AI within HR

Research has time and time again shown that the best way to asses a candidate is through multiple assessment methods. A combination of different forms of assessment methods with will give you the highest probability of hiring the right candidate. Some forms of assessment methods are quite straight forward, such as structured interviews, behavioural interviews, and personality assessments, but there are others which are a bit harder to understand.

One that consistently shows up in research as being one of the best predicators of whether or not somebody fits the job is a knowledge exam or ability test or "work sample". A work sample is quite simply an example of your skills in a work-related environment. In this blog, we will dig in a bit deeper in work samples, their advantages and disadvantages.

Two types of work samples

In general, there are two types of work samples. The first type focusses on the developmental potential of candidates and in how far they are fit to learn the job at hand. This type of test is often part of the recruitment process for a traineeship or apprenticeship, after which the hired candidate first goes through a trial period where he/she learns the job at hand. Here you can think of examples such as military fitness tests, where potential cadets get tested for their physical and mental condition, or even an auditioning for a role within the music or theatre industry. In both cases potential candidates are not being tested for their current experience or skill but are mostly assessed for their potential to develop.

The second type is a more general work sample and are focussed on testing the prior experience and skillset of the candidate for the job at hand. These are more common and widespread throughout companies. Examples include, a coding work sample for a software engineering job, a use case regarding market expansion for a business development role, a logical puzzle for an analyst position, the list of different roles and work samples can go on and on.

Although the distinction is interesting, it is often so that the two categories are intertwined in the same process: both the present skillset and prior experience as well as the development potential are addressed.

Advantages

Assessing Skills

The first and foremost advantage of work samples is that the result gives an indication on how well a candidate would perform at the job. This is one of the most crucial assessments within a recruitment process. It has been proven that this work samples are crucial to assess whether a candidate possesses the right skills or the ability to train for the right skills. According to Robertson and Downs (1989), and Roth, Bobko and McFarland (2005), work samples increase the accuracy by which recruitment processes can predict whether somebody is fit for the job or fit for learning the job. This alone should be enough of an argument to start using work samples, but there are more arguments which make the case for work samples.

Validation

The second argument for work samples is that it provides validation within the recruitment process. This is not only true for the company, that, of course, needs the validation whether a candidate is truly a good fit for the role, but also for the candidates themselves to get a better understanding of the role, responsibilities, tasks, and their own fit for the role. The work sample exemplifies the competence of the candidate for the company while it also clarifies some aspects of the role for the candidate.

Overcoming Bias

The third advantage of work samples is that the results can be assessed by other members of the team, overcoming subjective opinions or individual biases of the interviewers. The work sample can give an objective answer to one of the most important questions of whether the candidate has the necessary skills to work within the company. Read more about the six most common recruitment biases here.

Contributing to CSR and Inclusion

Corporate Social Responsibility is a quite encompassing field, but basically boils down to that companies should behave socially responsible with regards to people, society, and our environment. Recruitment is also a part of CSR and work samples can contribute to the sense that they are not biased towards ethnicity or gender. Therefore, work samples should be utilized by companies that aim to be an equal opportunity employer as these are a step closer to unbiased recruitment.

Quantifying Results

In recruitment it is difficult to measure how well one candidate would fit versus another. Quantifiable results therefore make it easier to choose with whom to proceed, but also to whom to decline. Quantifiable results allow for informed decisions rather than just trusting your instincts and basing your judgement on individual interviews. According to Gilliland (1995), applicants that receive work samples perceive them as a very fair part of the recruitment process. Therefore, feedback based upon work samples is also perceived as such.

Measuring Recruitment Process

The advantage of quantifiable results is also that it allows for measuring the performance of the different stages of your recruitment process. Again, these results are not based upon the individual impressions of the interviewers, and the results are therefore quite reliable. The results of the measurement can give an indication about the required standards for the role, if you are attracting the right candidates, and about how well your interviewers are filtering out candidates who are not fit for the role. For example, if most candidates easily pass the interviews, but seem to keep dropping off at the work sample, then this might say something about the required standards of the role which perhaps require adjustment or the quality of your interviewers who perhaps must be more attentive.

High Return On Investment

This argument is more applicable to more specific functions which require more specific skills than less specific functions requiring fewer specific skills. The idea is that, although it takes time, money and effort to develop these work samples, it produces clear data by which decisions can be made, saving more time, money and effort on multiple interviews, meetings and other methods which aim to achieve the same results. It is also important to highlight that work samples save you from hiring the wrong candidates, which could end up being the costliest mistake that you can make, in terms of time, money and effort.

Now let’s turn to the disadvantages of work samples, most of which I have briefly highlighted above.

Disadvantages

Time & Effort

The first disadvantage is quite obvious in that it takes time and effort into developing a proper work sample. Time and effort are often not a resource of abundance within a company, especially not when a new position opens up. Most departments would like to see their new employee up and running as soon as possible. Therefore, time and effort should both be minimal, and work sample require both time and effort to create and tailor according to your recruitment profile.

Cost

The argument that often follows behind time and effort is the argument of cost. This is not surprising as both time and effort cost money, in one way or another. Keeping costs low to create operational value should be one of the main objectives of a financial sustainable company. Still, here I would argue it is a matter of perspective. Hiring an employee is an investment. The better you have assessed who the right candidate is, the more sustainable your relationship will be with your future employee. So, whether we are talking time, effort, or money, we would argue that the benefits outweigh the costs, and, we, as Peops Relations, can make them cost-effective.

In conclusion

Work samples have grown out to be a necessary part of every recruitment process. Work samples give an indication on how skilled candidates are, validate the candidate’s competences as well as the candidate’s perception of the role, overcome biases, lead to more inclusive hiring, and have a high return on investment. There is really no good reason not to include work samples in your hiring process, they are vital for a successful process. The only reasons to not include work samples are time, effort and cost, however, we would argue that it is more expensive, and a waste of time and effort, to search aimlessly without any result, or even worse: to hire the wrong candidate. Read more about considerations of work samples here or get in touch with us if you need help setting up your own work samples and overcoming excessive expenses.  

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Culture, values, hiring the right people, motivating your employees, developing your employees, all these areas are hard to define and address within a company. To start of these processes it can be helpful to look how other companies have done it. So why not learn directly from the best? In this blog we will take a closer look at 7 essential HR lessons from Google set out in Laszlo Block’s book Work Rules! We will look at their successes and, maybe even more importantly, their failures. We will set apart these lessons and show you how they can help you into developing the right HR processes.

Lesson number 1: Vision, mission, transparency and voice are key to culture.

We keep repeating it and Laszlo confirms it, if you want to build a strong company culture, you need to start at the beginning. You need a clear vision, mission and connected values which describe why your company even exists. These need to be easy to identify with, ambitious and meaningful. The second aspect of their strong culture is their transparency and voice. Laszlo describes a corporate culture where everybody has access to everything in their internal systems from day one. Their CEO gives weekly Q&A sessions about what is going in in the company and they are even regularly running programs where employees can express complaints about internal policies, regulations and way of doing business (like the one in 2009 called ‘Bureaucracy Busters’).

Main takeaway: if you want to turn your departments with employees into teams with colleagues then you need a clear vision and mission, transparency and to let their voices be heard.

Lesson number 2: Hiring the best takes time, resources, (team) effort and high standards.

Within the recruitment department they’ve gone through many phases of what they perceived as the best way of hiring. First, they only admitted the candidates with the best qualifications, then they focussed more on mediocre candidates with better potential for development, in the end they are focussing now on a healthy mixture of both. Above all, they keep their standards high, which is key to the standards of their employees. Only 0,25% of all applicants gets the job. Laszlo compares that with the prestigious university of Harvard, which admits around 6,1% of all its applicants. Just so you understand how few candidates actually get the job. What’s more is that Google interviews new candidates in teams of four. These teams often consist of colleagues, managers, subordinates and one “cross functional interviewer” from an entire different department. He or she should ensure that the candidate is not solely being hired out of mere desperation.

Main takeaway: if you want to have the best teams, never lower your standard to speed up a hiring process. Hiring takes time, effort, resources and high standards. Start to improve your hiring process tomorrow by setting up hiring teams for function instead of ‘just a hiring manager and a recruiter’.

Lesson number 3: Promote autonomy and initiative by encouraging data usage and discouraging politics.

Google has a very flat internal hierarchical structure, in fact there are roughly four levels of hierarchy across all Google employees. Laszlo describes an internal culture where data trumps politics and promotion can only be made if the data shows that you are worthy of the promotion. So, for instance, you want more autonomy or you would like a promotion up the hierarchical ladder, then the data of your past performance must justify this. You must have shown in your work experience that you have a recorded history of making good decisions or leading teams/projects. Only then are you entitled to move up, the internal politics play less of a role. This also creates understanding amongst the rest of the employees why somebody is entitled to a better (paid) position within the company.

Main takeaway: hierarchical decisions need to made based upon transparent data. This has to be done in order to make the right decision, but also to gain support and understanding for the decision being made.

Lesson number 4: Study the top to improve the bottom.

Many companies look at their employees through a performance ranking system called the Bell Curve method (you can read more on that here). They use this system to decide who gets a bonus and who should be let go. Google uses this method too, but uses its results differently. They study their top performers and see what makes their performance so great. They use these results to create similar environments for their bottom performers in order to increase their performance. Project Oxygen showed that an exceptional manager is essential for a top performer. Engineers under an exceptional manager performed 5 to 18 times better than their peers. Google often evaluates the bottom 5% and offers them support to increase their performance.

Main takeaway: try and understand what makes your top performers so good and try and create similar environments for your bottom performers to improve them. Exceptional managers create top performers.

Lesson number 5: Stop looking for external teachers, use your own internal teachers.

Whenever companies feel the need to develop their employees, they often refer to external training agencies. They provide lengthy training sessions and workshops in all forms and ways. Even though this is a billion-dollar industry, the effects are often underwhelming. Laszlo notes that this is often due to ill design, lack of specific information, incorrect teachers or even that the trainings are not analysed for their effectiveness. Within Google they therefore mostly stopped with external development agencies, but are now looking inwards for qualified teachers. That means that if they need to increase sales, or address bugs faster, or find better candidates, they will look for their best sales person, bug squasher or recruiter to teach the rest of the department their tips and tricks. This reduces the training costs and brings their employees closer together in a common goal.

Main takeaway: if you want to develop your employees, look for internal teachers first before reaching out to external teachers.

Lesson number 6: Pay unequal based upon performance, award victories with experiences and encourage failures.

In a world where there are still big discrepancies in pay between gender and race, Google still chooses to pay different people in a similar position different salaries. So how do they justify this? Simple, their solution is to pay fair. If an employee out-performs their colleague by an extra 20%, then this employee will be often entitled to more benefits (in terms of stock options, bonusses and salaries). Although this in and of its own sounds fair, it does not mean that Google handles each situation as well as it ought to, which leads to the occasional salary scandal. Google often tries to increase happiness and performance as well, one of the ways of doing so is to hand out bonusses to well-performing employees. However, an internal survey showed that the employees did not necessarily became happier because if it. To address this Google started to award well-performing teams with experiences instead of individuals with money. This created a stronger sense of team and belonging amongst employees.

Finally, Google also tries to encourage all calculated risks. Google Wave in 2009 failed, but Google rewarded the team working on it anyway. Why? Because Google wants to encourage calculated risks and innovation. Even if the innovation might not turn out to be the next award-winning functionality this time, it could be just that the next time, so you need to keep your team motivated towards innovation.

Main takeaway(s): pay unequally based upon performance supported by data. Celebrate team performance instead of individual performance with experiences. Encourage calculated risks and innovation, even if the possibility exists that it could fail.

Lesson number 7: Face cultural problems, altering behaviour and the power of nudging.

Google has a company culture of transparency, as discussed under lesson number one, and even if that sounds great and has a lot of benefits, it can also backfire. One of the ways it backfires is that Google suffers one significant leak almost every year. When that happens Google announces in the entire company what has been leaked and what has happened to the employee that has caused the leak. Even though this might sounds devastating, Laszlo argues that the benefits of transparency outweigh these disadvantages. The same can be said for when Google tried to decrease some perks and benefits which was met by entitled behaviour such as scolding of and throwing food at cafeteria staff. Google published the entitled behaviour via surveys which led to staff-wide embarrassment and a drop in the level of entitlement. Google also had to deal with the fact that they wanted to change certain behaviours, such as keeping doors open for strangers, eating unhealthy food on lunchbreaks and leaving unlocked computers unattended. From their experiments it shows that restrictions and information about a better choice do not work. It is often met with anger and frustration. Their solution is to keep the freedom of choice, but nudge towards the right behaviour. For example, keep healthy and unhealthy food in the cafeteria, but keep the healthy food widely on display and easily to access while unhealthy food is more hidden and harder to access.

Main takeaway: the only way of facing cultural problems is head on and if you want to change behaviour then you should keep the freedom of choice but nudge towards the right choice.

In conclusion

The biggest insight of ‘Work Rules!’ is that data is key to many HR problems. It should be the key driver behind decision making, culture and many other aspects of HR, not only to do the right thing, but also to create understanding for why you do things. In this blog we have given you a very small taste of a must-read for any HR employee. We therefore strongly recommend that you read Laszlo’s full book, make your own analysis of what might work for your organisation and start making implementation plans to improve your business. Or you can get in touch with us and we can help you to with skipping the first two steps and directly move towards solutions to improve your organization.

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If you do a quick search on the internet you will find countless articles on the workplace of the future. It is flooded with blogs on working remotely, AI impacting work, and working more data driven (I also wrote a few blogs on those).

So today I want to talk about something different, on how the workplace will look like if we are used to working remotely, working with AI, and working data driven. In this blog I will take a shot at the social impact of these evolutions and talk about future hierarchies and decision making, how working will be more intertwined with our personal lives, and how human contact and wellbeing will become more and more important in our work lives.  

Hierarchies and decisions

Currently decisions are still made in hierarchical structures where one person’s input might weigh heavier than another. Of course, there are differences in how steep hierarchical structures are, from very tall hierarchies (still mostly common in Asia and parts of America) to flat hierarchies (still mostly common in Europe).

In the workplace of the future, I believe that the hierarchical structures will not disappear, but change in form and appearance. In this sense the traditional manager will be replaced by groups and teams who check each other’s behaviour and performance. Driven by data and AI they will take decisions based upon crowd-based intelligence instead of hierarchical positions.

In a similar fashion, bonusses and salaries will not be a result of negotiations and charisma, but from data-based performance and team approval. There will be more transparency in why certain decisions will be made and more people will be involved in the decision-making structure. This will require a simplified model of decision making as more actors will be involved.

This will make for organisations that:  

• are more agile and can respond quicker to market trends;
• have less internal politics and bureaucracy, and;
• determine, plan and execute better decisions.

Want to find out more about our future hierarchies? Read this article from Collin Williams.

Work and personal life

If working remotely will be fully accepted and implemented in the future, then that will have an implication towards the division of work and personal life. I, and with me many others, believe that working remotely will be fully implemented in the future.

Beside the challenges and opportunities which that brings, this will also have an influence on the division between our work and personal life. Obvious things come to mind as the working day has no ‘solid’ start and finish anymore. So, you might pick up your laptop during the evening, do a laundry run between meetings, or go out for a coffee with the family when there is not a lot to do. This has the advantage that we can become more flexible in how and where we work, but I would argue that this can also result in a lot of new forms of stress.

Since we do not have a solid end of our working day, we will experience a constant ‘working-mode’ kind of pressure in our mind. I would therefore argue that in the workplace of the future there will be more emphasis on planning and the use of calendars to structure your workday, and that this will be required by employers to prevent needless amounts of stress.

What’s more is that I believe that retirement as we now know it, might be a thing of the past. We live in a time that the proportion of elderly population will become relatively larger and that they will live longer as well. It is technically and financially not possible anymore to maintain ‘early’ retirements anymore in the current system as most people stop working around the age of 65 (and often earlier).

This system worked when people lived up until the age of 80, but currently people are generally becoming older. What has also always baffled me is that people at the age of retirement immediately go down from a full week of working to absolutely nothing. I believe this to be a wrong way of retiring. Firstly, because stopping too early with working is detrimental for your cognitive ability (see this article). Secondly, because it drops a lot of people in a mental hole, often feeling social isolated and without a sense of purpose. Thirdly, because these people are often capable of working longer if we rethink our perception of retirement.

I believe that in the future we will go to a step-by-step retiring system, involving medical advice and personal preference. An example of this could be a long-term plan where somebody starts to work 75% at the age of 60, 50% at the age of 67, all the way down to 25% at the age of 75. Other ideas could involve different or less intense functions and shorter working days. Of course, there will be people who will read this with a bit of healthy scepticism and will say that it is physically or mentally not possible to work that long. To them I would say that their arguing is sound if they base those ideas on current-day working conditions. I would argue that future work will become less physical and mental intense due to atomization, robotization and the utilization of AI.

Human interaction and wellbeing

As technology and working methods advance towards working remotely, there will be a bigger future emphasis on human interaction and wellbeing. More and more people will look for ways to interact with colleagues as they make up a large part of their social life and life in general. We already start to see the first signs on the wall with the COVID-crisis: people start meeting up for lunch meetings again and are showing up at the office for a couple of days a week.

So, despite a global health crisis, we still long for human interaction. In the future this will mean that there will be more emphasis on events that promote human interaction despite the working-remotely working culture. Things you can think of are: regularly reoccurring teambuilding events (going from once a year to once every other week), lunch meetings, culture promoting events, working remotely in teams etcetera. The employer of the future will support this in the future as it is important to maintain the company culture and the loyalty of his or her employees.

In an ever-changing world more driven by data, we believe that more and more companies will take a vested interest in their employees’ health and wellbeing to keep them at the top of their performance. This might mean that future employers will get involved to help out their employees with personalized health programmes in accordance to how their employees sleep, eat, drink and feel. So, in this sense data will be collected at the future workplace to analyse how the employees are doing and in the same sense will personalized health plans be a part of the future workplace. You might think of personalized food plans, wellness and mindfulness programmes, and personalized ergonomic working stations.

In conclusion

In this blog I’ve tried to look beyond just stating the future ideas of working remotely, AI, and being data driven and gave a sense of the implications that these developments might have. I believe that the future workplace will be ruled by mass-intelligence, driven by data, and focussed on health, wellbeing and performance optimization of the employees.

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