www.thehrdirector.com
these biases are pretty obvious, others are more insidious. I’d wager that ‘attention-to- detail’ is probably a pretty uncontroversial phrase to include in the description of a candidate you’re looking for, but like it or not, if you’ve decided that is what you require, and you’re evidencing that through traditional means, the proportion of well-formatted cover letters and CVs that arrive without spelling mistakes will be finite and, by the way, will correlate pretty closely with the proportion of candidates with the time to check and the privilege to realise the importance. Perhaps more importantly it might just be the wrong thing to be looking for in the first place.
Read through any competency framework and you will never find ‘highly distractible’ or ‘impulsive’ as a desirable quality. And yet it turns out that those qualities precisely are present in many top performers within sales organisations - to a demonstrably greater degree - than the population as a whole. This mismatch between what really drives organisations and the assumptions baked into our everyday language is, I would argue, the source of an enormous value deficit. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. As
socio-economic groups are the ones that specifically target top employers in their recruitment activities, and where 30 percent of people leave their new job in the first 90 days. These problems are not caused by insufficient political correctness. They are caused by decisions being made based on largely irrelevant data, usually in time-limited conditions, and by human brains that don’t have the capacity to filter it properly.
Gamification, when combined with machine learning, provides a genuine solution to this, because the output of playing a game gives you massive amounts of objective, behavioural information, that can be directly compared. Gamification allows you not only to assess your candidates better, but to determine the benchmark you’re measuring them on in the first place, in a much fairer, clearer and more efficient way. Unlike a CV, gameplay data does not give away anything about who you are - it just shows how you behave. Blind auditions - for example in hiring musicians who audition behind screens - have been shown to be enormously helpful for diversity. This means that you can ensure that machine learning does not learn bias from the training set by,
RECRUITERS - SWAYED BY SUBCONSCIOUS AND DEEP- ROOTED COGNITIVE BIASES SUCH AS THE AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC - TEND TO OVER-INDEX ON THOSE CHARACTERISTICS WHICH THEY HAVE SEEN AS PRESENT IN THOSE THAT ARE SUCCESSFUL IN THE ROLE
Daniel Kahneman pointed out, human beings are hard-wired not only to make bad decisions based on irrelevant data, but to be in denial about the bad decisions they make. That sounds about right. I don’t know of an institution, private or public, that doesn’t claim to be at least a little bit interested by the diversity and performance of its staff. And yet the output of their efforts are that, over half a century after the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, today’s world is one where there are fewer women leading FTSE 100 companies than there are men named John, where out of 240 members of the UK parole board, none are black, where universities with the lowest proportions of students from low
for example, “penalising the word “women” on a resume, as in a women’s club or sport, and downgraded all-women’s colleges as less preferable.” This has reported by many, including the business community platform, Quartz, with regard to Amazon’s well- publicised issues in this area. So you can have the efficiency of robot help without the well- documented downsides and, if you have enough historical data, you can proactively account for any differences in tendencies linked to gender or ethnicity, in a way that is entirely transparent.
So, what is holding gamification back? When you’re at school, games are what you do in
FOR FURTHER INFO
www.pymetrics.com
between study and exams. Today, they are what you play on your phone when you’re not at work. The word “game” captures something that is more fun than work, but also less consequential, less useful and perhaps even trivial. Gamifying sounds like you’re turning something into a game - so for the purpose of using games in recruitment, it is tempting to think it is in order to make the process more fun, mainly satisfying Gen Z stereotypes who don’t have the attention span to read anything longer than 280 characters long. This is no different to any other decision that is made, based on biased assumptions, and doing so is a huge potential blind spot for HR organisations. Gameplay is unfiltered behavioural data that tells you how people actually behave relative to what is relevant to the role, not just what they aspire to or how accurately they can describe their aspirations. It allows you to hire in a way that is far more predictive and fairer than is possible using questionnaires. Oh, and by the way, the average gamer might not be quite who you think they are. If robust gamified approaches come to dominate the selection market, it has the potential to upend a broken status quo. That will be far from trivial. The evidence then shows us that much of the information we are using to predict who will succeed in the workplace is deceiving us. As George Orwell wrote: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” I wonder if the world’s really ready for change? As I tuck into my seed and grain snackpot, I do hope so.
•
MAY 2019 | thehrdirector | 25
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
