Recruiters can be prone to unconscious bias during the hiring process. This inadvertently perpetuates discriminatory decisions, which can have a damaging effect for both the candidate and employer. But what’s more is that, for businesses, consistently hiring the wrong personnel can also be detrimental to financial performance.
David Bernard, CEO of the innovative AI recruitment platform AssessFirst, explains how we can eliminate bias in the workplace.
Recruitment Shortcuts
We are all hardwired to take cognitive shortcuts when making decisions. These shortcuts manifest as problem-solving strategies, dictating how we think about people and challenging situations. This is what is known as heuristics, or cognitive bias.
This is a considerable issue for recruiters attempting to find the best candidate, since we are unconsciously led to make decisions that are merely sufficient rather than ideal.
Unsurprisingly, this results in inadequate recruitment, and bad hiring decisions can cost companies dearly. Hiring the wrong person at mid-management level can cost a business around £132,000, which includes loss through recruitment time, training, rehiring fees, and reduced productivity.
To employ the best candidates through ethical practices as well as reduce cost-incurring biases from the workplace, recruiters should begin to support their own expertise with behavioral science and the power of artificial intelligence.
The Future of Efficient Recruitment
We now have access to recruitment platforms that use unique AI predictive technology, based entirely on behavioral science. This technology is used to analyze hundreds of behavioral data points for each individual, revealing the motivators behind their working practices. Crucially, it explains what and how a candidate thinks in relevant, job-critical scenarios.
In this digital age, it is inevitable that the CV will soon become less the norm for established recruitment tools, while interactive assessment platforms and personality-based hiring will become more accepted and embraced.
While CVs can provide data about a person’s education and job experience, we know that many falsehoods can also be found within CVs (you need only look at BBC’s The Apprentice to see how exaggerated some can be). And unless the recruiter does their due diligence in requesting educational certificates, for instance, there could be many inaccuracies in both the skills and achievements that a candidate can lead one to believe they possess.
These inconsistencies mean the traditional CV model is in fact a low-accuracy recruitment tool. When we also consider that an overwhelming 85% of people lie on their résumés, it is apparent how vast resources can be wasted with an insufficient recruitment process.
Cognitive skills tests, by comparison, are extremely accurate, while predictive psychometric testing allows each user to find their ideal vocation, based not upon a gut instinct or the validity of a CV, but through their talents, skills, personality, and motivations.
Some of the world’s biggest companies have already switched to psychometric testing as a method of hiring the right people. An estimated 18% of companies are now using behavioral science at the core of their recruitment process, and the percentage of psychometric testing for recruitment purposes is growing at a rate of between 10 and 15 percent per year.
American investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, regarded as one of the great innovators in finance, has used a variety of different personality tests for recruitment and management purposes. Dalio is such an advocate of the technology that he has encouraged Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey to take personality tests to witness the team-shaping potential of behavioral science technology.
Benefits to Businesses
Harnessing the power of technology to direct and enhance decision-making via tailored algorithms can help recruiters rid the processes of the inherent biases we all subconsciously possess.
The configuration of company personnel will eventually be driven entirely by behavioral science. The question is, how long can businesses avoid the inevitable and how many resources will be wasted while doing so?
The Economist reports the pandemic has advanced workplace technological innovations by approximately half a decade, which means some businesses are already at risk of practicing outdated recruitment methods. Five years spent adjusting recruitment processes to eliminate traditional biases will hamper growth and present a considerable competitive disadvantage.
The solution is to adopt AI systems that future-proof recruitment strategies and practices. In a crucial business year, where companies are hoping to capitalize on the loosening of pandemic restrictions, the opportune time to incorporate these systems is now.
 David Bernard is the CEO of AssessFirst. An occupational psychologist and a graduate of Université Paris 5—René Descartes, Bernard launched AssessFirst only 20 days after obtaining his master’s in Psychology. As CEO and chief creative officer of AssessFirst, he is in charge of branding and user experience. He also participates in executing various research projects conducted by AssessFirst, particularly in the field of group performance analysis. Bernard is also a renowned author and speaker. He has spoken at over 20 business schools and universities, including HEC, IESEG, ISG, and EM Strasbourg. He led two talks during the latest edition of “HR Speaks” on the subjects of “why some candidates succeed and others don’t” and “big data and models that predict professional success.” His latest book, 18 ways to get that job … without paying, f***ing, or killing, has been successful throughout Europe. |