960s—post a job, review CVs, assess candidates and (fingers crossed!) hope for the best.

It’s the system used by businesses big and small across the board, and it’s fundamentally flawed. The average global attrition rate of 16% proves the point; the retail sector, with an attrition rate of over 60%, reinforces it. Recruitment, a business worth €37.8 billion globally, is too often mired in the past. 

There are two major issues that lead to the wrong people in the wrong jobs. There are also a large number of minor issues but let’s focus on the two worst offenders, and we’ll start with something we all have but wish we didn’t.

Obstacle 1: Unconscious Bias

Intuition is what subjects people to bias, and although we might consciously reject all bias, the subconscious has, literally, other ideas.

There are at least seven different types of bias in recruitment and all are daunting problems to contend with in the interview process.

  1. Stereotyping: Judging someone by gender, age, religion, race, appearance, or any other type of characteristic. 
  2. First Impression: Forming opinions on candidates based on first impressions.
  3. “Similar to Me”: Responding positively to someone similar to the interviewer. 
  4. Negative Emphasis: When the interviewer receives negative information and bases hiring decisions on it. 
  5. Halo and Horn Effect: The Halo Effect is when the interviewer lets one positive trait about the candidate overshadow everything else. The Horn Effect is the opposite: allowing a negative trait to overly influence decision making. 
  6. Cultural Noise: Differences in culture can interrupt the flow of communication and trigger bias. Non-verbal cues, language differences (same words with differing meanings), values (cultural norms centered around time), different styles of dress and differing ways of expressing courtesy are just some examples of how cultural noise can seep into the interviewing process and trigger bias.
  7. Contrast Effect: A stronger candidate who interviews after a weaker candidate will appear more qualified. 

The impact of unconscious bias goes far beyond image in terms of damages. With recruitment tainted, the potential for diversity and inclusion are often limited leaving company culture, innovation, productivity and financials to suffer.

Obstacle 2: Feelings

Let’s learn about the second fundamental hiring flaw: call it gut instinct, call it intuition or call it feelings. Whatever term you use, the influence of personal feelings is a major obstacle when it comes to making intelligent recruitment decisions. In an era of unprecedented data riches, why are hiring decisions based on feelings? 

If you think about it, it’s really quite shocking. We have unparalleled resources when it comes to the quantifiable data that we could use to make our decisions. Yet, instead, we go with our gut? This is not an exaggeration. Many recruiters will openly admit hiring decisions often ultimately come down to a gut feeling. Yes, those feelings that we all acknowledge are generally wrong: wrong in life and wrong in business. 

These feelings or gut instincts are based on what candidates say they can do, their CVs, and in a large part, personality. Companies commit to candidates based on incomplete and unverifiable data. Hiring professionals admit to making decisions in the first five minutes of meeting someone. Given how little time this allows for candidates to sell themselves we can assume bias has done the work for them. Positively or negatively, this, for the most part, explains the high attrition numbers. An evidence-based approach would probably lead to candidates who can actually do the job at hand. A gut feeling leads to someone you might like but who is not necessarily the best fit.

Five Ways to Start Fixing the Hiring Process

So, how do we get rid of bias and make fact based decisions? How do we make sure we’re getting the best person for the job? Hiring managers need to work in a way that best eliminates bias and favors facts over feelings.

There are five simple steps to smarter hiring:

  1. Define job attributes: Know what you need from someone and make sure they can deliver. Don’t take their word on delivery; look beyond CVs.
  2. Check the work: If you’re hiring an architect to design your home, you’d look at their previous work: do the same with potential hires. People can say anything, proving something takes more effort. There are digital platforms such as Fluttr or Hackerrank that can help you with this.
  3. Behavioral questions: Understand how your candidates have handled actual work situations.
  4. Assess your data: Keeping score, measuring candidates against each other and being objective is the only way to make fact-based, unbiased decisions. 
  5. Check yourself: After the hiring is complete, watch the candidate. Review your notes and see if you were right. Were the measures correct and did you make the right decision?

This approach is by no means groundbreaking. Yet while these guidelines are easy to understand, putting them into practice is not as straightforward as one might initially believe, especially when pressured by time constraints, challenges in synchronizing interview  schedules, limited budgets and a huge stack of applicants’ CVs all competing for the same position.  

As a result, even seasoned veteran recruiters faced with unreasonable deadlines often fall prey to unconscious bias and rely on their supposedly honed business instincts with little evidence the candidate possesses the skills and competencies claimed on CVs. This dynamic may be even more prevalent in early stage companies which cannot avail themselves of an expert in human resources.

A New and Easier Way to Get Recruitment Right

AI has advanced at an incredible pace. All the hard work formerly needed to screen candidates can be done in an instant, at the push of a button. What about the patience to measure all your applicants against each other to see who has the edge? Technology has this. How about the manual nature of the screening process? A thing of the past.

Moving past the labor intensive part of the process, technology can also eliminate bias. Only humans have preferences, machines, if programmed objectively, don’t. These advanced technological solutions use data, gamification and AI to build recommendations on candidate interactions. Assessment, scoring and classification is conducted completely free of bias. In this space there’s a flurry of new solutions that span from:

Is recruitment is broken? Yes, most definitely. It’s in a sad state and anyone currently hiring the old way is shortchanging themselves and their employees. Remember, up to 28% of employees quit in the first 90 days because they should never have been hired for that role in the first place. 

But, if you’re open to change and want to hire smarter, now you know how. Integrating recruitment technology solutions to remove bias and emotion form the hiring process takes the guess-work out of hiring and can help your company thrive.

Amleto Montinari is an expert in helping companies combine human resources with technology to scout and select top performing sales professionals. Formerly VP at JP Morgan Strategy, Amleto now leads Fluttr a company developing software that lets you understand from the start who your future top sales performers will be.

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