A new article from The Global Recruiter examines the strengths, weaknesses and challenges that technology brings to diverse recruitment. Among the experts involved in the discussion are Ross Crook, Vice President at Cielo, who offers his perspective.
“Organisations that are growing quickly often haven’t had the luxury of time and can fall into bad habits when it comes to hiring – allowing unconscious biases to flourish,” he tells the magazine.
“Technology can therefore be a big advantage for the talent acquisition function – having both time-saving capabilities and the ability to screen candidates and select the best interviewees without prejudice, most systems will focus on the main candidate criteria, such as experience, qualifications, and skills, which reduces discrimination; they’re programmed to ensure that they don’t run the risk of having any unconscious bias that humans occasionally do.”
Ross also states the importance of infusing technology with the human touch to provide vital candidate experience support but that the two working together doesn’t always result in unbiased output.
From the article:
For Cielo, technology has helped to assess assumed future performance indicators and verify if they are valid or not. Ross gives the example of a financial services client where Cielo found that where people studied had less relevance to their future success than the subject they studied. Excluding this information effectively removed a social mobility barrier. “Vitally, a human touch is always needed to provide vital candidate experience support,” asserts Crook. “Technology and humans need to work together to provide a fluid experience.”
However, people and technology working together doesn’t always result in an unbiased output. Technology is great at following set rules and following those rules over and over again without question or error. Learning technology can get to grips with what is viewed as “success” and gradually adapt to deliver that “success” more frequently. But that does not necessarily result in diversity.
Read the full article, “Unbiased Tech.”
