It’s the hottest HR topic not directly related to tech. But to achieve true diversity and inclusion at work we must overcome pesky traits like unconscious bias, and to assure that reality, there is Natalie Mellin.

Natalie Mellin has gained experience from innovative tech companies like Spotify and King, and has played a central role in creating workplace awareness around diversity and inclusion over the last decade. She is one of the pioneers who helped reshape the conversation, and behavioral science inspires everything she does. With cross-functional research, she creates practical tools like process nudges and strategies to help both individuals and organizations make an impact.

With her vast experience from working both in-house and as well as consultancy, she is known as an influencer, dynamic speaker and we are honored to welcome her to Hiring Success 18 Europe in Berlin, September 19-21.

What does hiring success mean to you?

We need to change our hiring structures and processes to make better hires, which in the end, creates better and more sustainable business success. For me, this means identifying where you have the most bias in your process, redesign the steps to mitigate this, and cultivate diversity and inclusion.

How have attitudes towards diversity and inclusion changed over the last while?

Despite years of diversity training and anti-discrimination policies, one could argue we’ve not come very far. In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that the gender gap is widening in their 2017 report. McKinsey’s also reports in their 2017 Women in the Workplace study, that women represent only 18 percent of all c-suite roles. That number compares to 12 percent for men of color and only 3 percent for women of color. This is despite the fact that McKinsey’s 2018 report, ‘Delivering through Diversity’ reinforced the link between diversity and positive company financial performance.

Our brain gets hit by 11 million signals at any given moment in time. But we can only consciously process 40 of those. This means a tremendous amount of signals get processed using prior knowledge and patterns. This is unconscious bias. We need to focus on nudging our unconscious minds to mitigate more of the racist, sexist, and such behavior, and I believe we can do that through behavioral economics. Another way of saying it, my view has changed in the terms that I no longer believe we can train away our bias. We need to design it away.

What do you tell companies the biggest advantage of diversion and inclusivity are?

Besides the fact that it’s the right thing to do, it makes business sense.

1. Driving business success and profits – a McKinsey report on public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 33 percent more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21 percent more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
2. Drive innovation – Leaders who give diverse voices equal airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to unleash value-driving insights, and employees in a ‘speak up’ culture are 3.5 times as likely to contribute their full innovative potential. HBR
3. Understanding our consumers and essentially making us smarter – In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: non-homogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different than you challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking, which sharpens performance.

What kind of resistance do you get from organizations, and what do you do to get on board?

Nowadays it’s mostly about ‘how’. Something I completely understand, but we have years and years of research showing that diversity is correlated with both profitability and added value. Even so, for some companies or some executives, even the most compelling data seems to require additional rounds of convincing. Probably shouldn’t surprise me either. after all, research has proven facts and data don’t actually change people’s minds. But I found this quote the other day and thought it was quite good.

‘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.’ – Bernard Coleman III

What are behavioral economics?

I will again borrow the words of a much wiser person; “…the best way to think about behavioral economics is in contrast to standard economics. In standard economics, we think — we assume — that people are perfectly rational, which means that they always behave in the best way for them. They can compute everything, they can calculate everything and they can make, always, consistently, the right decisions. In contrast, behavioral economics doesn’t assume much about people. Instead of starting from the idea that people are perfectly rational, we say we just don’t know, but let’s check it out. So, what we do is we put people in different situations to check how they actually make decisions. And what we find in those experiments is that people often don’t behave as you would expect from a perfectly rational perspective. So, in essence, it’s an empirical and non-idealistic way to start looking at human behavior. And because we find that people behave differently than expected, often irrationally, it also leads often to different conclusions about how companies should be created, what the government should do, and, of course, what individuals should be doing.”  – Dan Ariely

Was there a eureka moment that made you want to address diversity and inclusion full-time? How did that happen?

Well, my mom tells me that I was questioning gender equality as a young kid. Then I took gender studies at university. This was an eye-opener in many ways. I found out about intersectionality, that we are more than one thing and that the power structure today will hand me a completely different experience as a white, middle-class woman compared to a woman of color from a lower socio-economic background. After being inspired by behavioral economics, I got angrier that we weren’t making enough progress in the space of diversity & inclusion in companies. And I thought everyone was tackling it wrong. I couldn’t understand why no one was using cross-functional research to make progress faster.  So I started to get involved. First, it was a project, then it was 10-20 percent of my job, until it took over all of the time I spent at work.

What is one thing even well-intentioned organizations get wrong about diversity and inclusion?

Many companies believe it’s too hard a problem to solve, or they focus too much on how to ‘speak’ to our conscious minds when trying to create change. I hope that more companies will learn from behavioral economics and embed D&I philosophy into the business strategy. It works best when a CEO truly thinks about D&I as a strategy for business success.

What about starting your own firm, how did that come about, and what can you do differently on your own that you could have with your previous employers?

It grew primarily organically. I started getting requests a few years ago, but sadly didn’t always have the ability to help while working in-house full time. This spring I decided that I needed a new challenge, and in the near future, I want to develop a free tool to help companies who may not have the funds to drive change. It’s a very exciting time. I get requests right and left. This is key as we will never succeed here as one, we need to create community and drive change on a bigger scale. That’s what I hope to do with my company.

Tech advancement is not slowing down, and as recruiters to struggle to find the best permutations for their HR needs, a bit of guidance of the latest trend is in order.

Speaking in jargonese, workforce analytics blend software and methodology that apply statistical models to worker-related data, allowing organizations to optimize their Human Resource Management. Sometimes referred to as descriptive analytics, this is helpful to understand, at an aggregate level, what is going on in your organization.

Tracking employee and candidate data to analyze in order to make better recruiting decisions, is a tried and tested strategy. What’s interesting now is the trend toward predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Recruiters are embracing rapid technological growth, not just because ATS systems continue to improve, but because the data they provide is changing their jobs for the better. Most notably, with a proper ATS in place, there’s a lot more recruiting and a lot less administration.

Workforce analytics gather data from enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and point of sale (POS) systems. The blending of data from these seemingly disparate sources makes for a more robust way to predict outcomes, and there are several software options to integrate with your current HR programs. Review and recommendation sites can help you narrow down your CRM, POS, or ERP software choices to those that connect the best.

Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics:

As we uncover predictive and prescriptive analytics, let’s take a look at how they’re different. When using predictive analytics, we’re beginning to move away from the traditional descriptive methodology, and beginning to ask, “what could happen”? It’s a use of statistical models and techniques that combine historical data pulled from a company’s tech stacks to forecast the future.

For example, when asking questions like “Which workers are most likely to leave”, or “which internal associates or external candidates are the best job fit”, you can use the data at hand to assist in knowing where your resources are best used.

Now, as we talk about prescriptive analytics, we’re taking things a step forward. Prescriptive analytics uses optimization and simulation algorithms to advise on possible outcomes, and answers the question of “What should we do”? Attempting to quantify the effect of a decision before it’s made, it’s not only an attempt to predict what will happen, but why it’ll happen.

So how does this new trend in workforce analytics affect recruiters?

One of the most notable ways recruiters use data is in succession planning, as well as internal recruiting. In the past, recruiters were limited to the short list of usual suspects based on gut feeling, two annual reviews, and senior management recommendations. Now, succession planning can be done using real-time data. What’s more is that the candidate pool is deeper, going beyond the top five people being nominated in secret to looking at another level of the organization based upon transparent, employee-driven career goals and performance metrics.

Another area where recruiters are using workforce analytics is in trying to understand what an ideal candidate profile should look like. Based on data gathered from the top performers in each role, it’s become simpler to identify the types of candidates who will also thrive in those positions. From there, recruiters will know from which pools to source, such as within specific geographic regions, professional organizations, or schools.

As the use of big data is disrupting just about every industry, consider how workforce analytics can change your recruiting strategy, as you consider how the face of recruiting is moving from what’s worked in the past to a predictive and prescriptive analysis and decision-making process giving you the best picture of where you’re going.

Data is being used to ever better understand company culture and employee profiles to find best-fit candidates for the enterprise overall. When it comes to assessing and analyzing culture fit, it’s essential we realize that regardless of which boxes you’ve checked – diversity, ability to work specific hours – at the end of the day, if people don’t feel included and accepted, you’ll never keep them.

Your competitors are looking to make the same great hires you are, so how do you make sure you have the upper hand in snagging candidates? The answer, increasingly, is Artificial Intelligence.

“Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function. It’s become mission-critical, but, at the same time, increasingly expensive.”

Speaking in a webinar detailing how SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, the industry’s first native AI-powered recruiting tool, Mr. Lavi stressed five ways he sees AI technology providing the backbone for recruiting in the future.

Task Automation: AI will take over high-touch activities like scheduling interviews and screening resumes, allowing recruiters to focus on high-value, strategic activities.

Automated Sourcing: AI will source new candidates online and re-discover talent in organizations’ own talent pools, helping recruiters leverage their own networks more efficiently.

Smart Advertising: Job advertising is a highly manual, unscalable process. AI enables advertisers to automate job advertising, making it performance-based and targeted. Through technology, your jobs will be advertised on the right job boards to the right candidates – at the right price.

Improving Diversity: Diverse teams perform better, no doubt about it. AI helps identify potentially biased language that would dissuade women or people from minorities to apply. Automated screening and scoring evaluates candidates only based on their skills, eliminating implicit bias from the hiring process.

Candidate Relationship Management: Candidates behave much more like consumers now – they value convenience. By outsourcing 1:many conversations to AI (through chatbots, for example), recruiters can focus on 1:1 conversations and drive better talent engagement and hiring success.

For this all to work seamlessly, cobbling a batch of BoBs onto a legacy ATS just won’t do. Real performance needs native level integration, and SmartAssistant is setting the standard for everything that will follow.

Click here for the full lowdown on what SmartAssistant can do for you.

Confused, frustrated, mislead. If candidates are leaving an interview with these emotions, you’re doing something wrong.

When a candidate walks out of an interview feeling they were more prepared than the hiring manager, that’s a bad thing, and it usually means that the organization doesn’t understand structured hiring 101:

• Define the Job
• Create Candidate Scorecard
• Market the Opening
• Plan the Interviews
• Select Candidate
• Make an Offer

We aren’t solving for the square root of negative one here, these simple steps are fundamental to finding great talent, on time and on budget. The consequences of leaving these basics unheeded are wasted resources, loss of talent, and ultimately, negative employer brand.

Here’s what to tell your team:

“Structured hiring” is a type of selection process that seeks to mitigate bias, subjective error, and confusion through codifying the expectations of the team for each other and the candidates. This ensures alignment between the organization’s business objectives, strategic direction, and culture. In other words, everyone will be on the same page.

…And why is it so important?

The bottom line. In a recent survey, STEM careers found that superior performers in an organization have 40 to 100 percent more economic impact on company performance than average employees. Therefore, an organization’s success can hinge on the degree of the talent within it, which makes your ability to find that talent all the more important.

Steps to Structured Hiring Explained

1. Define the Job – Conduct a job analysis by investigating the role’s tasks, duties, and responsibilities. Talk to the people who will work closely with this future team member and people who have done this job before!
2. Create Candidate Scorecard – Develop selection criteria in a scorecard-style to use during interviews, based on the information obtained within the job analysis. Then choose a method of assessing each criterion during the recruitment and selection process. It is important that these items be quantified to effectively measure each candidates level within each requirement.
3. Market the Opening – Plan the advertising and marketing strategy to broadcast the open position on job boards, social media, trade publications, or you may bring in an outside firm for professional advice that can provide individualized support and professional insight.
4. Plan Interviews –  Structure your time with candidates with questions and exercises that are the same for each. Weight the activities and determine benchmark responses in order to evaluate everyone fairly. 
5. Select Candidate – Form a committee of stakeholders to select the best candidate for the role based on all previously ascertained information and score each accordingly. Be cognizant of the employment laws of your region and ensure selection decision is not based on any form of bias or discrimination. This is where the weighted selection criteria scorecard comes in very handy.
6. Offer – Extend your offer to candidate verbally and then confirm in writing.

Pro tip: Try just implementing just two steps at first. Simply defining the job and structuring the interview can boost candidate experience and decrease bias enormously!

Following his Hire18 breakout talk, “Innovation: Unbiased Hiring”, this firefighter turned hiring pro expands on the issue of recruiting bias, from his niche and unique vantage point.

When you think about how certain careers are or aren’t like others, recruiting management and firefighting are definitely two that don’t lend themselves to cross-over circles in the Venn diagram of the mind.

But for Scott Johnsen, former firefighter and current and design manager at UserTesting, these two roles aren’t as diametric as you’d think. In fact, says Scott, “both share the same traits needed for developing great teams; conversely, they also share the same traits when teams perform dysfunctionally.”

To assure that teams function optimally, Scott believes in hiring for personality over skill, and that our own biases, even in the form of that good old “gut feeling”, might not be as reliable as we think.

Head over to Medium to get the full story on Scott’s unique perspectives and how to expertly deploy his skills in your own hiring practices.

Companies can now address diversity and inclusion challenges using AI. Joonko, named for Junko Tabe the first woman to summit Mt Everest, is a platform that acts in real-time to identify and solve workplace bias as it happens.

The Joonko story began in 2016 when CEO and founder Ilit Raz decided, after 13 years in tech, it was time to change the way people work – especially when it came to addressing bias.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Register here!  Your vote determines which six are flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders and puts them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

As a woman in tech, Ilit Raz is all too familiar with the unconscious, and conscious, bias that comes along with being part of an underrepresented group in a professional setting so she dedicated herself to putting an end to those unacceptable attitudes.

Give us the elevator pitch for your company.

We’re solving diversity and inclusion challenges using artificial intelligence while delivering measurable results that can move the needle for our customers.

Joonko is a real-time diversity and inclusion coach for companies, which can identify unconscious (or conscious) bias events as they happen and help your employees and managers to overcome them immediately.

Any thoughts on 2017 as a landmark year for awareness surrounding sexual harassment?

Campaigns like #metoo and #timesup have revealed the prevalence of sexual harassment in almost every industry including tech. There is an undeniable need for comprehensive solutions, like Joonko, to help HR/Talent leaders check and eliminate these biases and harassment – unconscious or conscious.

What lead you to create an inclusion and diversity tool?

I started in tech at the age of 18 and the bias I experienced was extremely isolating. I truly thought I was the only one who felt excluded, and it was extremely frustrating. Of course, through the years I found that these negative experiences were a problem in most workplaces and that’s when I decided I needed to do something about them. I didn’t want anyone else to experience what I went through.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

We tackle the ‘pipeline problem’ when it comes to diversity and inclusion hiring. The ‘pipeline problem’ is the idea that a company can’t achieve diversity goals because there aren’t enough qualified candidates applying outside of their usual demographic. On average we are able to improve candidate representation by at least 12-24 percent in the first 90 days, which shows bias is usually the problem not a lack of candidates.

What’s the role of technology in hiring?

Rather than fearing a future where technology replaces you, learn how to leverage your tools to become a better recruiter. Tech speeds us up, measures our work, and helps us see patterns – just those three things can amplify your recruiting 10 fold.  

Webinar Preview: Interrogate your hiring process

A software expert gives us a preview of the upcoming webinar ‘The Impact of Recruiting Technologies: Now and in the Future’ with the most effective tools for identifying and combatting negative bias.

An engineer by trade, Alistair Shepherd studies systems until he understands them enough to build them better. The human system interests him most, which is why five years and seven months ago he started his own company, to create software that optimizes team building and collaboration.

London-based Saberr is a lean crew of HR experts helping over 1,000 companies in 49 countries to hire and manage teams. As the founder, Alistair laughs easily and is always asking himself questions: Where are my weaknesses? Where are my strengths? Am I being authentic?

His favorite word seems to be “interrogate”, but not in a two-way mirror police station sort of a way. He uses it more reflectively: interrogating systems of hiring, interrogating methods of collaboration, and interrogating himself.

We get a chance to share in what he’s learned through all this interrogating like bias can be good, or that a high-status university doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate’s right for the job.

Bias and recruiting, what’s the first thing we need to know?

Hiring is a process of bias towards skill and experience. We hire a candidate based on their probability of success. We determine this probability based on a checklist. You know what you’re looking for, whether it’s a list of skills or a list of qualities, you have certain things you think are important for whatever position. Where we run into trouble is when we include things in the list that aren’t relevant to a person’s probability of success. That’s negative bias, and the scary part is, most people don’t even realize when they do it.

If negative bias is often perpetrated unconsciously, how do we check ourselves?

When data is a central part of your recruiting process you can make transparent and understandable measurements of a candidate’s qualities. This becomes especially important when considering cultural fit,  an area where it’s really easy for bias to sneak in. When there are metrics about a candidate’s values or work style it becomes harder to spin a negatively bias decision to yourself or others.

One phrase I hear a lot from recruiters is that “they just know” who will work for a certain role, and that can be true, but I would encourage that person to put it to paper. Make a list of those things they “just know” and see if that list really holds true to how they judge candidates. Step outside yourself. It’s the best place to start.

Can you really use metrics to assess cultural fit?

Yes! You absolutely can. The problem is most people don’t know how. I’m going to go in-depth on this subject during the webinar next week so suffice to say for now that it both can be measured and codified and it should be measured and codified.

Tell us about building your team from scratch at Saberr.

As the founder, I ended up hiring everyone, including the CEO. What I had to do was really interrogate myself on, well, myself. What supplement did I need? What qualities would compliment me? It was a giant process of figuring out where I’m lacking.

Who was your most memorable hire?

Definitely Tom Marsdon, our CEO. Here I am interviewing someone who’s 15 years older than me with such a wealth of experience.The importance of this hire really can’t be overstated because I would be relinquishing so much responsibility to him. It’s daunting to give away so much control of the enterprise you created.

How do you get over the fear of letting go?

Sometimes you walk into a meeting with a particular idea of how something needs to be done. The idea of using another method is scary because what you want to accomplish is extremely specific but once you realize that you and your team are on the same page as far as goals, the differences in approach become interesting instead threatening.

What did you do wrong in hiring?

My weakness is to oversell things. I was in pitch mode, just talking up my company to whoever would listen. I’ve learned to let our work speak for itself. It’s great to be enthusiastic, but tempering that excitement in order to give an authentic view of the company is important.

Are CVs still relevant?

CV’s are one useful data point amongst many to evaluate when hiring someone. They are helpful for understanding the depth and breadth of experience. What they do not tell us is the quality of a person’s skills. And what they can do is distract an interviewer with irrelevant information like hobbies, university, or grades which aren’t usually indicative of future performance.  

What’s a good indicator that someone will be a successful hire?

For me, shared work values are the best indicator towards positive work performance. Find out what motivates them and see if that fits in with your team.

I like to ask people to describe an ideal work environment. I push to get specifics. If they simply say collaborative it’s not good enough. I need to know if the way they work will be what they get out of the job. I don’t want to lead someone into a job where I know they won’t be happy.

What do you want people to take from your webinar next week?

The point about using cultural fit as a data point that can be measured is extremely important. When you put in the work to codify your culture and values than you can interrogate it and questions whether it is good or bad. It’s a test and that’s good.

I also am a champion of incremental change. Most teams approach Saberr with ‘let’s turn this bus around’ mentality. Rarely does someone think ‘ everything is perfect we just need to do more of the same.’

Taking one team at your company, identifying what is right and building on those positives can make all the difference.

Tune in November 29th at 3 pm GMT for more thoughts from Alistair as well as other experts.