How to hire right when you are starved for candidates

Grant: [00:00:03] Well. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our webinar on the topic of hiring candidates when there just aren't any available. Welcome to the webinar. As I say, good morning to all of those of you in APAC. I know we are presenting to a number of different time zones, so if it is a different time, glad that you that you could join us at our webinar today just by way of introduction. My name is Grant Meyer. I'm the managing director of the APAC region for Modern Hire. And joining me today is my colleague from over in the US, Eric Sydell, who is our EVP of Innovation and will be facilitating the session today. I'll kick things off and then I'll be passing over to Eric, who will who will take us through to the end of the webinar. We have set aside some time at the end of the webinar to be able to take some questions, and I'd encourage you to to pop some questions into the Q&A section. And we'll we'll pick those up and we'll try to address as many of those as we can at the end of the webinar, time permitting. And if not, we can follow up by way of email. We'll also be sending out a recording of this webinar, post the session as well. If alternatively you would like to contact us directly, you can do that through the Modern Hire website as well. So before we kick things off talking a little bit about Modern Hire, we are a global company specializing in the provision of services which help organizations with their hiring practices. As you can see on the slide, we have over 700 clients globally and with those clients we interact with candidates over 30 million times a year. And those could be through assessments, could be through interviews, chat, bot or text. But we have over 30 million interactions per year and we have a large global team comprising various roles. But we like to call out the fact that we have over 45 paged qualified industrial organization psychologists and we have just as many folks focusing on the technology side of our business as well. So that Modern Hire, we've been on a mission for quite some time to what we call changing hiring for good. So what does that mean? It means a number of things. First of all, when we reflect on the hiring process and the interactions between organizations and their candidates can best be described as not always the best experience for the organization, but in particular for candidates as well. So we've really tried to focus on changing that relationship, changing the power dynamic between the interactions between organizations and candidates, and really focusing on moving from what could sometimes, in a worst case scenario, be somewhat of an adversarial type of interaction or relationship to one of mutual discovery where both parties get something out of those interactions in terms of changing hiring for good. We also know that we're trying to come out of a pandemic which has been with us for the last couple of years, and that pandemic has caused us to have to change our hiring practices. And when we say change in hiring for good, we know that we're not going to go back to how hiring was done before. An example of that is those very webinar. We've all become so comfortable with Zoom meetings, with team meetings, etc. If you think about two years ago, perhaps that wasn't common practice where there was a lot more in-person interactions. And what we know is through the pandemic and some of the challenges that we've been forced to have to deal with, we have moved into a new way of recruiting. And what we say is some of the learnings through that process are going to continue as we refine how we improve our hiring practices over time. And the last way in which we hire or we change in hiring for good is about just improving experiences for all the stakeholders across the hiring process. So that could be for hiring managers, it could be for recruiters, but in particular for candidates as well. And a big focus area of ours is keeping candidates engaged, getting them through the process, obviously minimizing the degree of candidate dropout. I said there's over 700 candidates globally. There's just a snapshot of some of the organizations that we work with. And I think the call out on the slide is that some of the world's biggest recruiters partner with Modern Hire, to be able to afford their hiring practices and processes and the solutions that we could bring to them. But what I would call out as well as we work with a lot of smaller organizations as well. So we have solutions for different types of organizations, for different sized organizations and for different sets of circumstances that they may be maybe dealing with in their various markets. So most of our clients talk to us about four distinct problems which they they face through their hiring practice. This is and these are these are capturing what we talk about as the four E's efficiency. In other words, helping organizations deal with very large volumes of candidates. In other words, how do what is often a small recruitment team deal with that large volume, those high volume situations? So from an efficiency perspective, just helping them manage those numbers. Secondly, from an effectiveness perspective is how do we help organizations find the best candidates quickly or early on in the process, especially in a highly competitive environment, it's critical to identify those best, best potential candidates and progressing them through the process as quickly as possible so that you can ultimately make offers to those candidates before a competitive organization does does that. Thirdly, from an ethics perspective that's fundamental, central to everything that we do is fairness. And that could be fairness in terms of not discriminating against different groups based on anything other than job related requirements. We want every candidate in every situation to be given a fair opportunity to demonstrate their capability to be considered fairly for possible employment in our client organizations. That also reflects or relates back to some of the technology that we use, which Eric will be talking a bit about later on in the presentation about the ethical use of some of the technology and the technological advances that are impacting all parts of our lives, talent acquisition included. And then the fourth E is obviously include is focusing on engaging experience. So in a market where candidates there might not be enough candidates at the moment, candidate drop out is the worst possible outcome. So it's about having an engaging experience for our candidates so that they stay interested and go through the process and ultimately get to the pointy end of of of the hiring of the hiring process. So how do we deliver on those forces? Well, it's really a combination of three things cognition, which is our science brand. So we bring our science, which underpins everything that we do. We call ourselves a science based organization, and that science permeates through all the solutions that we offer. And we bring that together with technology to be able to demonstrate or to be able to implement solutions which are candidate friendly or modern but are equally underpinned by that science. And then sitting beneath that is our continuous improvement processes, which we call optimization. So we're not an organization that delivers solutions in a set and forget kind of process where we say, here's the best solution and what's going to work for you optimally from day one for as long as you stay involved with Modern Hire, we look at how well our solutions are working at a minimum on an annual basis where we do optimization or validation studies to continuously improve our solutions to our customers. And that could be making changes to, for example, assessments to make sure we are identifying the highest potential candidates and ultimately predicting performance in in the role or potential performance in the role. So when we talk about our science, we put our PhD, ISL colleges to work and they are intimately involved in helping us create and deliver our solutions. Obviously working across so many large organizations and doing over 30 million assessments and interviews per year, we've got a lot of data we can work with, so we use our science based approach to look at that data and see what's working, what's not working, to both create and optimize some of our solutions. From a technology perspective, be very aware that out in the market at the moment, there's some very clever things being done with technology, with technology, especially when it looks at delivering on the efficiency problem that organizations have to are struggling to cope with. However, that kind of approach without the fundamental science sitting behind that technology creates problems from an ethics perspective. And that's why we always focus on bringing the science together with the technology in order to deliver our solutions. And I've called it out a number of times in terms of from a technology perspective, our platform can manage those large volumes of of candidates going through the platform over 30 million a year and our uptime is 99.9% of the time. From an optimization, I spoke about those validation studies which are part and parcel of the service offering to our clients, but also a platform updates for a size organization. We have weekly updates which are done in the live environment. So you benefit from potentially 156 platform updates over a three year agreement worth more than higher when we close out the or open up the whole wheel in terms of a solutions. On the outside of the will are some of the solutions which we offer. And the best way to look at that is to put it in the context of that could be a hiring process. So right up at the top, once a candidate has applied for a role, they are able to start interacting with the Modern Hire platform through either text or chatbot type interactions. We find those text based interactions as being very useful right at the beginning of a process, because if you think about candidates today, especially the younger ones, they will receive many texts which will never remain unanswered, as opposed to emails where emails can take candidates a number of days to respond to. So we find that those text interactions are the best early stage interactions with candidates to tell them about, to maybe acknowledge their application, to tell them a little bit more about the role in the organisation, and very importantly to potentially ask some questions which are machine scored which can screen out based on minimum qualification criteria. These could be, for example, work rights in a particular country that could be minimum qualification criteria. It could also be availability when candidates can start. And if candidates meet those minimum qualification criteria, they can be automatically progress to the next stage in the process. In the process, which we call a realistic job previews, which could be a series of foyers where we share information about the organisation, about the role. Have have current job incumbents speak to candidates through videos in terms of explaining what the is about, what it's like working at an organisation at the organisation and really giving that candidate a good sense of what a day in the life of or what it's like working at that organisation. Should the candidate want to progress? They can progress to our virtual job tracks, which already are assessments and just as much as tech screenings were to screen out candidates who didn't meet the minimum criteria are assessments or virtual job tryouts or realistic assessments which focus on identifying the top talent or the top potential candidate so that you could identify maybe those 20 to 30% who are the strongest performers to automatically progressing to the next step in the process, which could be those on demand interviews or your asynchronous videos, the recorded videos. There are a number of customisations involved and included within those Customisations are some machine scoring of interview questions as well, which is which is certainly available on our platform. Should candidates be progressed? They can utilize our self scheduling tool to enable candidates to schedule their live interviews or live interactions with with hiring managers or recruiters, for example. And what that scheduling tool does is it eliminates or removes the need for recruiters to have to do the administrative tasks of scheduling meetings, dealing with cancellations, looking at availability, booking, parking, etc., etc.. And we can use that self scheduling tool to streamline that proposal process and getting recruiters to be able to focus on what we want them to focus on. In other words, dealing with the best potential candidates and then obviously moving into those live interviews. Now, I spoke about we don't adopt a one size fits all approach. So that's the full platform. Those are the solutions that are available. But we have clients who are using one or two of those solutions and we have other clients who are using all of those solutions. And it's all dependent on what is the right process for the kind of roles that you're recruiting for. So when we think about where do we fit in in the recruitment funnel, we're not a sourcing company, so we are services really take in just post applications. Once candidates have applied, that may be through an ATS and then they integrate with Modern Hire that when our services kick in and we take candidates and we we help them through an efficient, streamlined process all the way through to that candidate offer of the funnel. So many organisations who work in our space say, hey, trust us, we've got these solutions, they work and, and we just advocate for the quality of the solutions that we have. But Modern Hire takes that a step further. And in fact we've won a number of awards in the space, but some of the companies that you've seen on the slide where we've not only implemented some of these solutions, but we've actually demonstrated the positive impact or the business impact that we've had in those organisations. So for example, at Bank of America they were having significant problems with early stage turnover. In other words, new recruits were leaving within the first 12 months of their employment. What we were able to do through business impact studies and our validation processes is we could actually utilize our assessments to demonstrate that those candidates are scoring high on Modern Hire's assessments were more likely to stay longer at the organization. Now, that's a that's a good outcome. Wherever if whichever way you look at it, however, what we were then able to do is have a look at that early stage turnover and say, how much was that actually costing Bank of America in terms of having to keep replacing candidates and those lost opportunities in terms of training new, new employees and then losing them early on? And we were actually able to quantify that in terms of savings to Bank of America. We did some of some of the things that come cost and saved recruiter hours through our scheduling processes. We were also able to identify higher performers, which ultimately generated more more revenue for that organization. At Wal-Mart, everybody knows who Wal-Mart is. They had some specific requirements, which they wanted us to focus in on. One was they wanted a short assessment. They said, Everybody knows what Wal-Mart's about, but we're losing candidates because the assessment was too long. So we were able to scale that back and get a solution specifically designed for Wal-Mart to keep those candidates engaged for a short period of time, but ultimately to be able to identify the top performers. Incidentally, they also had a turnover problem, so we were able to start predicting candidates who were more likely to stay within the organization. And Amazon, one of our biggest clients, they were trying to scale their offices across the world, and they partnered with Modern Hire to roll out the talent acquisition process to to to to team up their fulfillment centers across the globe, which we help them with. So those are some of the business impact studies that we've conducted with some of our larger clients where we actually received some recognition in terms of the global HR Impact Awards. But every organization that works with us can benefit from some of these business impact studies. So this is how we work with organizations. We don't only implement solutions for the short term, we partner with organizations should be able to show that business impact over time. And these are some of the results that we've managed to achieve with some of our organizations. And really, it's focused on getting recruiters to focus on the highest potential candidates early on in the process and using recruiter time efficiently instead of getting them caught up in administrative tasks. It's about automatic automation through the process, so it's getting candidates from the application stage all the way through to a hiring decision as quickly as possible. And we have cases where the hiring process took maybe three or four, even five weeks to get completed. When we brought that down to a matter of days with some of our client organizations and then finally on the right hand side, there is that feedback as well. And basically remembering when candidates apply for a role, there are more candidates who are unsuccessful rather than candidates who are actually successful in being hired into an organization. The part and parcel of what we do is to ensure that that candidate experience for both successful and unsuccessful candidates is a good experience because candidates could be potential customers of that organization at a future point in time, or they will speak about the recruitment process. They engage with a particular with a particular organization. And it's about that positive advocacy. We want candidates to speak highly of the process they went through when being considered for a role at your organization. So that's the bit of introduction in terms of Modern Hire that that I wanted to provide before I stop sharing. I'll actually transition to my colleague Eric, who I'm going to let Eric share his screen so he can navigate the slides while speaking to it. I'll just remind everyone while they're getting that sorted out as feel free to pop your questions into the Q&A section, and we'll be happy to try to address those towards the end of the session. Over to you Eric.

Eric: [00:18:54] All right. Thanks, Grant. I appreciate the nice intro there. So I am Eric Sydell. I'm an industrial psychologist with Modern Hire and I am the leader of our innovation function, which includes psychologists and data scientists who basically study data. We study candidate data. We try to make sense of it. We use the latest techniques we can use in machine learning and AI as well as traditional statistics. And we try to interpret it and see what it means. And how well does it predict job success, turnover and other positive organizational and job outcomes? I've been doing this for 20 years, so a lot of what you'll hear me talk about is informed by that experience of doing this over and over and over again with different clients. So there is a ton of data out there in the world for us to consume and to use in how we make decisions about people. And it's too much. There's all there's really too much information out there, and our brains are not very well able to interpret all of that different type of data that's out there. Some of the things you'll see on the left side of the screen here common in the in the hiring process to see resumes and experience records. Increasingly, we see social media scraping. We see job descriptions and other types of candidate data as well that that is out there that recruiters and hiring managers will try to interpret. When we look at that information, we don't see that. We see we see skills and abilities, interests and work style, various competencies that are related to success in the job and ultimately that predict the quality of hire of a new candidate, of a new hire. And so our job and what what I've spent my career doing is trying to figure out what all that stuff on the left means for job performance and for your organizational success. And so that's that's sort of what our company does. We we try to make sense of information. And we'll talk about some of the insights as we go through there. First, I just want to take a quick poll here and give you a few a couple of minutes to respond here to this this question. What is the biggest issue you're currently facing in hiring? And so poor candidate experience, lack of sufficient candidates, low diversity or long cumbersome hiring process? So unsurprisingly, because this is a webinar about lack of sufficient candidates. So most of you have have said that one. And so that's great. That's what I expected. Some of the other ones are actually related to the solution for how we can help you to find more sufficient levels of candidates in your population. We'll talk about those as we as we move forward. I want to start off here, though, with a little bit of a broad look at the labor market as we currently see it. You know, everything was going along pretty smoothly until a couple of years ago when the COVID pandemic started. And shortly after that, the phrase great resignation was coined by an industrial psychologist here in America. And the great resignation continues. This month, Gardner reported that only 29% of I.T. workers they surveyed have high intent to stay with their employer, meaning 71%. If my math is correct, do not have a high intent to stay with their employer. And that's just one job category there of I.T. worker in America. The number of Americans filing for unemployment for the week ending on March 19 of just this year dropped to the lowest level in 52 years. And that is not a typo, 52 years. There's also a record level of jobs open in the US over 11 million this January, which is a lot for our economy. A lot of these trends, of course, hold worldwide, you know, and so it's an interesting situation that so many companies, so many of our clients find themselves in where they have so many open positions and just not enough people to fill them. And so that's a very different challenge than most companies had a couple of years ago. Now, another interesting thing, though, is that there's a new concept that I've seen called The Great Regret, which is where candidates actually take a job with a new company and they think that the grass is greener on the other side. But lo and behold, the grass is not always greener. Almost three fourths of new hires experience, surprise or regret that their new position turned out to be significantly different than they thought it would be. So kind of an interesting statistic there. Even though there is a lot of turnover and a lot of people are looking for something different, the majority of those people may not be actually moving to jobs that they that they really like much better. Now, in a very broad sense, this quote at the bottom of the screen, I love this. This is by a Yale historian named Frank Snowden. He wrote this before the COVID 19 pandemic occurred, epidemic diseases reach into the deepest levels of the human psyche. They pose the ultimate questions about death, about mortality, what is life for? So again, I think it's interesting that this was written before our current pandemic. This was a known phenomenon even before. And we certainly see this now. And I think with the the great resignation and the soul searching and the new working arrangements that so many people are looking for, getting tired of spending 10 hours a week driving to the office and ironing shirts and doing all the the ritual of going into an office environment or people who are tired of a job that they're bored with and they want to find something that's more purposeful and meaningful for them. These types of things happen when we collectively, as a as a civilization, begin to search our psyche for meaning. So there's a lot of this stuff is going on now that I think is in response to that pandemic situation. So, you know, the basic solution as we see it at Modern Hire, we're hiring technology platform. The basic solution is to put in place a good hiring process with appropriate and scientifically developed tools that are flexible and that you can adapt in an environment where there's a lot of candidates and also adapt to an environment where there's not many candidates at all. And so we sort of change these dials on the system to accommodate whatever sort of candidate volume our clients might be might be experiencing. When there's a ton of candidates, you have the luxury of being more selective with the people that you hire. You can be more rigorous in screening people out who don't meet your expected minimum criteria and preferred skills and capabilities for the job. In an environment of scarcity, what you don't do is throw away your entire process and just hire people off the street just to fill the seats. Inevitably we see that over and over again. Companies that do that end up failing harder than they would have otherwise if they had maintained their well thought out and rigorous hiring processes, but worked harder to entice candidates to attract them. And and a lot of times rebuilding the jobs and what's appealing about the jobs for candidates whose mentality have changed over the last few years and who may be looking for something different than they than they would have been looking for a couple of years ago. So we're going to go through sort of three big three or four big chunks of recommendations here. And there's a lot in here. I'll probably go fairly quickly and we'll probably run a little bit close on time. So I just want to start off and talk about the the time that's involved in hiring. It's always way too much, right? No hiring process ever has been accused of being too short. I don't think so. Why is speed to hire important? Why has efficiency in hiring important? You know, there's some statistics on screen. 42 days is the average time to fill across industries. 27 and a half days is the average length of the interview process in the US. So almost a full month spent in the interview process. Now a lot of times that is because there's seven different rounds of panel interviews that all have to be scheduled with 50 different interviewers. And there's a ton of dropout that that causes when that sort of thing happens. Ten days only ten days is the average time that top candidates are off the market. So it's very, very easy for candidates, especially top ones, to find new jobs these days. You cannot take a long time in the hiring process. 46% of companies are experiencing layoffs within their talent acquisition teams. 47% of job offers rejected due to candidates receiving an earlier offer. And 46% of candidates have rejected a job due to the length of the process. So there you go. We, tons of statistics on this type of thing. And here's another another set that is actually from a different survey. And it's slightly different. But these are these circles are the reasons candidates drop out of a hiring process. And the big one right there in the middle is 61% accepted an offer from another employer. Maybe it was a better offer, but that's actually a smaller circle there. That's only 4%. People accept offers from other employers when your process takes too long or when they become too frustrated by the process or find it irritating and that sort of thing. So far and away, the biggest, biggest factor, as you can see there, is accepting an offer from another employer. Now I want to address a specific issue. That is a question we get a lot, which is we build hiring tools and processes for our clients to use that are all scientifically designed, that are intended to predict job performance and be fair and really to hit all those for ease that Grant talked about in the beginning. So sometimes people say to us, Well, hey, we don't have a lot of candidates, so why don't we just shorten our hiring experience and get rid of different steps? So, for example, let's get rid of an assessment. Now, this is a study that we did ourselves in 2017. It's published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, which is really the preeminent journal in our field, peer reviewed. So this is legitimate research here. And the study found that selection system length did not predict rates of applicant attrition. We like to use fancy words in these things, but basically that is just saying that the longer the assessment was that had no relationship with candidate dropout. And so what we find, what we found in this study and what we continue to find as a candidates will drop out in the early stage of an assessment. A small percentage often will, but beyond that, early stage in the assessment length doesn't really matter. So if if 5% drop out in the beginning, chances are it won't matter whether the assessment is 10 minutes long or 30 minutes long after that, as long as the candidates find it engaging and job relevant. If they don't find it engaging or if they find it confusing, then then all bets are off, you know, and I think you start losing candidates at that point. But by and large, what we find is that our clients lose candidates between steps, not within the steps. So if you think of a modern hiring platform, a modern hiring kind of ecosystem at a big company, there's an applicant tracking system. And then sometimes there are ten or 20 other solutions bolted on top of it all as sort of Band-Aids to try to fix the experience. And what that can lead to is a very disjointed candidate experience. So you're constantly as a candidate, being slotted from one thing to another, and maybe the link that's supposed to transfer you to the next step is broken or doesn't work, or maybe one particular step in the system. You have a technical support question, but you're not sure who to contact or something doesn't load properly or whatever the case may be. There's so many reasons, and having all these things kind of crammed into an experience can be frustrating. It can take a long time, especially if you're trying to schedule seven different panel interviews for this candidate. What a nightmare. So you're going to lose people in those types of environments. What we recommend is automation is is automating more of the process. And this is just a quick example of one of the ways that we automate a measure called career stability. This is basically predicting it's a few questions that predicts how likely a person is to remain in the job of a call center agent, a call center representative. And we have a lot of different content and questions customized for different jobs that we've studied for years. And so you can ask a few simple questions and have a sense for how likely a person is to remain on the job for a long period of time, just as one sort of simple example. So the next topic I want to hit here is widening recruiting efforts. Now, as Grant said, we're not a recruiting company, but we do have some thoughts on on the topic of how you source and recruit people. One thing that we like to point out in the in the pandemic the last several years and even before that, I think diversity and equity and inclusion have become much, much bigger topics than they used to be for many of our clients. And we see that a lot of interest all over the world in diversity efforts. Most companies are working hard to come up with diversity strategies, but only 25% so far, at least according to this survey, have set diversity or gender diversity targets 44%. Almost half of candidates say they've experienced discrimination in the hiring process. Now, why am I bringing this up and talking about widening recruiting efforts? I think it's really important for companies these days to pay special attention to the needs of diverse candidates and to ensure that they are hiring people with as much diversity as possible. A company's level of diversity has long been linked to competitive advantage. Organizations that have a degree of diversity that mirrors the population tend to outperform those who don't. And a couple more statistics. You can see we love our love our statistics here. So companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 33% more likely to have better finance, financial returns and same same basic idea for gender diversity. So there's tremendous reason to be diverse organization. And a lot of times in traditional hiring processes, we have this idea of culture fit where we want to hire somebody who fits our culture. And I think a lot of times, unfortunately, that has been a proxy for low levels of diversity hiring. You know, we want to hire somebody who fits our culture and who just really feels at home, who I feel at home with. Right. And who do I feel at home with? Will Probably people who are coming from a very similar background to me, you know, and I think that that idea has sort of permeated through the culture fit world to some extent. And so now we've seen people talk instead about culture fit, talk about culture, add meaning how can I bring a new person into the organization that adds something different, unique, specific needed to the culture that we have here. And that, I think is probably a better lens for for dealing with culture than staying fit. Think of it as ad. So that's a thought on on that. And then when you look at when you look at diversity, go back to slide. When you look at diversity, it's not just about racial, ethnic, gender diversity. There are plenty of ways to get creative with it as well. And lately I've been reading and seeing information on the hiring of people with criminal backgrounds. There's actually a huge group of people with criminal histories who a lot of companies will not hire. And there's actually psychological research on this that shows that most of the time people with criminal histories turn out to be very reliable and stable employees. Now, it's not the case that that is always the case. There are situations where that's not necessarily true, of course, but by and large, there's a pretty large group of of probably fairly motivated people who who may have criminal backgrounds and who are a lot of times excluded from work opportunities. There's another group of of people which neurodiverse individuals, neurodiversity being people who might have autism or Asperger's or even attention deficit disorder. And so people like that may have more difficulty getting through the traditional hiring process, but they can often add tremendous specific types of value to organizations as well. And so I think that we have to think very broadly about diversity. There are people out there in a lot of different groups that are sort of systematically underserved by our hiring techniques around the world. And those are those are very high quality groups of candidates that can potentially fill some of those fill some of the seats that our clients have opened. Just taking a step back really broadly, we're in a time of a lot of extensive change in hiring and in the labor market. And there's a lot of experiments that have been kind of. Going on and how can we enable remote work? How can we staff in these crazy times where things seem to be changing by the day or by the month? In terms of candidate volume. So a lot of different things going on that our clients are ultimately experimenting with and trying to deal with. And one of the ways that we do that is just by having these systems in place that you can sort of turn up or turn down as the case may be. So automated tools that can help you get people through the hiring process as quickly as possible. There's a few things here. Automated tech screenings, scalable, realistic job previews. We say realistic previews now, but I call them job previews because that's the traditional name for them. And one thing that I point out about those is that they're a great, great thing to do. They're very engaging for candidates to help them understand the nature of your job and your organization. But for them to be realistic, they can't be commercials. They can't just be commercials about how great it is to work at a particular job or particular company. And I think it's sort of human nature. We see this a lot of companies trying to sort of sell the job and that is that's okay. But when you are trying to sell a job, you may not be presenting it in as much of a balanced way and as much of an authentic way as as you might. And that can lead to more people coming on board and then deciding that the job isn't right for them and quitting later. So something to be aware of. Grant mentioned automatic interview scoring, which is a new technology where we use AI to automatically score what a person says in the interview and we can actually score what they say against job relevant competencies. And that is a crazy technology. It's crazy to be able to say that that can even be done because that's essentially our computers are beginning to understand what we say as humans. And I don't think that that can be said strongly enough how amazing that is. So that is that's a new kind of thing, but it can help the process to be much quicker since that happens automatically. The other thing that that does is it reduces bias in interview scoring. When we have a sample of subject matter experts, trained interviewers, experienced interviewers score the same information as our AI. What we find is that the AI shows group differences or shows evidence of bias four times less than the human group does. So it's four times less likely to cause bias than than trained like expert human raters who are who are doing that task. So there's a lot of potential there to see that grow. And for that type of technology, I think, to speed up the process and to help reduce bias. And then Grant also talked about self scheduling. Scheduling is such a nightmare and everybody hates it and definitely, definitely automate that and make it super fast and easy for everybody. So ultimately, a lot of the solutions that we talk about here have to do with the five things on screen and certainly investing in diversity and inclusion, flexible working conditions, kind of thinking about the nature of your jobs and how how conducive they are to the flexible style that so many people want these days. Can you evolve your job requirements? Can you change them? Is it really necessary that you have to have 3 to 5 years of experience to do the job that you're hiring for? Probably not unless it's a brain surgeon. Yes, by all means, you need a lot of experience, but there's a lot of positions out there that we continually see that have experience requirements that are simply too high. You know, you don't necessarily need to know how if you're hiring for an I.T. position, you don't necessarily need to know how to program in every coding language under the sun. I.T. People, coders, they're good at figuring things out. It's one of the kind of hallmarks of being a coder is being able to problem solve. They can figure out some new syntax on a new language if you think that the rest of their profile looks good, you know, so. So people can learn things on the job. And a lot of times we recommend more focusing on digital readiness and problem solving skills and things like that. And you can always train, train some of the other stuff. And I'll just skip down to the bottom. Leveraging ethical AI, I believe, has a great value in the hiring process, but it needs to be carefully used and deployed because they can also be used in plenty of non ethical ways and it can become too invasive of privacy as well. So we do need to be very careful about how AI is used and that's just the case with any powerful tool that it needs to be wielded carefully. Finally, I'm going to talk just a little bit about the candidate experience. I think that we've been talking about candidate experience at Modern Hire for a very long time, and it has become more and more of a focus over the years, which is great. But overall, most candidate experiences are not that great. And I think it comes back to the fact that you've so many companies, you've got an ATS and then you've got a whole bunch of other systems on top of that, and they tend to be very disjointed, somewhat bureaucratic, frustrating to deal with, etc.. So one of the ways that you can promote a good candidate experience is by focusing on your own employer brand. And why does brand matter? 75% of candidates research a company's reputation before applying. 83% of employers say that brand plays a significant role in their ability to hire people. 69% of candidates would not accept a job from a company with a bad reputation, even if they wouldn't have a job. I love that last part, even if they wouldn't have a job. And then 87% of candidates say a positive interview experience could change their mind about a role that they want stated. So lots of power in your employer brand. What is your brand? Is are you a company that seems exciting and fun and good to work for? So those are there's a lot of power in and kind of being able to craft that and communicate it. A few things that make an elevated employer brand, in my opinion. One is it has to be defined. You have to know what it is. You have to put it out there so that people can see it and understand it. And it can't just be like a poster of values that you put on the wall. It's got to be more than that. It's got to be authentic. And I think that, you know, if something is too too slick, marketing slick, it's a commercial, it begins to lose the authenticity. It begins to lose the meaning. And it's not as generally compelling for your candidate pool. You know, one thing that's always important is so many of our customers have candidates that are also their clients or their customers. So candidates are also your customers. If you reject someone, you want to make sure that they still have a positive view of your brand of your company. And I'll just skip to the bottom on measurable. So make sure that your brand is has metrics like retention rate, quality of higher cost of hire. All these types of things that we see in the hiring process can be measured and you can use them to calculate the ROI of your process and to understand how well all the different tools you're using are working. A couple of quick tips of things that we've seen work well over the years for increasing the richness of your employer brand and sort of your digital presence to try to communicate more fully with your candidates. Videos are great. We recommend using videos when you can. They tell a richer story about your jobs, about your people, about your organization. You can use our platform to create realistic job previews, where you upload pictures and text and things and talk about your jobs and your organization. Or you can also take your iPhone out onto your warehouse floor and interview some people and use that and share that with prospective candidates. So it doesn't have to be a fancy solution. It also doesn't have to be expensive. I we've seen plenty of clients over the years who who have developed very slick job previews with models, actually paid models dressed up as their employees. Everything looks perfect. Everybody is very good looking, you know, and it's sort of this idealized environment. And I think that can convey some information to a candidate, but it doesn't come across as overly authentic. I think I would for my money. I would way rather see. An actual regular employee actually talking about their job and even sharing negative aspects of the job. Not bad aspects of it. Not like this company is no good to work for kind of thing. But you know, sometimes it gets hot in the warehouse and sometimes I have to lift £50 and you know, a shift is draining sometimes know or whatever the case may be, but actual real information that candidates can can use in their decision. And then finally, of course, the candidate experience has to be convenient. You don't want it to be too cumbersome and too slow. We share this a lot. These are the seven factors that we talk about for great hiring experiences, ease of use, expectation setting. How long is it going to take? What are the criteria we're using to decide who we will hire? Being engaging, giving candidates an opportunity to perform, which you can do digitally with virtual job tryout. The assessment that we offer, that's sort of a day in the life experience, etc.. So I'm going to skip forward in the interest of time. We have also can provide what we call blueprints. These are examples of hiring flows for different positions and this particular one here, it starts with a text screening capability and you see a little simple graphic there. It's very quick, it's very fast. Answer some basic questions about yourself right on your phone. And then an actual virtual job tryout where you're doing right on your phone, some sort of exercises that are similar to what you would encounter on the job. In this case, you're listening to an interaction and verifying the account number and address and other information below. So sort of like what a call center agent would do on the job. Then there's an on demand interview capabilities where you can record answers to questions. Those can be automatically scored, as we talked about earlier. And then there's a live interview feature as well. For your final candidates where you can do that as well as the self scheduling stuff. So that is a little bit of some of the tools that we offer that sort of help this process be smoother and better. And in the interest of time, I'm just going to skip forward a little bit here and we will also mention quickly that there is a number of different ways we add in question sets, assessment content and hiring processes to get at some of the things our clients are most concerned with these days. Some of the new things we've added recently include digital readiness, so being able to use technology appropriately and quickly. Diversity and inclusion. Being comfortable with remote work. And then also safety orientation. Some of the some of the new things we've added. So I think in the interest of time, we probably have a few questions. So it's okay. I'm just going to skip forward a little bit here and we have a few slides here, just about the benefits of AI and hiring. And the the poll question that I skipped is basically how comfortable are you with AI and hiring? And, you know, typically some people say that it shouldn't be used at all. Most people say it's okay to use somewhat and a few people say it should be used for everything under the sun. And my perspective on it is that it should be used carefully in a lot of cases, but certainly not. It's not necessary in every case. So there are a lot of benefits that we see to using AI. But at Modern Hire, where we're very careful about how we deploy these AI is such a powerful technology, you do have to be careful that it doesn't have unintended consequences and ultimately any negative effects on the candidate pool. I want to mention this graphic very quickly. This is a way that we talk about the quality of data that is used in the hiring process. On the right, you have the best type of hiring data. These are assessment responses, answers that I specifically give you. If I'm a candidate to use in the hiring process, those are the most job related, the easiest to interpret, and they have the best predictive power. As you go towards the left on this slide, you see a lot of other things that are commonly used in the hiring process, but which have less and less job relatedness and ability to actually predict performance and to do so fairly. So on the far left you'll see just people's Facebook profiles and things like that. Not really a great source of job related information and probably very biased as well. And finally, finally. And then I'll stop talking. I want to announce to you that we do have a book that we've recently launched called Decoding Talent How A.I. and Big Data Can Solve Your Company's People Puzzle. I've been talking fairly quickly. I have a lot more words to say about it, and you can read about them in that book. It's published with one of my colleagues, Mike Hudy, and another writer, Michael Ashley, and it's published by Fast Company Press, and it's available on Amazon and lots of other places as well. So if you're intrigued by these types of topics, I'd encourage you to check that out. It's not a commercial for Modern Hire. It stands on its own as a vision for the future of talent management in the age of AI. So now I think with the time that we have left, we'd like to see if there is some questions.

Grant: [00:53:29] Eric. I'll be monitoring the questions. And what I would say is there's a very definite theme that has emerged and i'll let you take a sip of your water there. You've been holding the mic for a little while there. But the first question that that came through is just relating to the session. And just to confirm, again, the recording will be made available for you to share too with your colleagues, etc.. But getting into some of the substantive questions, the theme, Eric, is A.I. and Mobile Preference. The question with AI is something that seems to be very popular within the within this region. And a lot of my colleagues will tell you that when they interacting with prospects and clients, the question of do you do you have AI in your process? And it's almost that it's seen as a necessity or a requirement. And and then when you probe a little deeper, sometimes you get some interesting answers. So I think you touched on it a little bit earlier on, but when we talk about ethical or responsible or good, I just would love to hear your thoughts around what does that look like? Or if we're looking at implementing a solution that does have AI as part of it, what are some of the things we should be looking out for?

Eric: [00:54:46] Yeah, that's great. Yeah. AI is the topic of our times. I mean, other than the pandemic, which is lately been the topic, you know, AI is such a massively powerful and transformative capability. It's been said that it's more powerful than or it's more influential on the human condition than fire, than the discovery of fire. I mean, that's that's crazy, right. So very transformative stuff, very powerful. And as with any powerful tool, you have to be very, very careful how you use it. And my fear with AI and a lot of people's fear is that it will begin to automate and kind of objectify and control our world in a way that is ultimately dehumanizing for people. And so I think and I'm a psychologist, as you know, and a lot of our company is psychologists. We think a lot about this. We certainly didn't go into the tech world because we wanted to dehumanize it. We wanted to make it better for people, for candidates, for recruiters, for everybody. And so it's very important to us that we use AI in a way that is not invasive of privacy, of individual privacy. And for that reason, you know, there are companies that score facial features and that read facial features and use that to predict job performance and things. We don't do that. We drew a line in the sand and we said, you know what, we're not going to do that because it's invasive. We're only going to use the data that people consciously give us in the hiring process to use to make a decision. And that means the way I answer questions, you know, my answer is to questions that's fair game. But the way I look or the way I sound, my accent or whatever, it's not fair game. That's not a legitimate information that should be used.

Eric: [00:56:41] And so we draw the line and we don't do it. And so that's that's how I feel very strongly about that as sort of our AI champion at Modern Higher is obviously I love AI. It can do a lot of great things, but we have to be responsible and harness how it's used. The other thing that I think you'll see a lot is that it's become a marketing buzzword. And so companies, everybody under the sun has an AI this or an AI that. All AI is is data analysis software. It's just an advanced way to analyze data. That's it. Do you need it in your hiring process? No, you don't. In fact. And so many times companies are just trying these AI tools out, thinking, well, this is it's AI. It must be super smart, right? It must really solve all our problems. No, not really. You can have something that's pretty dumb and it's still AI, you know. So it's it's not a silver bullet. It's not a magic wand. And I think if a if when companies just talk excessively about their AI, you really have to dig in and understand, okay, but what is it really doing for us in the hiring process? You know, we're not talking about self-driving cars here. A self-driving car, by all rights, needs to have AI. That's how they work. But for a hiring process, there are appropriate places to put it and good value that you can get from it. But you need to you need to go beyond the marketing hype and really consider what it's what it's offering and doing for your process. So I took most of our time with that answer. I could do a whole webinar on that Grant, right now.

Grant: [00:58:19] That's really right answer and always good to hear you talk about AI. And I think in the in the minute or so that we have left, maybe I'll make a couple of. Comments and answer one last question your way. And basically, they have just in the last minute or so, a number of questions have come through. So when we share the webinar recording, we'll address some of those questions in that communication as well. There were some questions around do candidates react positively or negatively to AI, which I think you've touched on, Eric, and in terms of if they know it's being used and and if they understand how how it's been used. And I think a follow on question to that was, could I be used in sourcing? And I think it goes back to your slide about gathering data, which is intentional rather than things like social media scraping, for example, which which is not intentional information. But last question for you and you probably got about a minute, Eric. It's probably a tough, tough, tough requirement is what is the longer term, let's say, ten years our future of work look like with regard to AI and the pandemic. And you've got to make.

Eric: [00:59:24] Sure I can answer that in 2 seconds. No, I think we're going to continue to be in a world that's hard to predict. That's sort of a cop out of an answer. But I think that there's so many huge global dynamics happening right now. Everything is cyclical. I think that at some point things will begin to stabilize more. But automation is here to stay and increasing levels of automation are here to stay. So it's very important that we keep the humans in mind, keep us humans in mind and try to make the world as as good for us as we can as we move forward into these uncharted territories in the future.

Grant: [01:00:02] Awesome. Thanks so much. We're at the top of the hour and thank you, everybody, for joining. As I say, there are a few other questions and we'll look to answer those in the follow up communications. But really appreciate everyone joining. And Eric, thank you for your time and sharing your insights as well. And with that, we'll bring the webinar to a close thanks for joining Modern Hire and how to hire when there are not enough candidates. Thank you.

Eric: [01:00:27] Thank you all.