In the fight against unconscious bias, Sweden experiments with AI – but will robotic interviewers really catch on?

Meet your interviewer, Tengai: she’s friendly, observant, and did we mention she’s a robot?

Tengai’s 16-inch glowing face sits on a table at eye level with the candidate. She smiles and blinks forming empathetic facial expressions as she asks “have you ever been interviewed by a robot?”

For most people today, the answer would be ‘no’, but that might not be the case in five years. For that, we have to thank Furhat Robotics, creators of Tengai. The AI and social robotics company that has spent the past four years building a human-esque computer interface that can replicate our speech and subtle facial expressions. The idea being, a human-like robot is much less scary than machine-like one.

A few companies, like the Swedish recruitment firm TNG currently trialing Tengai, are experimenting with the use of robots in their early interviews, and many more companies already use some form of AI in their selection process.

Many people have reservations about using AI to make hiring judgments. ‘How much should we trust these droids?’ they wonder. Indeed, the question has its merits.

Proponents of the technology point out humans aren’t great judges of character or ability because we are all affected by unconscious bias, which impedes our ability to assess fairly. And what’s more, this bias is hard to shake – numerous studies have shown that trainings which aim to minimize unconscious bias’ influence in the workplace has little to no effect on future behavior.  

On the other side, decriers of recruiting’s new reliance on AI-driven judgments point out that the underlying algorithms of these technologies can also be biased and given the homogeny of the tech and data-science field, we must be careful.

Let’s dive in…

Understanding Unconscious Bias

To grasp the argument for using robots in interviews, it’s first important to understand what unconscious bias is and how it occurs. As it has become a workplace buzzword, there’s often confusion around the actual defintion.  

Dolly Chugh is an award-winning psychologist and Professor at New York University. She specializes in the psychology of human bias. Speaking on the 10% Happier podcast, she offered a very helpful example which frames unconscious bias in a way that’s easy to understand:

“When I say ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ your mind probably automatically jumps to ‘…little star’. Somehow, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ became an association in your mind. And there are many other associations we’ve all internalized.

We may associate certain groups of people with certain attributes. But we probably don’t remember when that became part of how we think. This is because it’s all part of the flow of our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind represents the vast majority of our brain’s work. Unconscious mental processing is absolutely essential for us to function as human beings, but sometimes it can lead us away from being the person we’d like to be in certain situations.”  

Reining in biases, as a recruiter, can be tough. First impressions and gut feelings count for so much during interviews. But left unchecked, unconscious bias can result in unfair judgments, overlooked talent, and ultimately, discrimination.

Enter The Robots

Robots designed specifically for recruitment purposes are generally much better than humans at making unbiased decisions about a candidate. This has already proven to be true through a recruitment experiment conducted in Sweden.

Since late 2018, Swedish recruitment agency TNG have been using an AI-driven robot head called Tengai to conduct first stage interviews in place of human recruiters. The results have shown an encouraging example of AI eliminating discrimination rather than amplifying it.

New Technology, Same Process

Tengai was built by Furhat Robotics. At first glance, it’s appearance is a bit disconcerting. It’s a disembodied robotic head with a friendly-looking human face. It’s placed on a table where it sits about eye level to the candidate. All this to ensure the interview proceeds in a way which most closely candidates are accustomed.

Unlike a typical interview, Tengai doesn’t engage in small talk. This ensures all recorded responses are work-related. Each candidate is asked the same questions, in the same order, with the same tone of voice. Tengai standardizes the process to a degree that even the most methodical human recruiters can’t match.

Crucially, Tengai knows absolutely nothing about a candidate’s race, religion, gender, appearance, or other visual/auditory factors that commonly give rise to unconscious bias. Once the interview is complete, human recruiters then receive a transcript of the answers. It’s then up to them to decide whether or not to move that person forward.

By replacing human recruiters with Tengai, TNG and Furhat feel they are creating a fairer hiring process that still retains a ‘human’ touch. But it’s important to keep in mind that robot interviewers bring their own set of limitations and challenges.

Hiring Involves More than Interviews

Research shows unconscious bias often influences whether or not someone advances to the interview stage. Tengai and other robotic interviewers offer zero benefits when it comes to creating fairer resume selection processes. So, unless such robots are accompanied by other bias-tackling measures throughout all other stages of the hiring process, they are an incomplete solution to the problem.

Key Information may Go Unrecorded

Robots like Tengai create an extremely rigid interview process. And while standardization offers some benefits, it isn’t perfect. It prevents the natural ebb and flow of a typical human conversation. For example, a candidate may mention something in passing that grabs an interviewer’s attention. If they feel the information is highly relevant to the role, they can ask the candidate to elaborate or clarify. This helps prevent great candidates slipping through the net due to unintended omissions in their answers.

Candidate Experience And Employer Brand

Even when the rationale for using robots is clearly presented, some candidates are not going to like being interviewed by a robot. It’s easy to see how the process may be perceived as cold and clinical by some candidates. As a result, this may cause significant damage to the employer brand. Others will welcome the change, but introducing robot interviewers will undoubtedly polarise candidate opinion. So it’s important to weigh up the risk/benefit ratio, which will vary widely from business to business.

Not All Technology Is Similar

When selecting any new technology for a hiring process it’s important to consider what it actually does. Some robots are made to standardize the initial interview process to root out bias, while other tools use algorithms to evaluate the candidate’s facial expressions or speech. With the latter example, especially, organizations need to rigorously question the way the AI is making judgments and track if those judgments are leading to a homogeneous talent pool.

D&I may not have a finish line, but that doesn’t mean we want to have the same conversation 50 years from now.

Torin Ellis, host of SiriusXM CareerMix, author of RIP the Resume, and leading diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategist joins SmartRecuiters for the fourth year in a row at Hiring Success 19 – Americas for an expert panel on the economic value of diversity.

Torin started a recruiting firm in 1998 and what he saw in the industry wasn’t always pretty. Up close with transactional Talent Acquisition, he was privy to the dearth of diversity across industries. He found himself asking “why” a lot – Why was there only one black person on the whole North American sales team?… Why were there so few in management?… Why were company leaders talking about a ‘war for talent’, yet failing to consider non-traditional candidates? The list went on. And although in his capacity as a headhunter, he did his best to boost under-represented talent, he wanted to do more.

So, in 2010 he decided it was time to face the issue head on and founded the Torin Ellis Brand, a boutique HR agency  to advise companies on D&I strategies and risk mitigation.

During this time of economic recovery in the years after the 2008 financial downturn, D&I was not on the forefront of the workplace milieu, and when it was the news was dismal – homogeneous workforce and biased hiring processes, but Torin didn’t want to focus on the bad press.

“My thought then, and I follow this principle today, is that I need to get more people involved,” says Torin. “If we keep having punitive conversations about D&I, that aren’t solutions-oriented, then I know white men are going to run in the opposite direction. I know that white women may not participate. I know that black men are going to continue to be frustrated when they get passed over for a job or a promotion. And I know black women will continue to have to work until August to make the same amount of money that their white male counterparts made in by December of the previous year.”

His main goal is to not have the same conversation 50 years from now, and what he preaches are solutions-based D&I programs, that achieve more than a press release. Learn the three tenants of successful strategies, and the next challenge work culture faces.

Give us the outline for a D&I strategy that is more than window dressing?

• Empowerment
• Strategic Exploration
• Tactical Execution

Empowerment: We need people to speak up. D&I programs fail when there is silence. So part of the strategy needs to be grassroots where people leverage their own power to tell their higher-ups ‘D&I programs are something we need’. The other part is management creating avenues for those voices to be heard and the concerns addressed.   

Strategic Exploration: Be willing to sit amongst people that are different from you and explore a variety of strategies. Know that there will be gambles and mistakes. Be genuine with apologies, and don’t be afraid to recalibrate. Most of all, trust that the community will be receptive to genuine efforts.

Tactical Execution: Not everyone can be in the meeting making the decision, so include people at different levels. Talk to the people on the ground, understand their needs, and empower them in the execution of  the program goals. These people can be the evangelists, amplifiers, and action-takers that translate your D&I efforts from paper to practice.

Last year you started your session ‘The Power of Diversity’ by quoting Bernard Coleman the III, global head for D&I at uber saying: “The house burned in front of them but they wanted the data to prove it. That is the audacity and ridiculousness of making the business case: convincing one of the obvious. If the smoke doesn’t alarm you, the fire certainly should.”

Why did you share this and what does it mean?.

That quote arrested my spirit. It made me think, there is absolutely no reason, people like myself, should have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to create a business case for diversity.

For the last 20 years, people have been saying there’s a war for talent. Well, if there’s a war for talent, then why are organizations not embracing – or even seeing – different talent pools? Why are organizations not looking for ambitious and creative ways to nurture non-traditional candidates?

Too many companies are paralyzed in their comfort zone of ‘we are preparing a white paper on why diversity is important’… It’s a thin veil covering a lack of progress.

Watch last year’s session below!

Looking to the future, it’s hard enough to implement D&I programs in a traditional workspace, how will organizations find success in the gig economy?

We have a more disparate workforce than we’ve ever had before. Companies struggled with D&I programs when everyone came to the same place to work. So, how are we going to do it when people are all over the place?… How are we going to make sure that remote workers still feel a sense of culture and inclusion?

The truth is we don’t have definitive answers to ‘what’ will be successful in this, the fourth industrial age. We are beginning to employ the tools from like big data, analytics, AI, and nanotechnology, which is a great start.

What people need to understand is that D&I doesn’t have a finish line, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get somewhere.

Meet the leaders who will make you sit up, lean in, and question everything you know.

Look forward to two days of learning and inspiration, throughout our 50 plus sessions including more than 100 speakers – these are just a few of the leaders joining us for Hiring Success 19 – Americas.  

“We’re bringing together business leaders to shape the future of recruiting,” says SmartRecruiters Founder & CEO, Jerome Ternynck. “Organizations now lean on talent acquisition to provide the competitive edge it takes to win. The Hiring Success conference arms practitioners with the latest in recruitment innovation, strategy, and best practices.”

February 26-27, over 1,000  TA leaders from global brands like LinkedIn, VISA, and Google join SmartRecruiters to define the future of recruiting. Three tracks – innovation, diversity & inclusion, and Hiring Success – allow attendees to customize their own learning adventure.

Meet seven of our fan favorites returning this year to share their stories of growth and perseverance.

Lou Adler

Lou’s life as a recruiter began in 1978 when he walked into a hot wheels manufacturing plant to hire a production manager and said… “Forget the job description, walk me through the plant, tell me everything that’s wrong, and I’ll find someone who can fix it.”

And to this day he lives by the same credo – hire someone who can actuallly do the job. He calls it performance-based-hiring and it’s the foundation for everything that has come since, from founding his own company, The Adler group to authoring two Amazon bestsellers.

Read our full interview with Lou Adler, and learn why this simple philosophy continues to disrupt the TA industry to this day.

Saumya Chopra

Have you ever tried to implement new tech and instead of making everyone’s lives better, the chaos of transition brought your team to a grinding halt? Saumya feels your pain. As People Technology Product Manager for Square, she’s been leading teams through system changes for seven years, successfully!  

Through all these implementations, integrations, and transitions she’s learned one thing: it’s not just about finding the right tech solution but getting everyone else on board.

Read more about Saumya Chopra, and how to make your end user the center of tech adoption.

Bill Boorman

Recruiting’s “man in the hat,” Bill Boorman is the harbinger of new tech and the creator of recruiting’s merriest meetup, #TRU un-conferences. He’s hosted 100 events in 65 countries and five continents over the last 12 months. As he zigzags the map, he’s learning about the latest in grassroots TA – and he’s ready to share!

Learn more about Bill and why he was dressed as Father Christmas the first time we met.

Robert Coombs

Over the last decade, Robert’s career has hit every note in the tune to success. The current COO for The Class by Taryn Toomey, has advised top government officials, held events at the White House, testified before the US Congress, spoken at TEDx, and had initiatives featured in The New York Times. So he thought finding a new job should be easy, he was wrong.

After a frustrating couple of months of being screened by bots, he decided to flip the hiring process on its head by building a bot to apply to jobs for him.

Learn the end result of this little experiment and what it means for TA.

Sandi Lurie

As Sr. Director of Global Recruiting for the digital experiment platform Optimizely with over 25 years of experience, Sandi isn’t afraid of a little trial and error. And she expects the same adventurous spirit from the recruiters she works with.

While she’s always trying new things, one constant is her firm belief in empathy as a recruiter’s most powerful tool, and the proof is in the pudding. Optimizely was voted 4th best place to work in Silicon Valley in 2018.

Understand how Sandi and her team have helped foster an environment of support and why it’s the best thing they could have done to boost candidate experience.

Hung Lee

The creator of recruiting brainfood (the talent acquisition newsletter eagerly awaited by over 9,000 people weekly) is always asking questions. How do I reach the right people? What is my mission? How can I do it better?

If you follow him on social media you’ll see Hung is constantly gathering feedback from his audience and actually incorporating it! Maybe that’s why he has been able to build an audience that’s not only large, it’s active!

Get inside this influencers process, and start engaging your crowd today!

Jo Lockwood

In 2016 Joanne embarked on her personal rebrand, which included selling her IT services company and transitioning to her true gender identity. In the wake of this decision, she discovered the hidden obstacles that many trans candidates face when they search for the right employment opportunity.

In response to her experience as an applicant, Joanne founded SEE Change Happen, a diversity and inclusion practice specializing in supporting Transgender inclusion in businesses and other organizations.

Learn more about the obstacles trans candidates face and how your organization can step up.

Here’s what will define Talent Acquisition (TA) in the coming year, and how your team can win in the 365 days ahead.

2018 was defined by deep, recruiting-AI integrations, including the first AI native to an applicant tracking system (ATS) in the form of SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, and a data security revolution heralded by the general data privacy regulations (GDPR) in Europe, as well as similar legislation around the world.

No story ever ended neatly at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. We will continue to see AI take root, and data security will remain top of mind. Yet, as a new year begins, one can’t help but look back at the last journey around the sun to identify the lessons that will prepare TA for the next 365 days.

To understand better the trends and challenges of 2019, we sat down with CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, Jerome Ternynck, to learn how a new ‘marketing’ outlook shaped by a laser-focus on candidate experience, and a mastery of tech, will get TA into the boardroom this year.

Five Predictions for Talent Acquisition in 2019

3 min 26 sec video

1) Recruitment marketing or bust…

“Source candidates like an outbound marketer. End-to-end recruitment marketing, branding, and candidate relationship management systems (CRM) with consumer-class candidate experience throughout — Recruiters need to leverage the whole gamut by proactively sourcing, building talent pools, and nurturing relationships in order to compete for top talent in today’s candidate-driven market.”

2) Diversity and inclusion are ‘non-negotiables’…

“If you don’t have a strong D&I strategy (there are many ways for it to be simple but effective), you’re losing the long-term talent game.”

3) TA is boardroom-ready…

“We’ve always known that hiring success = business success, now it’s time to show the world. This is how we’re going to do it: Today’s leading TA Suites provide you with all the data and insights you need to drive hiring success and, by extension, business outcomes. A simple hiring success dashboard with net hiring score, velocity, and budget metrics is easy for a boardroom to grasp. It’s no longer about faster and cheaper — it’s all about the value created! We tried it, our customers adopted, and it works.”

4) Think ‘global’, act ‘local’…

“With more and more companies evolving towards distributed workforce models, often spanning across 3-5 offices/countries, your TA strategy needs to be global, yet your tools and processes need to be local. Think detailed configurability within an overarching collaborative platform as the staple ingredients for a successful recruiting strategy.”

5) Digital savvy is the ultimate differentiator…

“Tech, tech, and more tech. From AI and blockchain to chatbots and scheduling, it’s all happening online. These digital solutions have made it possible for recruiting to deliver results to the boardroom. Growth strategy will increasingly depend on tech stacks, and the partnership between vendors and customers will be key to driving business growth.

Necessity breeds invention, and that’s what we’ve seen with TA over the last decade. As the talent economy becomes more competitive, tech rises to the challenge to support recruiters and bring hiring to the next level.”

Recruiters and TA professionals gathered for the second day of SRD18 to share insights, network, and beef up their recruiting toolboxes—here’s what we walked away with.

“What is your power word?” asked Anna Ott and Robindro Ullah as they welcomed audiences to the main stage of the Ellington Hotel in Berlin for the final day of Social Recruiting Days 2018. “Transparency”, “Surfacing”, and “Algorithm” flitted across the screen as the two conference emcees discussed how these terms are quickly becoming part of the modern recruiting lexicon.

More than a simple etymological exercise, exploring the ideologies behind these words is important when considering the future of candidate experience, workflow, and technology in the TA industry. After all, with issues like candidate experience and artificial intelligence moving to the forefront of conversations surrounding new trends in recruiting, it’s no wonder why “Transparency” and “Algorithm” made the buzzword short list.

Discussions about what’s next in recruiting were the major focus of the day’s schedule, which featured interactive sessions that armed recruiters with new tools to do their jobs better, explored topics of diversity and inclusion, and took a deep dive into the challenges of being human in a digital industry. For those who were unable to attend the conference, here are five of our biggest takeaways from Social Recruiting Days 2018.

1. A candidate’s resume or CV does not indicate their performance in the three major criteria of top performers.

Traditionally, resumes and CVs have been a recruiter’s bread and butter, but according to Bas van de Haterd, truly evaluating a candidate goes well beyond what’s on paper. In his session, “Beyond the CV”, Bas shared his insights after experimenting with a number of industry-grade digital assessment tools to see how data reveals a candidate’s job compatibility.

According to Bas, ambition, talent, and character, are three key areas that distinguish great candidates from good ones, and many of them can be quantified with assessment tools. “It’s about testing the candidate’s genetic and psychometric abilities,” said Bas, through game-based tests like those from BrainsFirst, which accurately measure a candidates’ cognitive abilities, their eye for detail, problem-solving abilities, or communications styles—skills that would not be found on a typical CV.

2. Having an LGBT+ friendly culture is in the top 3 criteria of choosing where to work.

In fact, in the US and DACH regions, having an inclusive workplace culture was ranked number one priority for LGBT+ employees, more than salary level and geographical location. This reporting came from Stuart Cameron, founder of Uhlala, who survey over 4000 LGBT+ professionals worldwide for his presentation about one of the largest underserved talent communities in the world.

According to Cameron, the number of self-identifying LGBT+ people worldwide is roughly 340 million people, but only 50 percent of the population feels comfortable enough to be open at work. Moreover, 80 percent would go back in the closet if they changed employers. In the UK, 33 percent of LGBT+ employees feel that being out would be a career risk.

Cameron highlights companies that are working to build more inclusive work cultures for their LGBT+ employees, applauding PayPal, McKinsey, Adidas, Allianz, Apple, Facebook, and Google for their efforts, but recognizes that we still have a long way to go to make this community feel safe, celebrated, and included at work.

3. The more digital we become, the more human we must be

“Feel first, think second”, says Dave Hazelhurst, partner and director of client services at Ph. Creative, a global marketing an advertising agency. “Think about the actions and behaviors you want to drive”, he continues, addressing the recruiters in the audience. To Hazelhurst, understanding your customers and clients—or in this case, candidates—is how you not only build a killer employer brand, but how you attract the best talent.

Hazelhurst looked at the pain vs. pleasure dynamic, claiming that we are far more motivated by pain than we are pleasure, so recruiters should be thinking about how to ease a candidate’s fears, doubts, and worries first. From there, we can consider how to make the candidate experience more enjoyable—”effortless” according to Hazelhurst.

4. If you want to continually hire the wrong people, stick to traditional recruiting practices

Dr. Uwe Kanning, professor of Business Psychology at Osnabrück University, brought equal parts knowledge and laughter to the main stage with his tongue-in-cheek session about the ways that companies are making the wrong recruiting and hiring decisions. Dr. Kanning claims that, despite hundreds of HR-related publications are distributed each year, most hiring teams still “go with their gut” rather than look at what the data says.

Dr. Kanning argues that most interviews follow a similar pattern that rarely includes job-specific evaluation criteria. As a result of our human bias, we base our decisions on criteria that has nothing to do with the actual job requirements—factors like attractiveness, weight, or ethnicity. Traditional “assessment systems” are built on intuitive decision making, and the longer we rely on the old way of recruiting, the more companies will be stuck with the wrong candidates.

5. We may soon get rid of CVs, resumes, and cover letters—and both candidates and recruiters will be better off for it.

MoBerries, Talents Connect, and Talentcube took over the main stage to discuss how their services are redefining the status quo of talent acquisition. From changing how recruiters source candidates for IT and STEM positions, to swapping the traditional CV and cover letters for video interviews, the future of recruiting looks to be going all digital, mobile-optimized, and no longer reliant on candidate-provided documentation.

Video interviewing remains a top tech choice for companies this year, with two-thirds of the World’s Most Attractive Employers (WMAEs) already using the technology according to Universum’s 2018 Employer Branding Now report.

These changes, they argue, represent what candidates want from their job-search experience, make it easier and more convenient for them to apply, and limits the probability of candidate misinformation or misrepresentation. It’s clear that recruiting is moving towards a more candidate-centric model, and these slick startups see a chance to make the process faster, better, and more technology enabled for both candidates and recruiters.