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Combatting Hiring Bias: Recruiting a Diverse Workforce with Intelligent Automation

Published Oct 25, 2022, 7:31 AM

Intelligent automation can help combat the human biases that can lead to discriminatory hiring practices. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell takes on this topic with Jacob Goldstein, host of What’s Your Problem?, and guest Angela Hood, founder and CEO of ThisWay Global. They discuss how intelligent automation can accelerate inclusive hiring practices, why machines can mitigate bias but not remove it, and why diverse companies are more competitive.

 

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Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. This season of Smart Talks with IBM is all about new creators, the developers, data scientists, c t o s and other visionaries creatively applying technology in business to drive change. They use their knowledge and creativity to develop better ways of working, no matter the industry. Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin Industries podcasts as they use their expertise to deepen these conversations, and of course Malcolm Gladwell will guide you through the season as your host and provide his thoughts and analysis along the way. Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at IBM dot com slash smart talks. Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Pushkin Industries, I Heart Radio and ib AM. I'm Malcolm Gladmow. This season, we're talking to new creators, the developers, data scientists, c t o s and other visionaries who are creatively applying technology in business to drive change. Channeling their knowledge and expertise, they're developing more creative and effective solutions no matter the industry. Our guest today is Angela Hood, founder and CEO of This Way Global. Angela's mission is to eliminate discrimination in the hiring process. Angela is a serial entrepreneur who saw the potential to use automation technology as a way to combat the human biases that lead to unfair hiring practices and a less diverse, less competitive workforce. On today's show, you'll hear how automation makes it easier than ever to connect businesses with the right candidates, why automation is such a powerful tool to mitigate bias, and how Angela's own experiences with discriminatory hiring inspired her to take action. Angela spoke with Jacob Goldstein, host of the pushkin podcast What's Your Problem and former host of nprs Planet Money. Jacob has been a business journalist for over a decade, reporting for NPR, The Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and is the author of the book Money, The True Story of a Made Up Thing. Okay, let's get to the interview. Can you tell me just you know we're gonna get into it a lot, but very briefly, what is this weay Global? So our technology is built specifically to match all people to all jobs without bias. And the last part is the hardest part and also the most important. And where did the idea for the company come from? So I'm a female engineer, and um, you know, I'm going out into the workforce after graduating, and I think that just like everyone else, I can just put my name up at the top of my resume and submit this to companies and they'll know entertain me for an interview. And what I found was because of the type of engineering role I was looking for, which is in the construction industry, that was not the case. The recruiters and also the hiring managers at these companies would see my name and think, well, I don't think that we want a woman, or we don't think that she really understands the job because it's out in the field. And so a mentor of mine said, why don't you use your initials, which are conveniently a L. And so I would submit my resume as a L hood and people thought I was a man. And so then at the same company, for the same job, I would get interviews. And that was the first moment where I realized there was a lot of bias in the market and turns out that there's a lot more biases, and we work to correct for all of them. It's funny that kind of story shouldn't be shocking, right, Like I know that I shouldn't be shocked by it, and yet I still kind of am. So clearly there's a tremendous amount of bias in the world, and bias in recruiting. And you know, we're familiar with these kind of stories of human bias, but but now there's this new problem, right, which is algorithmic bias. What is that tell me about algorithmic bias? A lot of algorithms are underpinned by machine learning, and machine learning very simply can happen kind of two different ways. You study what has happened in the past, and you try to duplicate that faster and more efficiently, and so that in this context would be called supervised learning, and that seemed like the logical place for nearly every recruiting technology to start the problem with that is that there's been so much historical bias that all you would really be doing is capturing that company or that hiring manager recruiters bias and duplicating it really fast, very efficiently. So you would just be expanding bias much much faster than how a human could. The flip side is something that's called unsupervised. So this is where you build a system essentially a black box. It's doing all types of calculations and decisions internally, and then it's not biased in theory, but you have no idea what it's basing its opinions on, so it can kind of create bizarre results. Also, it's not explainable, and so then you get caught in this catch twenty two of I don't want to do bias at scale, but I need to be explainable. So what do you do? After thirteen failures, we finally figured out a way to do this. The methodology that we finally found that innerrated the results that run biased was not ever allowing the math model or the computer to see the information that causes bias. So we had to not let gender enter into the system, ethnicity couldnot enter into the system, things like that, and so then the logical question is, okay, well, so if you don't allow those pieces of information to come in, how can you then enable qualified people that are also diverse to surface without bias? And the answer is when you remove these factors. It happens naturally, and we learned this by testing. We've had fifteen and a half trillion matching events go through our system and almost it's been now almost a decade, and through this we've learned a lot. People are very diverse. If you will just remove your own bias, you'll start seeing them. So it's a it's an automated version of what you as an individual did, uh before you started the company, when you switch from putting your full name on your applications to just your initials, effectively hiding your gender. Yeah, it started with that. What we also learned though, is even if you conceal your name, there are words where maybe someone is a waitress in a previous job, and so then the persons like, ah, that's a female, right, So then we had to go one step further. We had to say, now we have to neutralize these gender specific words inside resume so that a person cannot look at the document and still sus out ethnicity, gender and other biasing attributes. It's remarkable that after hiding prejudicial information from the computer like a candidate's gender or ethnicity, a qualified diverse workforce assembled naturally as a result, for the overburdened recruiter. That means there are huge advantage is to using intelligent automation. That's a win win. As the conversation continues, Angela explains how IBMS technology enabled her to simplify her customers hiring processes, and she also shed some light on how far intelligent automation has come in the past few years. How does intelligent automation look different today than it did, say, five years ago, it actually works, as the first thing. The the level of innovation that has taken place is absolutely incredible. And here's the thing about it is people have had some negative interactions with things that said that they were automated and they're now they're like, I don't want to use it. The level of innovation that has happened is absolutely incredible. And for them to not try something because they tried something a decade ago and it didn't work, that it's just completely the wrong approach. We're going to see massive innovation over the next five to ten years too, and you don't want to miss that. You don't want to say, oh, I said on the sidelines because I had a bad experience a decade ago. So I think if you know, if you're anywhere involved in technology or business growth, you need to be part of this. This is your economy in play a role. So what is a digital employee? Right? So our partnership with IBM, Watson Orchestrate is around the DIG. So D I, G. E. Y is a DIG who's a digital employee And I always think of it honestly, is more of a concierge. You can have all of your job descriptions living inside of Box, for instance, and so there's all the job descriptions and you're like, oh, I need to find someone for this job. Watson goes into Box, grabs the odd description and then sends that into this way system and this way automatically surfaces up to three hundred qualified people from diverse organizations. Right, so now the recruiter has not had to figure out where are they going to source these people from. They haven't had to sort out how they're going to reach out to diverse organizations because we have partners. And so now that part has been taken care of, and then Wat's an organestrate does the next step, which is sends out communication to the candidates that you are interested in automatically, and then you get to sit and wait for these people to respond back to you of their interest in discussing something with you. Now all of this has been automated, and essentially what I just described could easily take a person three weeks to go and identify all the talent. So you take three weeks and you put this down to roughly three or four minutes. Now it's absolutely incredible, and I think it gives recruiters the time to do what they really want to do, which is talked to people. How did you decide that automation was the right tool to fight bias? That was a journey, be as I think a lot of entrepreneurship is an innovation. When we hire technology, we're hiring technology to do a job for us. So what is the job to be done here? It is to identify qualified talent without bias. So when you start breaking this down, you realize that if humans could do it, we would have already done it. There's been a desire to have this happen for many, many years, and we were not successful at it. And the reason why is bias is not discrimination. These things get confused all the time. Bias is a product of our survival mechanism. We are always going to survive as humans, and so we we need these survival skills. That's part of bias. So we're not going to get rid of it, and it's not a character flaw. Bias is just inherently human and we are human. And the best purpose that I think technology can serve is the fact that it can do some things that we can't do. We have to be very careful about how we engineer it. Our own technology was engineered with removing bias is the priority. But we can really have technology make us better humans because it can do things we can't do. Despite the potential to vastly improve the way we hire, most companies still think automation is inaccessible, perhaps a luxury to aspire to in the future, but we live in a time when companies are hungrier than ever to fill positions quickly. Jacob asked Angela what automation can deliver for businesses today and how a companies creative It is linked with its diversity. How prevalent is intelligent automation in talent acquisition workflows today? So our data says that in enterprise that roughly seven percent have adopted some level of truly automated technology. But when you look at the job market in toll like, you know, if you look at the millions of employers we have, it's you know, less than three percent have adopted automation. These are companies that have a smaller workforce to do a great amount of work. They're recovering from a pandemic, they need help, and they think that automation is expensive, and it's actually the opposite. It's not expensive at all. And so I would encourage businesses that are mid market in small businesses to embrace technology in a way that they haven't done. So, I mean, there's one more piece of sort of what's going on now that seems really interesting in the context of what you do, and that is the incredible demand for workers right now. Right there's I don't know, ten million plus job openings, there's the great resignation, and so I'm curious how automation is helping both companies and workers through this process. Now, there's never been a job market like we are living in right now, and so we have to think of as employers, we have to think of how do I attract this talent. The other thing about the volume of jobs that are open. Is if you just do the simple math, there's two jobs for every one person looking for a job. Okay, so that is astounding to begin with. But of the jobs that we have available in the market, most people do not have the skill set required to fill those jobs. Inside the talent pool that is actively looking for a job. So now you have to go out and you need to be looking for passive talent. You need to be cultivating a relationship with the people that do have the skills you need. When you go to them, you need to be able to say two things. You need to be able to say, we use the best technology to identify you because you were special, and we really want you to come to work for us. That's number one. Two you need to say. And when you get here, we're going to help you automate those parts of your job that you've never really enjoyed before, because we want you to be able to dig in in the areas you're passionate about, because you're gonna be happier and you're gonna have a better work life balance. That is how you win talent in this market. Yeah, what have you heard back from recruiters about about this? You know, increased integration of technology. So one of the things that I think has been maybe the most surprising is that it's really opened up the communication between hiring managers and recruiters inside the same company. And there has long been a silo of hiring managers putting out job descriptions and saying recruiters, you know, go find people that make this. And then the recruiter needs additional support because they're getting questions from the candidates or there's some questions around what are the real job specific requirements, and they have trouble getting those answers from the hiring manager. Hiring managers very busy and they have their own job to do. So by making this more efficient, you start getting much better interactions between the entire company. And in this current market, companies are truly desperate to find the talent that they need. The people want to be found, and now the technology is there to help make this seamless. So that's the automation piece. Let's talk about the diversity piece sort of you know, landing here right. So on the diversity side, how does how does a diverse workforce help make a business more creative? A lot of the big consulting firms have dug in for the last decade and said is there really an R O I around diversity, And uniformly the answer has been yes. There is increased profits, a more consistent workforce, meaning people don't want to leave. There's not the same level of attrition when the workforce is more diverse, and better recruiting numbers. So all of that is like the outcome. But I think the key thing to understand is the why behind this. The why is that when you're diverse, you come to solutions and you come to questions and challenges from a different perspective. And when you have a diverse workforce that is collaborating and bringing their creativity to the market and you are using their insight to develop better solutions, You're going to create better solutions. You're going to get those solutions to market faster. You're going to understand positioning of your value proposition inside the market. All of these things happened with far more clarity when you have a diverse workforce. You mentioned earlier that you failed was it thirteen times? And I'm curious if sort of getting through those failures and working your way to success was a place where you did some creative problem solving. I would say that would be an understatement at moments. Uh, there are times where you know, I just say, like thirteen failures kind of in passing. But there were times where I felt like I was close to breaking as an innovator, and the fact that was, like, there's just non solution for this. The thirteen failures is incredibly gut wrenching. But I was fortunate. I had very supportive and susters and so we got through it. Uh, And I'm very proud of the company we are today because of those failures. So just to to wrap up, let's let's talk a little bit about the future. We've done the past, we've done the present. Let's talk a little bit about the future. I mean, how do you think the hiring process will look in the future, whatever, five years, ten years, And in particular, what role will will automation, intelligent automation, augmented intelligence, what role will will all that play? Well, if you look back in decades ago, there were people that would work for the same company for ten twenty years, and that was, you know, not that unusual. Now very uncommon, and in the future, I think it will be absolutely rare. I think we're looking more likely at people that will work for multiple companies. We're seeing that with the rise of the gig economy, we obviously are seeing people love to work remote. I know when we have an active job that goes out into our marketplace and if it is remote and also prioritize diversity, you will have twenty to thirty times more applicants. So I think that we're going to start seeing companies really investing in those two attributes, trying to keep as many jobs remote as possible, just because it attracts talent that companies are really struggling to find right now. And I think the level of automation is going to continue to increase, that will continue to increase an investment over the next five to ten years. In twenty years, I think we will all look back and say, why did we all do these crazy parts of our job? Why didn't we automate those It's because we were waiting for technology like Orchestrate provides. Do you have any specific advice for businesses that want to incorporate technology and automation in their in their business and their work. I would say, realize that you use automation every day, You use AI every day. So when you're using Google Maps or something like that, you're you're using your smartphone. You're accessing this kind of technology as a consumer, as an individual, there's no reason why you should worry about adopting it as a business, and don't feel intimidated by it. You are absolutely ready to use it and your business is ready to benefit from it. Just don't have that fear. We certainly is a company work with companies of all sizes. We have companies that have five to tend employees only, and we have some that have hundreds of thousands employees. That's a great thing about automation is it doesn't care the size of your company. It will work for you. Angela's fun to talk to you. Thank you for your time, congratulations and making it through to thirty And if you really think about that, that's a It's a really impressive level of persistence. Like I could imagine failing a few times, but I would have given up at nine or something at seven. At seven, I was like, I'm a crazy person. It is vitally important to get hiring right. What could be more essential to an organization's success than deciding which human beings make up that organization. If we let our biases go unchecked, we end up excluding qualified candidates, leaving our workforce is less diverse and therefore less competitive because of it. Angela made an interesting point earlier that I want to go back to. She said that bias is not a character flaw, it's a survival instinct, and that the best purpose technology can serve is to make us better humans by doing things for us that we can't. Bias is in human nature and we'll never truly get rid of it, but the first step to minimizing its impact is to acknowledge it's a problem we need help with. Intelligent automation can make hiring more efficient. When we allow computers to mitigate our biases, better hiring is the result. Sometimes to build the best team possible, we have to know when to listen to our human instincts and when to set them aside. On the next episode of Smart Talks with IBM, how to use data creatively in order to solve novel problems, We talk with YouTube content creator and IBM's senior Data science and AI technical specialist, Nicholas Renaud. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, David jaw Royston Deserve and Edith Rousselo with Jacob Goldstein were edited by Sophie Crane. Are Engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Bragair and Ben Tolliday. Theme song by Granmascope. Special thanks to Carlie mcglory, Andy Kelly, Kathy Callaghan and the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and I Heart Media. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is a paid advertisement from IBM.

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