Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Predictive Hire - getting rid of Bias in Recruiting



recruitment bot beats recruitment bias 

CEO Barb Hyman and PredictiveHire and Siri’s equiavalent - Phai - has won  customers including Afterpay, Woolworths Qantas , Spark NZ, EnergyAustralia, Medibank Private, Suncorp, Freedom, Jemena, Iceland Foods, Holland & Barrett, Virgin Mobile , WOLT. And a host of other clients in 47 countries. 


Phai interviews a job candidate every 30 seconds and has raised $7m from Aconex’s Leigh Jasper and a cohort of other investors.


What does Phai and predictive Hire do?

Phai discovers a person’s personality traits from their written answers to five questions…. And removes bias from the interview process.


PredictiveHire  shortlists candidates  who best match the role, before a human steps in and conducts the next stage of the hiring process.


The insights from the interview are gleaned without consideration of a person’s history, gender or any identifying information.


PredictiveHire adapted Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) – a natural language pre-training algorithm that is used for training AI algorithms before large inputs of data.


When being interviewed by the bot, people are given 48 hours to complete the five-set questions, which are designed to test applicants’ suitability for a role and also yield insights into their personalities.


Questions for a Woolworths role ranged from how an applicant had previously responded to missing a work deadline or personal commitment, to telling the bot about a time they’d made someone’s day better.


And while companies are given insights on potential employees, so too are job applicants.


Once someone has submitted their answers, PredictiveHire automatically emails the applicant  insights into their personality, and coaching tips on how to improve.


Barb wants to eventually turn Predictive hire  into a tool that gives everyone access to an AI coach in their pockets.


About 1.3 million candidates have been interviewed by Phai, enabling PredictiveHire to accumulate a proprietary data set of 550 million words – which it says is the largest of its kind in the world.


Barb Hyman shares a few insights 


“There’s a lot of mirror hiring, and it’s why there’s so many white men in start-ups. Bias in Recruiting is not ok ‘“


“The CV is also a very poor proxy for anything. The sooner we get rid of the CV, the sooner businesses will see real talent.”


“What you can glean from a short conversation with a chatbot is more than you could in an initial interview, or certainly more than a CV.”


“What you get from using clean data sets and a process that’s truly blind is you fix the inequity in the world. You fundamentally don’t need targets or quotas any more,” Ms Hyman said.


“One client, Woodie’s in Ireland, in six months they hired three times more ethnic minorities than any of their diversity initiatives had achieved in the previous two years.”


Inspired by Yolanda Redrup - AFR 


https://www.afr.com/technology/this-bot-will-judge-you-in-five-questions-at-the-first-interview-20220302-p5a15v


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