Job interviews have always been a source of anxiety for many people. The pressure of showcasing your achievements to a stranger in an unnaturally structured conversation is not easy, and for many neuro-diverse people, it is pretty much impossible. The use of Ansychromous video interviews has helped the situation in some ways but doesn't provide the opportunity for real-time conversation and exploration, which is critical in the later stages of the recruiting process.
Could a methodology initially designed to combat communication delays in space travel offer a solution that bridges the gap between synchronous and asynchronous interviewing in a way that is inclusive for everyone?
My guest week is Rob Brougham, Director & Co-Founder of Braided Communications. Rob worked with NASA to develop a unique way of helping astronauts have real-time conversations with people back on Earth on future missions to the moon and Mars. He is now using the same technology to make the recruiting process more inclusive and effective. So how does this all work? Just keep listening to find out more.
In the interview, we discuss:
- A simple way of defying the laws of physics in space travel
- Making the asynchronous synchronous.
- Co-presence and connection
- The importance of inclusive communication
- Applications in talent acquisition
- Making interviews real-time and inclusive
- What does the future of business communication look like?
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support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters smart recruiters is your all-in-one platform but faster smarter hiring making recruiting easy and effortless smart recruiters are making some big changes revamping their user experience adding AI features and refreshing the UI i know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner they understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support so it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates if you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition head over to smart recruiters dot com and find out what they're up to trust me your team and your future hires will thank you there's been more of scientific discovery more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime of mind at all the ages of history hi there welcome to episodes 639 of recruiting feature with me matt alder job interviews have always been a source of anxiety for many people the pressure of showcasing your achievements to a stranger in an unnaturally structured conversation is not easy and for many neuro diverse people it's pretty much impossible the use of asynchronous video interviewing has helped the situation in some ways but doesn't provide the opportunity for real-time conversation and exploration which is critical in the later stages of a recruiting process so could a methodology that was originally designed to combat communication delays in space travel offer a solution that bridges the gap between synchronous and asynchronous interviewing in a way that's inclusive for everyone my guest this week is rob brawn director and co-founder of braided communications rob work with nasa to develop a unique way of helping astronauts have real-time conversations with people back on earth on future missions to the moon and to mars is now using that same technology to make recruiting processes more inclusive and effective so how does this all work just keep listening to find out more hi rob and welcome to the podcast hi matt thanks very much for having me on the podcast an absolute pleasure to have you on the show please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do yeah of course so my name is rob brawn i am co-founder of a company called braided communications and what we do is a couple of things one of them is where we started which is very strange which is that we started in the space sector and now we also deliver inclusive communications so that's me and the company in a very small nutshell i'm sure we're going to more details soon well absolutely and i really want to talk about inclusive communications particularly in the context of time acquisition but i don't even go any further before you give us a bit more of the back story about space so tell us tell us the back story how did the company come to be sure so the company came about when myself and my co-founder who sadly is no longer involved sadly he had to leave for health reasons but we are we started by solving a problem for future space travel which is when humans go back to the moon as they should do in a few years and potentially sometime in the future go further into space perhaps even as far as mars maybe in 20 25 years time those astronauts will be so far from earth that all their communication back to earth will suffer from a time delay because even though it's using radio waves we travel at the speed of light which is the fastest possible speed in the universe the distances are so vast that there's going to be a time delay which at the moon is about a second and a half and when humans get to mars it's going to be measured in minutes and if you can imagine trying to record a podcast with somebody where there was a time delay of a few seconds even or even a few minutes between you and the guests it's impossible to have a a natural communication and because that's caused by basic laws of physics everybody in the space sector just assumed it could never be solved and that the space sector would need to find ways to kind of cope without a solution we came along with a solution which kind of shocked a lot of people just to be clear we did not break any laws of physics so there's nothing like that going on but what we realized was that the way human beings communicate is actually quite adaptable and plastic and what we did was we invented a methodology of communication that disguises latency so if you were on mars and i'm here on earth we could be communicating in a way that would feel to both of us pretty much like a natural synchronous dialogue even though there's an underlying delay and so we came up with that idea as i said it was a way of disguising not removing latency managed to blag our way into it into a nasa conference going back before lockdown and showed this to some of the people who've done some research in this area and they were very excited so actually we're really proud of the fact that as a small British company our first income actually came originally from nasa to study this idea and see if it worked and the short answer is it did so that's now there is a published academic paper so that's where we started awesome tell us about how this works they know that people will be fascinated that you are somehow breaking the laws of physics without breaking the laws of physics so just tell us a little bit about how it works yeah sure and it's it's kind of super simple but not obvious and actually at some points when i have this conversation with people people kind of go oh is that it i was expecting something a little bit more exciting we kind of bells and whistles and flashy lights on it it's actually really simple as i said and sometimes the best ideas are the simplest so i'll try and describe it's very visual as well so it's a little bit difficult on a podcast but essentially if you can imagine if you were on Mars and i'm on earth and we're communicating and there's a time delay of maybe five minutes you know you can't just pick up the phone to me and call me because it will take five minutes for my phone to ring so everything is kind of pre scheduled so we probably agree the day before that we're going to have a have a communication session and what we do is we agree the topics so let's say for the sake of argument and simplicity there are six topics we want to discuss when the the session starts you're on Mars i'm on earth both of us log on to our computers to communicate braiding is entirely written there's no audio and no video what you see on your screen is kind of a chat window and what i see on my screen is is another chat window which is a different subject and those two chat windows are two of let's say six chat windows arranged on a carousel that rotates between us kind of one step at a time you're typing in one i'm typing in another on the other side of the carousel after maybe two minutes the carousel rotates one step the content you type begins this journey to me the content i type begins this journey to you and you then have a fresh braid as we call it to type on and so do i and the same thing happens a couple of times and then after that carousel that we have between us has rotated half a rotation you get the first message from me that i typed about seven or eight minutes ago and it's taken five minutes to travel across the void to you at the same instant i get the first message from you and from that moment onwards as the carousel rotates each of us gets a fresh message fresh message from the other person even though that other person wrote it ages ago five six seven minutes whatever it is it doesn't actually matter to each of us it feels like a message just received from the other person so that's why to us as human beings it feels like a natural synchronous dialogue so it's super simple very visual so yeah maybe the the listeners can go and see on our website and see some visuals of this but it works amazingly well and it's now been studied in academic studies and shown to work so this was before the pandemic the pandemic obviously comes along and changes the way that people work so we have far more remote work we have teams working remotely people getting very burnt out by constantly being on video and you know companies looking for new ways of communicating and communicating more effectively how did what you do evolve based on that you're absolutely right all those things were happening and actually what what happened to allow us to kind of take what we'd invented for space and adapt it to here on earth was that when we were building it as we were testing it we and this is this is myself and my co-founder began to realize that this this strange thing we invented for space was allowing the two of us to communicate to better better together or perhaps we might be better to say communicate differently so like everyone else we use emails we use phone calls we use zoom and meet and other and teams and other things and all of those each of them had like if you like different weaknesses in some senses and they were all they were all kind of very similar in other ways you know all meeting technologies are broadly the same in that they allow people to communicate together and talk together what we realized was this braiding thing was allowing us to communicate in a synchronous manner but without some of the weaknesses that were impacting on some of our meetings so one of the biggest problems and this is a challenge for you here Matt is one of my biggest weaknesses is I talk too much and I do ever have it in meetings of sometimes talking to much and dominating the meeting I try hard not to I'm very aware of that but obviously for me that means I have to think hard not to interrupt which means I'm not thinking so much about the content of the meeting what we realized was by taking our braiding our braided approach and adapting it into a meeting on earth we were able to create an environment where each of us could contribute without me interrupting too much so that was one of the benefits there's a whole bunch of others because actually what it turns out is that all individuals have different communication preferences different environments in which they thrive and when you look into some of the research for this a traditional meeting whether that's face-to-face or video is really only an ideal environment for people who are neurotypical confident and extrovert anyone who doesn't really fit that that mole struggles in a face-to-face meeting and that can apply to different people at different times so someone might be really confident in one meeting but go into a different meeting where maybe there's a different power dynamic or a different age profile or whatever it might be and that person suddenly feels unable to contribute so traditional meetings don't tend to adapt to all environments so we all need other tools in the toolbox and it turns out the braiding can be a new tool in the toolbox particularly for inclusive and effective meetings yeah i think that's really interesting i want to dive into the inclusive part of this in a second but i think the the interesting thing from that that kind of meeting perspective is for years i've been interviewing people who who run remote first companies kind of before the pandemic and asynchronous communication is such a big part of people who work like that but if they're working across time zones and and things like that but but actually the kind of the technology around asynchronous communication isn't particularly sophisticated and it's really interesting to see something that bridges the gap between very very asynchronous communication where people are getting replies hours later and ineffective real-time video meetings so i think it's a gap that is definitely there to be filled yeah i think you're absolutely right man i think actually the word synchronous is a key point there so some of the the studies around the way people communicate is that for effective really genuinely effective communication you need to have what's called co-presence you need to feel co-present with other individuals that isn't always the same as co-located co-presence is a concept that's enabled by synchrony but synchrony doesn't necessarily mean at the same time it means with a shared rhythm and a shared focus of attention in that psychological communication sense and you can have people sat around a table or sat around a virtual video conference who don't feel that sense of connection they don't feel that sense of co-presence and that's one of the things that we've realized that that braiding does is it brings that sense of co-presence to more people in environments who otherwise would struggle to to feel that sense of co-presence and therefore struggle to communicate and that's why it kind of covers a gap in existing technologies where they're not actually able to provide that for everybody we'll get back to the show in just a moment but i wanted to take a minute or so to talk about something that i know is critical for you all right now tara acquisition is going through an unprecedented transformation and many of you are likely in the middle of planning your strategies as we move through 2024 towards 2025 we all know the operating models change management and aligning ta with corporate objectives are essential parts of any transformation strategy but with the market and AI technologies in particular evolving so rapidly there's a real risk that your strategy could quickly become outdated that's where strategic foresight comes in it's a proven methodology that helps you build credible future scenarios create agile strategies and most importantly have a proactive influence on what the future of ta acquisition looks like both within your organization and across the industry i know you're busy so i've created a concise online course that breaks down strategic foresight into easy-to-learn tools specifically designed for ta transformation it's quick to implement and will keep you ahead of the curve you can learn more by visiting mattalder.me/course that's mattalder.me/course there's really never been a better time to shape the future of ta acquisition so don't miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact talk us through the applications of this ta acquisition so yeah in ta acquisition there's one very simple application so and actually to me the way i think about ta acquisition also ta retention which is just as important so grading as a technology can create meetings that are inclusive and effective incredibly effective in fact on average about eight times more efficient than the same meeting in a traditional manner so if you've got a team that you want to retain and build you need to create environments in which they can all communicate and that's where graded meetings exist but then we have a sister product which we call braided interviews because we're really imaginative with our names which is very much focused on the ta acquisition part of this so there's been a lot of studies and work recently about creating inclusive processes for recruitment and a lot of really good work and some things which with hindsight are kind of obvious but none of us really thought of them before so things like making sure your language is really unambiguous making sure you're advertising roles and searching for talent in places where where the talent might be rather than for a better word where you've always looked before and adapting processes to perhaps be more skills based etc but in most cases there's still a desire for an interview to be part of the process so how do you interview people who perhaps might struggle with face-to-face communication or that has to keep part of an interview process now about a year or so ago the kind of gold standard for inclusive interviewing was to say two things first of all it's really important to send the questions out in advance and actually that tends to be regarded as good practice for all interviews now so you send the questions out in advance so people can at least prepare and not be completely caught off guard by a kind of left field question but then for inclusive interviews it was well the only thing you can then do is get email answers back and then follow up with another email for a follow up question and that is a a very asynchronous process and it puts the the diverse candidate at a disadvantage because by the time you've gone through a process over three or four days of questions and follow-ups by the time you've done that the the the neurotypical candidates probably already been offered and accepted the job so instead of that you go to try a a braided interview which is using this braided methodology to allow the candidates to actually be interviewed in a synchronous real-time environment with the interviewer but without any of the challenges that would make them struggle in a face-to-face interview so that's what's out there at the moment being used not by many people this is still a very early-stage business and this is a very early-stage product but this seems to be doing a great job of creating a fair playing field where everybody can shine so if someone chooses a braided interview that gives them an equal chance to shine compared to someone else who might choose video or face-to-face I think that's really interesting because when it comes to neurodiversity in the recruiting process it's talked about a lot a lot of the adjustments that are made to the interviewing process they're not very big adjustments they're not changing the process they're just kind of tweaking things slightly to swing it a little bit more in the favor of the neurodiverse candidate but not fundamentally doing anything different and it's it's interesting to hear about this because it is a very different way of doing things but it's a way of doing things that could apply to all candidates couldn't it absolutely could and actually there's another point there about the interviewer themselves as well but to apply to candidates I mean when we're talking to companies who are looking at braided interviews we're careful to say it's the company's choice obviously but we would never recommend that they mandate braided interviews for all candidates because for some candidates it's not the perfect environment but for some it is so if you have a choice and you know one of the most important things there is to bring consistency so if you're interviewing two people you should be saying these are the five questions I'm going to ask you both you whoever the candidates are but if a candidate A chooses a face-to-face interview and candidate B chooses a braided interview they're going to get the same five questions they're going to get the same chance to shine in their answers on those questions but with a very different methodology that's much more inclusive to many people and I said the same thing I think will apply over time to interviewers as well I mean I've worked in a number of big companies across my career and when I look back now and you know this wasn't something that was kind of discussed at the time but there were always some managers who really struggled with interviewing and many of them kind of you know didn't want to and were delegated to other managers who then might not be the best qualified to assess the candidates for the roles and you know maybe those those managers were neurodiverse in one way or the other and probably didn't even know it back in the in the in the 90s early 2000s but if they had alternative methods with which they could interview candidates it may well have helped them find better candidates for their vacancies so it sits on both sides of it which I personally think is really interesting so as a final question for you what do you hope the future looks like in terms of recruiting and business communication in general oh that's a big question obviously I really hope it's it's something that becomes more and more inclusive over time certainly you know in my career I've seen some significant strides towards inclusivity and the embracing of diversity in all its aspects and that's just you know fantastic one of my favorite phrases in that is taking old phrase and slightly changing it the old phrase of great minds think alike absolutely rubbish in my opinion great minds do not think alike if you have a diversity of thought diversity of background diversity of experience you're much more likely to get better outcomes better solutions to problem and more solutions to problems so I personally am very excited by the the opportunity and to embrace and include more inclusivity over time both in the in the talent acquisition process and in the general business process as well Rob thank you very much for talking to me thanks very much Matt it's been a pleasure my thanks to Rob you can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfeatured.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting feature feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening I'll be back next time and I hope you'll join me this is my show [BLANK_AUDIO]
