E052: Bias and Technology to overcome it in recruitment

This is the world of work podcast with James and James, hi. This is

James. Just before we start, I wanted to remind you that you can read our articles, explore more podcasts, and learn about our online personal and management development programs and workshops by visiting our website, www, dot, World of work.io. All right, onto the podcast. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. I am so excited. I'm proper excited. Why

is that? What are we talking about today?

So we are talking to a gentleman who works for an organization who is trying to help other organizations recruit in a less biased way, in a

less biased way. Yeah, what's that gonna lead to increased diversity and inclusion in line with our series on those subjects? Well, it

might do, and it also might just, you know, improve hiring generally as a process, and it might just make the world a better place too. Well, we'll get to that

hopefully. Yeah, no, I'm just excited because I think it's a really interesting subject. And I think one of the themes that we always talk about is how rushed everybody is to do their job. And I feel like quite often recruitment is something that gets time pressured. Yeah, I

think it absolutely is. And one of the things I love about this episode is it's quite sort of contemporary. It brings in subjects I'm interested in. So it brings in bits around technology. It brings in bits around sort of behavioral science, and it looks at some of the existing, you know, challenges we face with the recruitment process, and how we can overcome those, and how, not just larger organizations can overcome them, but how people in all organizations can, can try and create a better set of recruiting outcomes. Yeah?

And I don't, I don't always say this, but with this episode, I really feel like everybody in the world of work can take something from it, yeah, in the sense that these are issues that face us all. Yeah, yeah. It's more than just and we should know about them, right? We should be aware of our own human fallibilities 100% that should be like the strap line for our program. It should be a strap

line for life, human and human literally, I mean, the irony is, when someone says I'm only human, they literally mean fallible, right? And yet we don't think, anyway,

anyway. Should we have a little check in before we get into it? Yeah? How are you listen, I've got a Snuffles. I missed a Snuffles today. So, yeah. So I'm feeling a little bit sorry for myself, but generally pretty happy, but it's the first time I've been ill in a long time, so I can't complain, but obviously the biggest thing on my mind at the minute is for Snuffles. I

know we would I was saying earlier, Snuffles is that hilarious thing where you shouldn't be allowed to do anything else, because really, all you're doing every five minutes is thinking, do I feel better or worse? Am I okay now? Am I worse? Should I put another jumper on. Yeah, I'm loading up with medication and caffeine, and that's getting me through Well, in which case, then I'm impressed that you're recording today.

What about you? How are you getting on?

I am so one of the reasons I'm super excited about this episode is because I studied a bit of this subject as part of my course last term, and I am now knee deep into year two, yeah, and loving it. And I love it. It's I just I'm such a geek. I'm mad for the research at the moment, mad for it. I find it quite hard work reading it, but once I've got through it and I understand it, and I can go back and try and interpret it, yeah, loving it.

Happy days. All right. Well, why don't we jump into the episode and have a chat with Andy Babbage from applied, all about technology, recruitment, bias and how to make the world a little bit more on the flip side.

So here we are. We're getting into the conversation today. We're speaking to Andy Babbage from applied, and we're carrying on with our series on inclusion and diversity, and today's focus is really about sort of bias and recruitment and how we can improve a recruitment process so that we can strip out some of the biases, some of the flaws in there, and create more diverse and more inclusive working populations in our organization. Just to kick things off, Andy, would you mind saying hi and introducing yourself to the

audience? Hi James and Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast. As you said, I'm the I'm one of the directors that applied, and we're trying to use behavioral science to remove bias from recruitment to improve hiring outcomes. My personal background is fairly eclectic. I was recruited through our own platform, and as a result, most people, yeah, most people here have quite interesting background. So I was originally an engineer, before I moved into more of the commercial side of the business, started to get more and more interested in diversity, particularly around gender, and then finally found myself at Applied essentially, my job is is trying to translate the benefits and messages of applied into a business context so that organizations are interested see the benefits of using us. So yeah, really looking forward to talking it through with you today.

Yeah, that sounds great, and that's exactly what. We want to hear about today is how these processes work and how it creates better outcomes for businesses and organizations. I guess before we get into that, just a little bit more generally, as you know, we're speaking about inclusion and diversity throughout this entire series that we're looking at, what's your take on why those areas are important? I mean, you mentioned you've had a bit of an interest in it. What's your sort of general take on diversity, of inclusion.

I think it's, I think it's the moral and business imperative on the business side, I think the research is continuing to grow that diverse teams are better at innovation, you know, the better at problem solving, better at breaking down group think. And as an organization, you can better represent and serve the market if you represent them internally. But I also think that newer generations of workers, or the workforce are starting to demand it as just the way a workforce should be. So I think if, if your organization is not thinking about this, then it's you're potentially going to be left behind, because I truly think it's going to start making up a big part of companies competitive advantage. Yeah,

it's so funny, you should say it's not funny, but it's so interesting that you should say the piece about moral imperative, because I think that previously, maybe we haven't been, and I speak to someone in, you know, in the sector, we haven't been brave enough with organizations to make that statement, that it's not just about the business case. And I think we've in elsewhere in the series, we talk to someone about neuro diversity, and we talk about the next generation being demanding more of of the organizations that and being more confident in what they can ask and what they expect to see in their organizations, which I think it feels really exciting time.

Yeah, I think it shouldn't have to rely on a business case, because I think it's the right thing to do, but in terms of us, in terms of how we think about the good that we do, in terms of social impact, we believe it's tied to the scale of people using tools like ours, and the way to get there is to make sure it is commercially viable, it can stand On its own, at least that's our philosophy. That's our approach to it.

Yeah. And you know, the next series where we're going to be doing, where we're as ever, starting to, starting to work on Redis, is all about responsible business, and about the role of business and shaping a better set of outcomes for society. And I think to achieve those better outcomes, businesses really do need to be commercially viable. So I think that makes sense, and it's good to hear you, hear you say that you're working towards creating better outcomes for individuals and organizations, well, maintaining a, you know, a profitable base on that as well. Yeah, I

think it's, I think it's hugely important that we hear from organizations that are doing things differently and structuring their purpose differently, because I think, I think there's a big difference, like you've alluded to of being commercially viable and successful in order to achieve other social purposes, and being commercially and being socially forward thinking to be more commercially successful. And it sounds very much like the more and more we're talking to organizations that are the former right, are trying to be really successful and commercially strong such that they can create meaningful change,

yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about about the area that you focused in. So a lot of your work at applied is about the recruitment process, and a lot of it's about, I guess, sort of bringing people in. What what do you think some of the flaws are? I mean, how do you see the regular recruitment process work? I guess, what's the need out there? What's wrong at the minute with the

way that people do things? Yeah, where do I start? We've got time Well, first

of all, let me say I think recruitment is a really hard job. I think, I think if you're part of a small company, you're usually doing it in addition to your day job, and usually googling how to do it properly and just trying to learn on the fly how to do it. And then, if you're part of a larger Talent Acquisition team, you're usually overworked under appreciated, and have to deal with pushy hiring managers. So I think it's actually a really tough job, and I think unfortunately that's that's led to a lot of the job having a focus on speed and time to hire and productivity and efficiency of the process, which is fine, which is definitely something that's important. What we've seen is, as you start to focus more on speed, you tend to sacrifice other things, potentially, like quality of hire and diversity being one of those things. So in terms of the actual process itself, you know, we've been 98% of processes use like a CV and cover letter sift. So we've been using CVS for for like 100 years. As we know, there's lots of research that shows the types of information we get in CVS is causes your biases to come out and and essentially adds noise to your decision making process. So recruitment is a complex decision with multiple variables, so the last thing you want is your biases ruling and causing you to make decisions based on your gut. But sadly, I think that's where the majority of recruitment is at the moment. So I think there's lots, lots of areas for improvement.

Um, can I just ask you to clarify a few things we've done some episodes looking at things like biases before and things like that, but would you be able to just give us your definition of water biases and maybe talk about some of the things within CVS at that starting point of a recruitment process, but that you think draw out biases or lead people to fall down as sort of a preconception? Absolutely

So bias, or rather, the ones who address the unconscious biases, and they are a mental shortcut or a heuristic that your brain uses to make sense of all the information it's getting. So the ones that you typically get, there's lots you get in recruitment, five big ones. So affinity bias, the idea that we unconsciously prefer people who sound and look like us, so we'll be more favorable on their applications. Stereotype bias, if we're lacking information about someone, we'll fill it in with a stereotype which are grossly inaccurate. Halo effects. If we you know, someone's gone to a great university, we might look positively on the rest of their or less, rest of their CV. Confirmation bias. If someone starts off an application really well, we're more likely to say this person's great all the way through, because we don't like being we don't like disagreeing with ourselves. And finally, group think, so if your boss says this person is the is the best person the job, you're more likely to agree, no matter what you really think. And all of those come out in a CV. So I was just looking at the research yesterday. So since 2006 there's been over 90 correspondence studies where, essentially, researchers send out to two CVS, sets of CVS where they change a simple, simple part of it, like someone's name or a background characteristic, and they send it out to 1000s of jobs, and they record the rate of interview callback. So 90 studies across 27 different countries, 79% of those show a distinct disadvantage to the minority group that's being tested for. And what that means right now in the UK is if you have a minority ethnic sounding name on your CV, you have to send 60% more CVS than a white, British sounding name, and that's the equivalent of having an extra eight years of experience. That's phenomenal. I mean, that's a huge, huge disparity.

I think the disparity is huge, but also the sheer volume of evidence to show that this is a real thing is a standard, absolutely astounding.

So there you're talking about sort of ethnicity coming across. Are there other diversity traits that you see in the data, signaling disparity as well? Absolutely

So of those 90 studies, they did them across religion, ethnicity, age, sort of male, female, but also women with children, LGBT indicators. And what they do is they essentially add or remove different parts of the CV and measure the differential in interview callback rates. There's lists you can Google Online, which just go through all of the studies. And it's pretty depressing and scary reading, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's funny. I only really got interested in this area about four months ago because it came across my study books, and our lecturer introduced us to some of the research that you're talking about. And there was a genuine stunned silence during the lecture of just how bigger both both the magnitude of the effect and the breadth of the research across sector, across country, across characteristic, etc, and it was astonishing. And there's a really interesting we met a postdoc student who's studying class at the moment, because obviously it's not protected characteristics. There's a lot less research around it. Yeah, and they were using, they did some similar work around signifiers on CVS that would, you know, like not having go to gone to university in the year after you'd gone to school, maybe five years later, things like that. And they just said it's, I mean, the conversations are just people reveal themselves, even in the qualitative conversations, just because they are so unaware. They are so blissfully unaware of the associations they're making in their head. The shortcuts is a really great, great explanation. So thank you for that, because they literally reveal the shortcuts they are making when they start to talk through what they're thinking when they read it

absolutely. And I think, I think it's important to note that we're all guilty of it, and biases aren't aren't always bad. They just are. But the important thing to know is, it's great to be aware of your biases, but it's really hard to turn them off. You know, once you've opened Pandora's box, it's difficult to tell yourself, no, ignore that piece of information. It's not going to help me, because it's already happened.

So it's really interesting that you talk about that Andy, because I know that in the US, for example, they have specific laws around which tests can and can't be used based on the level to which a minority groups answers might deviate. So it's considered to be a discriminated reprocess. If there's a a group that performs particularly poorly or out of the lira, and that we don't really have that in the UK, do we? We don't have that kind of measure. No,

no, we don't. We don't know at all. And just to talk a little bit more about assessment, choosing assessments, people, you're right. People don't consider the impact it could have on different minority groups. But also, people aren't really talking about how predictive assessments are. So each assessment, there's been over 100 years of research into how effective different types of assessments are, and the conversation isn't really about picking the most predictive one, it's just picking the same one that you've used before. And they're kind of, kind of, they're interlinked, because the most predictive forms of assessment are often the ones which have the least bias. So if everyone's using a CV which has things like years of experience, use of education on it, which is some of the least predictive indicators of performance on the job as their first set, first round first filter in the process, then, and it's biased, you're really getting a pretty poor first round filter, in My opinion.

Yeah, wow. Well, so what are the popular methods of recruitment? Then, what are the what is it that you find most consistently that isn't, isn't either predictive and is potentially not helpful in terms of a diversity point of view, but that people are still using? Yes, absolutely. So

that. So 100 years of research, the most famous meta study is by Schmidt Schmidt Hunter, done in 97 and repeated in 2016 and it essentially ranks the different methods, assessment methods, in how their predictive validity. The ones at the bottom are years of experience, years of education and references. Then you move up to things like unstructured interviews. So an unstructured interview is basically like a bit of a chat where you get to know the person. Maybe you grab a beer, you get to know them, and that is very gut driven. You're you're prone to affinity bias and things like that. You're not really learning much about the candidate in terms of how, how you do the job, and you're prone to kind of go down these channels where it leads to what you have in common, and things like that. So those are the ones kind of on the bottom. And then as you move up the different assessments, the more structured they get, and the closer they get to the actual job is the is the more predictive. So structured interviews, where you ask each candidate the same thing and have a marking criteria for each answer means that you don't go down a path of, are they like me? Can we have a good chat? Do I like this person? And then you've got things like work sample tests, which are actual scenarios from a job that you get the person to either write down their answer to or to role play and or have a simulation. So if you can actually do the most predictive forms of assessment, which happen to be the least biased up front, you just get far better hiring outcomes in terms of quality of hire, and you also tend to see more diverse candidates. But there is, you know, there's lots, lots and lots and lots of examples of fairly poor assessments still being used, despite the evidence against them.

And when we think about those sort of poor assessment processes that we talk about, what's the impact of those on organizations and on the. People coming into the organizations. Does it show up in terms of performance? Does it show up in terms of retention? What? How does it show up and materialize?

It so it shows up. I think, essentially, if you're if you've got a filter which is incorrectly assessing people, it means that you are potentially missing out on a couple of things, you're missing out on people who are different to who who are disadvantaged by that assessment, which impacts the diversity of your organization. And secondly, you're possibly just missing out on the best person of the job because they don't look the part. So you're missing out on the best talent, and those, I guess it's, it's really the interesting thing is that the once we hire someone, we usually convince ourselves that we did a good job of it, unless things go really bad. So these problems manifest themselves in cultures that are built up by homogenous workforces, where something toxic is amplified continuously. So it's usually not like a you see high churn or something like that. It's usually down the track. Longer term, there's some kind of implosion due to those impacts on a company? Yeah, I think, I think you're describing a place where I've been in the past, where long term in place and coming up.

Okay, so with, with the focus that we've we've touched on here, and your organization to focus, it's very much on the recruitment piece. Do you look any and at all beyond recruitment. Do you look at things like onboarding or anything like that, or do you just focus on the recruitment side of things? So

we, at the moment, only focus on the recruitment side of things you can use our platform for, like internal promotions. So you mentioned you had an episode on gender pay gap, moving trying to move women into more senior roles. This is a great tool to use for that. I would say we don't currently do anything on onboarding, or even further on the other side of the funnel in terms of sort of attraction and going out and sourcing people. But what I will say that if you, if you are, if you are looking to improve diversity inclusion in the organization. It's not, there's no silver bullet. We're certainly not a silver bullet. We're one piece of the puzzle. And I think, I think you need to have great onboarding. This is the eye piece of the DNI to make sure, if you're, if you get different people into your organization, they actually want to stay, and aren't just kind of confronted by, you know, a workforce that isn't inclusive. So not not now, but we see that we need to we're a piece of the piece of the puzzle. Time I read a

I read a great piece of research. Well, it wasn't great, I mean, it was depressing, but I read a really interesting piece of research about exactly what you talk about, where organizations have maybe improved their recruitment really well, and they're attracting much more diverse candidates, and they're getting through the process appropriately, and then they're coming confronted with an organization that is only pro inclusion and diversity up to that point, and they haven't done the hard work. And then what happens is they're losing them quicker, and then their reputation drops with those communities. So what you say about there being no silver bullet and being I mean, it's we spoke to someone a couple of weeks ago. She said, What did she say? She said, I have to crawl all over the process from beginning to end to find the places where we can make improvements. And I thought slightly creepy, but brilliant, brilliant metaphor of the sort of forensic detail someone needs to put every stage of the process through absolutely

and I think, to go back to your first point, I think the worst outcome of that is, or one of what, there's many, there's many bad outcomes, but, but one of them is that the the organization that's tried something different with their recruitment has gotten someone quite different in their door, and it hasn't worked out for whatever reason, usually because they they haven't thought about the inclusivity side of the equation, and they say, Well, we tried someone different. It didn't work out. Let's just go back to hiring from the same talent or using the same proxy as we did before, that's it's

just crazy, because if you would never develop a product or service like that, if that was your main business, you wouldn't go, Oh, we're gonna try something new. Well, it hasn't quite worked. It works into a point, but not more. So we're just gonna throw it all out. You would go back and you would iterate, and you would iterate until you got

there absolutely. And I think this goes back to talent acquisition teams being time poor, being under pressure. They're asked, they're the battle, they're the kind of the area where a bit one of the biggest impacts can be made on the diversity of your workforces. And they're asked to do it, but they're perhaps not. Given enough, you know, time and resources to actually do it, because it's not going to it usually doesn't work first time. It's a it's a learning process that you need to iterate on, exactly as you say.

And they never have, they will not, never. They rarely have the influence across other parts of HR and other line managers, etc, absolutely, to be able to sort of influence change so that they can, I must be, must, you know what I think you might be, the first person that's made me massively sympathetic for

have a tough job, right?

It is. It's really tough, and then only to sort of be really ambitious about it, and then maybe watch it fail the first couple

of times. And it goes back to that, you know, the combination of the moral imperative as well as the business case, because a lot of these conversations that they need to have to win that argument internally, can't survive just on the basis of a moral imperative. They need to bring in a business case, I believe, to get others in the organization bought into, you know, the iterative design and test and fail and build process. But they need to get to

a good absolutely, I think, yeah, it also goes back to what they're measured on. So most KPIs for talent acquisition teams are things like time to hire volume of candidates. So I don't only the most advanced talent teams are actually hired on, sorry, measured on the quality of hire. I'm gobsmacked that there's rarely a feedback loop of the people that were hired and how they're going in their job to the method in which they were hired and how well they did through the assessment process. So you continuously improve that just really doesn't exist at the moment. I do think it is changing, though.

Certainly my experience, you know, I've hired a fair number of people in a large organization, and that feedback loops really not been there, so we've really struggled with that. And, you know, and our recruitment team were, were using, you know, structured interview processes and things like that, and we had metrics in around diversity to ensure X percentage of candidates needed to be, say female or BAME or whatever, just as a total side conversation, one of the things that we found is that we had a pool of recruiters that our hiring team would go to, and each of those recruiters needed to provide us with 30% female applicants in that provision. But what we found was that all of them were providing us with the same 30% right? So the other 70% varied. Sorry, but we had like 10 people, each sending us 10 CVS. We'd have three women and 70 men or whatever, which,

which is just a beautiful example of how someone has to have that very top level, but also critical thought of, how is this coming together? Because I, Look, I get the logic of how those how this time it's gone set. But someone needs to take a step back basic maths and go, Hang on this overlap here. Yeah,

oh, dear. So that's a good conversation about some of the current things that are going on and some other challenges. What's your view on what we can do to make that sort of post attraction, pre onboarding, but core recruitment process more effective. What can we do to get better at that? Yeah, I think there's a few things.

First of all, I would, I would start switching out the KPIs for for the team and what they're measured on and what actually drives their behavior, so quality of hire and looking at maybe churn in the first year, rather than inputs like time to hire or volume of candidates, I think that's, that's, that's first big change in terms of a whole team. I think

teams have to start or recruiters have to start challenging themselves on the proxies they are using for working out whether people have skills. So if someone's gone to a great university, it might be an indicator that they are intelligent. But just because they haven't been just because they maybe haven't gone to the top university, doesn't mean they're not intelligent. Yet people would use that filter of university all the time, and to really, you're kind of doing yourself a disservice, and you've really got to what I'd say is the challenge is to break down that proxy into what you're actually trying to measure, be very explicit about. We're trying to look for these skills and then actually test the candidates on whether or not they can do those things is kind of a big shift. So no more proxies for what you should be hiring, what you're looking for actually look for the things you're looking for with and I think with tech, that's become possible and isn't as onerous and time consuming as many people might think it. Might think it is. I would also there's a whole bunch of practical things you can do to a CV, like anonymization, which means you're able to guard rail against biases creeping in, and as you remove bias. You remove noise from your decision making process, and you ultimately make better decisions.

I was speaking to a friend in Edinburgh who's actually relocating back to Germany and is applying for jobs there. And it appears that in Germany, you're still expected to put photos on TVs for all kinds of jobs, which just took me as a complete surprise. And I guess that feels like that would bring with it so many potential flags for bias. So

one of those correspondent studies that I spoke about was in 2016 and they had Sandra Bauer with a picture of, I guess, I guess, German looking person, and then her name was changed to Miriam Aztec, and they had the exact same picture, but they'd kind of she was wearing a head scarf, and the callback rate for interviews for her dropped massively. I think it was from 19% for Sandra Bauer down to 4% with a head scarf. So

completely shocking, shocking results. But I was amazed as well that people still put photos on their CVs.

I feel like, I don't know, maybe it's just me. I feel like photos bypass the UK, like we were always so traditional about not doing it, and then by the time everyone else had stopped doing it, we had only just caught up. So we never really did it, because certainly we used to get quite a lot of one of the small, other small charities I worked at, we had a lot of international applications. And I don't think I ever had a UK application with a photo in 10 years. And yet, every single pretty, yeah, I would say every single International, certainly every single European application would include a photo for a good seven or eight years. I used to find it fascinating. I was like, Why do I It sounds awful,

isn't it, but now we've got LinkedIn, right? So you can just, yeah, you can just, you know, LinkedIn, Google people see their photo, even if you're not meaning to,

and see their network absolutely and see who knows them, and it's and Lord only knows what you see into a simple LinkedIn relationship between someone you respect and that person. A little bit

of social proof, right? Oh, god, that's frightening. I hadn't even thought about that. There's also

a crop of tools coming up, which are, which link into other social media networks, which kind of pull, in aggregate, you know, your Facebook or your Twitter and things like that, with the I guess, I think the misleading premise that more information is good for helping you to make your decision, it's

fascinating, isn't it? When did we become so obsessed with thinking that, like, if you just get all the information, that's going to be the best possible way. Like, it's crazy, I guess. And I guess there's a with not to do star stars. But with great power comes great responsibility, right? With tech, and it will, it does. It's that thing of we don't, just as we can, doesn't mean we should. Yeah, absolutely.

It's sort of how I ended up at sales. No, I know. I know. Nvn State is sort of, you know, social social value, and the sort of Chinese model for social value through societal action and stuff like that. I mean, where does it end? Which is a little bit of a side conversation that we might do another time, but we might have to come back. We don't need that right now. So we talked a little bit about anonymizing. We talked a little bit about the need to really define what's needed in a role. I had a question on that, which is, do you find that hiring managers know the skills, really, that are needed for their roles? Predominantly, you talked about a little bit in the tech space, but more broadly, what's your sense of a hiring managers knowledge of, I guess, the skill requirements specifically of a role, and maybe the outputs they're looking for within their role. Yeah, so I'd say that they they know,

but historically, the way they've recruited is to get a JD that they used before and use that and then maybe add a few requirements to it. I think, yeah, I think the piece that it's missing is actually getting them to sit down and write out maybe six to eight skills. And a skill is a catch all for, for for something you need that person to do in that role. So actually getting them to write it out is usually a really good experience for the hiring managers. And once you know what you're looking for, it sounds really simple. What do you know what you're looking for, you can actually test for it and get it much easier than if you you're not exactly clear on what you what you're looking

for. And so that takes a bit of time up front. Do you do you find that people are not doing it partly because of a time it takes, of a thought process? Or is it just an awareness? Or, yeah, it's preventing people

from doing, yeah, I think it does take time. There's a couple of barriers. So the time thing, but also you've got to have a good relationship with your hiring managers. Well, I would say that it actually doesn't take that much time, once you learn the methodology to developing to. Getting the skills and then developing the way to assess it. But what we do, a good way to do, is develop a library of questions which are linked to skills. So if you need to, if you need to link in, if you need to get someone who's got if you're trying to test for resilience, for example, you can go to question libraries and work out which skills have been used previously and worked well for resilience, and just pull that into into your job. So there is a bit of upfront work, but it gets easier over time. And I would say the outcomes are, you know, more than enough to repay that initial work up front,

what you're saying just makes so much sense. I like, I the number of my career has been dominated by very small organizations, and the number of hires that have been made on job descriptions that are either so woefully out of date and someone's like, oh, it's, it's in the shared drive, and it's, it'll be from three years ago, when we last recruited that role, and there's no conversation with the person who's either the outgoing person or the hiring manager, about what has changed in the role or the sector, or indeed, anything that the organization does or doesn't do. I

love your point about looking at the job spec and adding a few more things because you want to personalize it,

or whatever. Or I quite like, I've had a number two CEOs I've worked with a long time ago, very long time ago, who like to just chuck on things that were nice to haves, well, if we ask for it, you never know what you get. And I'd be like, I just remember, I didn't understand any of this stuff at that point. But I do remember thinking, Well, if there's 15 things on there, but only five of them are really important, absolutely, and we recruit for the other seven. Yeah, with stuff. And I just remember thinking that's that's crazy, even really early in my career, was like that. That does not seem like a good idea.

And there's, there's research around how men and women respond to long list of requirements as well. So I think it's men will have a punt at the role if they've got like, 60% of those requirements, whereas women prefer to have 100% not because they're less confident in any way. It's more that they see requirements as requirements, as rules, whereas men are like, I'll just bend my way in here.

Well, and I think, I think it's really interesting. I don't, I wouldn't even sense from the conversations I've had. It's about that. It's about them saying, well, it's up to them. If I tell them what I have got and what I haven't got, and they choose to take me, that's up to them as an organization. Whereas I think when I've spoken to people who don't put themselves forward and people I coach, particularly women, it's about saying, Well, I don't want to put myself forward and waste anyone's time. If it's not I don't fulfill all the needs. And what's really interesting is we talk elsewhere in this series with someone around neurodiversity, and she was saying that the exact same split is true in that quite often,

people with autism are far more likely to act in that secondary way of not putting themselves forward, because they will see it as a Physical tick list. It's a rule, and there's 10 rules, and they only take nine of them. So move on to the next job. Yeah, absolutely. Which is, you know, explains quite a lot of if you're already playing in a pool, that's, you know, even at the application stage, so uneven in the sense that you might have some very, very clear matching opportunities across all the cat across all the requirements from one gender, but you've got a huge number of people who maybe meet some of them. Yeah? And you combine that with a badly written job description that's got some nice to haves on it, suddenly you're in a world where you've got some lovely people who are brilliant, but for the completely

wrong job, your probability of getting the right person must, like, diminish exponentially. Yeah,

I wonder. Sometimes I do wonder about probabilities and whether people could all just do with a bit more understanding

about that. Absolutely, I think you're just shooting yourself in the foot and missing out on the best talent. And I think if you truly change your process to focus on getting the best possible talent or quality of hire, then what we've seen is diversity comes naturally, because there is no trade off between those.

Yeah. Okay, so obviously you got you and you at Applied are really passionate about getting this better. What I guess the really helpful understanding would be we've referred to a little bit. But what role do you see tech playing in improving this? And specifically, how do you use tech as an organization to try and improve organizations experiences? Yeah,

I see tech as a great enabler. It's a tool, really, and it means that maybe in the past, you didn't have the time, or you it wasn't physically impossible to, you know, to redact everyone's name from a CV and do your job at the same time, but I see now it'll it enables people to use more predictive assessment methods more easily. It enables people to remove bits of information that can lead to bias, and probably most importantly, it. Enables people to collect data on the effectiveness of their process, both in terms of how predictive their assessments are in reality, but also whether or not you by tracking diversity throughout the funnel, whether or not you are, in fact, running a level playing field for everyone. So I think it it is a tool, not the answer. And I think the talent team needs to be in the right direction and be aiming for the right things for it to be effective, sure,

and then for you as an organization, I mean, clearly, tech plays a role in what what is it that you guys do for your customers, how do you provide a service room and help them? Yes,

so we offer a recruitment platform where, essentially, our customers put their roles up on the platform. People will apply to those roles online, and then our customers will review and assess people in a de biased way right through to hire. So what that involves is a whole series of research backed interventions, a lot of behavioral science in there trying to improve and remove bias from each of the stages. So for example, on attraction, we we have a tool that looks at the exact things we're talking about in terms of job descriptions. It'll give you warnings if you've got an endless list of requirements, for example, that's what. That's one of our first tools. But the core of the platform is really just, is, I guess, three things. The first one is we, we nudge people towards the most predictive assessments so you we don't use CVS, right? Instead, we use these work sample tests in three to five got these questions at the start of a process, the next thing we do is we, before you, review the answers to those questions from candidates, we do a whole bunch of behavioral science methodologies to remove bias. So one of those is anonymization. And then finally, at the end, we actually measure whether your questions have been effective, and we do the kind of funnel metrics all the way through. So if you think about most recruitment platforms, Africa, tracking systems, I would say the majority focus on speed and productive and efficiency of the process, which is important. We think we're different because we're focusing on quality of hire and diversity above all else. And when you do those things, the speed comes naturally,

yeah. And when you Yeah, no, that does make sense. And when you think about the types of organizations that benefit from essentially your platform and the service you provide, pardon me. So sorry.

No, I'll jump back in. Sorry. I just choked. I was getting a bit excited. My question was going to be, what types of customers benefit the most from this? Do you see what you're doing being value adding for small organizations, or is it really for large organizations? Or what are your thoughts? It's

a really great question. We believe it's a universal solution, because the problem is everywhere, as we know. So we think everyone can use it. It tends to work better for knowledge, heavy roles, so it's less useful for maybe, like seasonal employment, like people in retail that you need to employ for a couple months over Christmas quickly, it seems to be better suited for knowledge heavy roles, maybe like consultants or tech things like that. In terms of size, we don't think it's limited, but it's more down to the barriers which face us if we want to engage with a larger customer versus a smaller one, a larger customer will have be said in their ways, have their process, and have quite a lot of inertia behind that. So it's difficult to displace and to convince people to change the way that they're working. Not impossible, but difficult. Takes a long time. We have done it in some cases, with a smaller company who's kind of at the start of their growth journey. You You can really get in there quicker and explain the benefits a lot quicker, and kind of show them the value of the product quite quickly, which means it's it's more easily adopted for the kind of smaller, kind of progressive companies who are thinking hard about how they how they recruit and treat people,

and for them to, you know, sort of absorb the system into their ways of working. I mean, how much of an ask is it for them? It's

a, I mean, it's a, it's a fairly big ask, because we essentially asked them to let go of the CV, which is the way we all know how to apply for a job. So it's a massive behavioral change, which is always going to be tough. But I think if you couple the practical business outcomes of. Are, you know, getting three times as many great candidates with the with, I guess, the building a better workplace, the kind of social mission angle of it, people are usually pretty happy to make the change and try it. It just takes, takes a bit longer for them to let go of their their existing ways. As the organization gets bigger. Of course, those systems and processes and tech are just more embedded and take longer to kind of pry out or replace.

Yeah, cool. Well, I think we're kind of getting to the end of this. I think it's been really interesting. I think the stuff you guys are doing is great. I think it's great to hear you talking about the social imperative as well as the business case, and really trying to drive stuff forward. I

guess I'm just mad. I'm just back where I was two months ago, where I'm really mad about the world again, but I'm glad someone's doing something about it that makes me happy,

baked in and just I think, I think, actually, it's a time for hope and optimism, because I think tech, science, data has finally caught up with the demands of recruitment, and you're seeing a change. So all of the best new tech companies think this way about how they hire people. So that's for me, that's uplifting, and we'll get

there. Yeah, great. Just before we go, is there any way that listeners can learn more about you and what you do and your organization. Yeah. I

mean, I think the best place to go is a website. You know, we've got videos and resources on what we do. Otherwise, please connect with me, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, get in touch. We're happy just to have a bit of conversation if you want to hear more. Yeah. And what is your website? Could you listeners? Yeah, it's W www.be, applied.com. Cool, so that's BB, applied.com.

Yeah, cool. All right, well, hopefully some people get in touch. It's interesting. It feels hugely worthwhile, and like we're moving in the right direction.

Yeah, thanks Andy for sharing your time and your experience and your knowledge. I think what you've done today has really helped people think differently about maybe stuck in their ways might be strong, but maybe people who are just making assumptions about the way they do things, even

if people can start to challenge the status quo and see that there might be new ways to do things in this space, well, that's great. Thank you so much for having me on well. Thank you very much for spending your time with us, and have a great day. Bye.

Okay, so here we are back in the conversation. I thought that was a great conversation. I liked Andy's measured tone and insights and what they're trying to do. I thought it was really interesting. I misheard

you for a minute, and I just thought you said like Andy's tone, as in, you liked his voice, which, which, by the way, he has got, I missed, I missed

the measured bit. I mean, it's a great way to speak about this subject. I think it really brought some complicated things to life in an accessible way, which was really useful. Yeah. I

mean, we're getting towards the end of the series now, and I have to say, on reflection, that there have been a number of guests that I've been surprised by how impressed I have been by their knowledge of the sector the theme, but also their own reflections, yeah, and ability to reflect on what they do and what organizations are doing. So, yeah, yeah. Really good. Love it. Any big takeaways? Stand up for you, for

me, well, I guess I always try and think about things from a small organization. Small organization point of view, like really small. And I guess the one thing I would take away is that I think we all know that our job descriptions aren't always the best, the most accurate, the most stripped down to what actually is truly going to be, the judge of the job and the skills required, rather than nice tabs and things like that. And I think, I know we're all busy, but I think an half an hour conversation with the person who's either outgoing of the role or going to be managing the role to really refine that job description is something we can

all do. Yeah, that's powerful, right, right? It's a simple thing that everyone can think about it. I

always say to people like people on career coaching or mentoring. If you can demonstrate you really understand the purpose of the role and what it takes to do it, and you can demonstrate that you both want it and have the experience do it, then you've got to be in with the shop. Good chance. Yeah, you can't do that. If the job description is poor. You can't get a decent list of those people if you're hiring, if you haven't explained the job properly totally. It makes total sense, right? So simple, yeah, so that's mine. What about you?

Well, I'm going to cheat. I've got three things I'm going to do. Maybe it's cold, yeah? Well, I'm just going to rattle through them quickly. One, moral imperative around diversity and inclusion. I think we don't always accept that as being necessary. I think moral imperative is a good reason to do this. Business Case is good, but morally, this stuff is important as well. Equity is important. Next thing that really stuck in my mind was the importance of data, and increasingly, we're moving towards a data driven way of working in all areas of life, and it's just good to see that reaffirmed, and to see the empirical nature of outcomes based on data that this type of approach, kind of. I think that's interesting. But the bit that kind of stuck with me was that, as I think you said, you know, a lot of people in recruitment space have a have a hard time at the minute. They're under so much procedural pressure, so much time pressure, that it's actually kind of hard, in my opinion, based on the people I've spoken to to, for some of these people to do the sort of quality of job that they want, and to produce the output and to do these things. And it's just important to remember, I think that a lot of people really want to do a great job in this space, and are trying to, but sometimes come up against constraints. So I think this was a good sort of step forward in that area, to give people more education and insight and opportunity to do that. Yeah, I

think, I think going back to the moral imperative, we did an episode like in series one, where I went on a bit of a rant about, we shouldn't do this because it's necessary. We should do it because we can, yeah, in and it was about something completely different. But I maintain that the organizations are brave about the moral imperative will progress in the long run. And I think, and I think you're right about the compassion for recruitment, and I my challenge to senior leaders would be, start pushing in a positive way your HR to change and to think about what's new and to learn and invest in their own personal development and professional development. Give them space to be producing better outcomes that are empirically verifiable. Yeah,

and stop treating recruitment as a process through which you have to go through a series of steps and tick box exercise such that you will get a quick result at the end. Yeah? Like, you know, yeah, these are the people that are going to work in your organization. Don't you want to take the time and energy to do it properly and get the best possible mix? Yeah?

All right, well, with that, I think I'm going to take my high horse and fold it up and put it away, and then I can get back on it another

day. Well, I'm going to keep my high horse out, okay, but I will, I will just move it to the side for a moment, right? Okay, all right. Well, let's,

let's call it a day. There. We're going to check out, and that's going to be us for another week. We'll be back with another episode next week. Until then, have a great time. Bye, everyone.