Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 28: Can You Automate Assessment?

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Gareth Jones from ChemistryA few episodes back I spoke to Matthew Jeffery about an innovative global graduate recruitment campaign SAP had been running. On this week’s episode I dig a bit deeper into the story behind its success by talking to Gareth Jones from Chemistry who were the company who designed the recruitment process.We also talk about technology and assessment in general covering a number of areas including: • The biggest mistake most companies make when they are recruiting • Using personal data to predict future performance • The current and future role of algorithms in assessmentGareth also shares his thoughts on the future of work and some of the emerging technology he is seeing in the assessment space. Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes

Duration:: 15m
Broadcast on:: 16 Sep 2015
Audio Format:: other

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Gareth Jones from Chemistry

A few episodes back I spoke to Matthew Jeffery about an innovative global graduate recruitment campaign SAP had been running. On this week’s episode I dig a bit deeper into the story behind its success by talking to Gareth Jones from Chemistry who were the company who designed the recruitment process.

We also talk about technology and assessment in general covering a number of areas including:

    •    The biggest mistake most companies make when they are recruiting

    •    Using personal data to predict future performance

    •    The current and future role of algorithms in assessment

Gareth also shares his thoughts on the future of work and some of the emerging technology he is seeing in the assessment space.

Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes

Support for this podcast comes from Social Referral from Broadbeam. Social Referral is the automated and seamless workflow for employee referral. Recognise and reward employees for referring friends and connections to current jobs. Spread the good word about your employment brand and attract top talent to your business. With Social Referral, recruiters and employees can share, engage and are rewarded instantly. Ignite your employee referral programme with Social Referral from Broadbeam. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 28 of the Recreating Feature Podcast. A few episodes ago I spoke to Matthew Jeffery at SAP about their innovative graduate recruitment process. I was interested in digging a bit deeper and in this week's episode I talked to Gareth Jones from Chemistry, the company that designed SAP's assessment process. Gareth also always has an eye on the future and we talk about some of the tools and trends he's seeing in the space. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recreating Feature Podcast interview. My guest today is Gareth Jones. Hi Gareth. Hi Matt, how are you? I'm very good. Would you just like to introduce yourself? Yes, sure. So I'm Gareth Jones and I'm the head of technology at the company called Chemistry Group. We may not have heard of. We are a change, people change business consultancy and at the core of everything that we do is assessment. We do an awful lot of work with large corporates predominantly around resourcing and re-engineering the resourcing strategy. My role in the business is to build the technology that we use to do that, because we've designed for a while. Okay and what was, you know, tell us about your background to, you know, that got you into this into this job. My background got me into this job. Well I'm a bit of a, it's been a bit of a journey for me. I started in HR, so in the sort of the whole remit of people. Did 10 years there in large corporates for an HR role, got a bit disillusioned with it. And that's when I stepped out into a journey of other roles. Sales, business development, consulting, but always in technology and people with a flavour. And I did spend some time running a recruitment business as well. That's seven or eight years ago. So I've always been in the kind of the fold of my fascination as technology people. So, a long time in the industry. Yes. Might say industry better. No, I don't think so. No, no. So, if people haven't come across chemistry before then, they may have listened to the podcast I did a few weeks back with Matthew Jeffery from S&P. He mentioned chemistry in the context of a graduate recruitment programme S&P had run. Where he had basically done automated online assessments for I think it was 50,000 candidates. Now, I think it was your IP and your technology that kind of powered that. Can you sort of tell us a little bit about that campaign and what you guys did and what you learned from it? Sure, yeah. So that was really for S&P's global graduate intake which I believe was covering 70 countries and multiple languages. And they needed to bring that together but didn't really have the resource to pull that into one, I suppose, central point. So we worked with them on that full campaign. So we helped kind of re-engineer that whole graduate resourcing piece from initial attraction through to hire. And the key elements that were the first thing we did was we designed and built the online screening tools which have had quite a bit of press and I'm about to talk about those. That dealt with the volume of applicants they had and brought them all into a central place where we could consistently benchmark them against what a great looks like for an S&P graduate which is a sales graduate which is the first group we started on. We then designed until that same what great looks like DNA which is the heart of everything that we do and we built into the video screening which we called Hangouts and the assessment centers which were the third element in. So we had kind of a full suite but the kind of the magic really happened in the applicant screening so that's where I think huge amounts of sifting took place and allowed them to have a full hiring quota at the end of the process because the funnel was so rich. Now one of the questions I think I ask almost everyone who comes on this podcast is can you replace a recruiter with an algorithm. Now I'd be interested to know your thoughts on that but maybe the question slightly more complicated slightly broader which is which bits of recruitment could you replace with an algorithm. But do you think that you can replace a recruiter completely with an algorithm or what's your view on that. So I think the answer is I'd say no not right now we're not into the sort of we're not ordering a hire that gets delivered at the door at the moment but who knows what I do think and there's a lot of debate about it let's face it online. But I do think it's a bit of a sun headline thing in that what we've known what we know is that we can replace some of the work they do. And it's the if you look at where we're at the moment the applicant screening work which we know already just using existing technology that we use is you know more quick and more accurate if you've got the right definitions behind it. And a lot of wasted time for recruiters to do so that it definitely is already replaced by an algorithm or being on the hugely sophisticated one. But through a set of assessments we're able to define what it looks like well enough to narrow that applicant pool down to a good well qualified set of individuals so yes that can absolutely be done. And the future technology that's out there that I've been looking at we're playing around with you know broadens that scope massively to the point where actually the more interesting question for me is not whether you can replace a recruiter it's whether you can replace a psychologist. Can you replace a psychologist with an algorithm, there we are. We're actually in your offices at the moment, we're not saying that too loudly. Presumably even with the SAP work there was a huge amount of presumably designed type work that went into that in all of humans. What was the sort of process that? So effectively it was designing fundamentally finding out what great looks like and we use some sort of IP and assessments to work that out that's key. And then simply then it will say simply it's then taking that with the applicant screening tools for example it's building bespoke assessment content so we don't do off the shelf stuff so we're actually tailoring the assessment so they reflect and find the people that are going to be have the potential to do the role the real potential not just based on what university went to and what work experienced in my school have been to so it's far more accurate in that sense. And what do you think the biggest mistakes companies in making in kind of assessment and recruiting are at the moment is there anything that kind of consistently comes up? Yeah, I think the thing that's amazes me is that time and time again even large sophisticated businesses don't have a good idea what great looks like. They don't have a consistent idea for key roles in the business. They need to roll out a new strategy enter a new market transform their retail experience. All of these initiatives require the right people and when you see how they're defining what success is for those roles that are going to deliver on that strategy. It's woefully inadequate you know in a lot of cases it's still still a job description or a person spec that's been written by someone who's currently in the job. There's no defined framework to say what are the things that really will predict performance in this job and it's missing and I still find companies with 50, 80, 100,000 employees they're still not doing it. Yeah, you mentioned you kind of touched on the future and technology that you were looking at and all that kind of stuff. What's the most interesting and exciting thing you've kind of seen in terms of technology that people have developed or are developing that you think could be used within recruitment? Well, I think the interesting shift is that for a number of years we and others have measured say our criteria so in our world values, motivations, behaviors and intellect. We've been measuring those things in a very structured way for a long time you know through third party like SHL type of psychometric assessments. And what we're seeing now is that with the way the fabric of the internet now works and the way we as consumers behave and the things that we do online particularly, we're leaving that vast digital footprint is a huge opportunity for us to add layers of accuracy to those things. So instead of me just asking you a set of questions around, you know, your values to determine what your value set is or what your personality is. Actually, there's the opportunity to use this out there for me to just kind of in the verticals observe you by looking at your social updates, what you're saying, how you're saying it, what your likes are, the stuff you put inside your LinkedIn profile, the things you say on social communities. Your actual behavior that we can map by seeing how you connect on a social community with others or how you interact with others at work, your health and nutrition data, all of these things we're capturing. And they, if you can look at them through the right lens, they also predict potential performance. So for us it's I think the core still remains the same, but we've now got these fabulous multilayered different data sets that we can look at that can make that prediction of performance more accurate. I think that's really interesting because a lot of people would have the kind of reaction to that as, well actually no, I don't put very much about myself out there. And I think when they realised just how much information is tracked and it was too late, they kind of be terrified. And I think there's a really interesting thing about, you know, privacy and how much privacy we actually don't have that could be a big debate moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're coming to a tipping point with that. I think they say that the millennials don't care about privacy and I just don't believe that's true. I think they do care, but they've just unwittingly walked into, you know, exchanging access to something like Facebook for their entire, you know, data profile. And I think at some point we're going to be reaching the point where we're saying, hang on, whose data is it anyway? I've just done a post on it around. If I'm moving from company to company as an employee, why shouldn't I take that data with me? I'm leaving it dying in a work day instance or an Oracle instance at the moment, and I can't use that for my benefit. And if I'm the one who's trying to find my own job, doing my own development, pay for my own benefits, et cetera, I need that data. I think we're going to come to a point where someone described it, it could be as magna carte proportions. I'm not sure it will be or not, but it could be that moment when we say, hang on a minute, the data landscape has to shift in terms of ownership, part ownership as a minimum. So, final question, one of the other guests I had on, not so long ago, was Steph and Kazri up, who was the CEO of Upwork, which is the talent kind of network where massively leveraging people working remotely, bringing kind of global, freelance talent into businesses. We've very much had a conversation that he obviously very strongly believes that's the future of knowledge work. Is that a view you share, and if it is, or if it isn't, how important might the assessment or how you sort of tell whether people are appropriate for the job might be. Would it be ratings? What do you think is putting you on the spot? I can see you thinking deeply about this one. It's all evolving, isn't it? And I think that businesses like that, there are more and more of us independent, or having to do two roles, maybe a job and do something independent. And certainly organisations are looking to try and ultimately have large ways of workforce, either working independently or flexibly. I think with that, if you've got an environment like that where people are trading their services, stuff and they're communicating on the platform, actually that platforming itself has some incredible data about the behaviour of those people. And could find some way of putting the right lens in the middle of all that, and match people much more appropriate. Even you could get into which is being done at the moment, monitoring those updates, how often they put in a bid for work or how the conversation goes. And using that to define things like trust signals and reputation and stuff like that. And I do know a couple of organisations that started out in the assessment space with new but familiar assessments. And what they're doing is shifting that layering social stuff over the top of it, and turning that into your personal recommendation engine. So, you know, the fact is that this will take a view of you across your social footprint and say you're trustworthy because of your behaviour. So, that's...we live an interesting time. We do, indeed, yes, it's very good to say. Gareth, thank you very much for talking to me. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. My thanks to Gareth Jones. For show notes and past episodes of the podcast, please go to www.rfpodcast.com. You can also subscribe to the mailing list there and find out more about me on the work with my older page. You can, of course, subscribe to the podcast itself on iTunes and on Stitcher. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]