As employers increase their efforts to improve diversity in their hiring, there is a growing debate about the role technology can play in solving diversity challenges. It is evident that tech isn’t a silver bullet here with something that is very much a human problem; however, there are certainly ways that technologies such as AI can help to identify the scale of the problem.
My guest this week is Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and Co-Founder of Phenom. Mahe is a thought leader in the AI space and has some valuable insights to share on the role it can play in diversity, equity and inclusion.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Bias in recruiting
▪ Why D&I issues can’t be solved with AI
▪ When AI makes things worse
▪ How AI can create an awareness of bias that can be used to change human thought processes
▪ Leadership, accountability and the importance of C Suite goals
▪ Redesigning talent and reimagining work for the future
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Phenom, the global leader in talent experience management. A single platform solution powered by AI, Phenom personalizes and automates the talent journey for candidates, recruiters, employees and management. Phenom is hosting a free virtual event, IAM HR from December 8 to December 10 to help HR leaders conquer unprecedented challenges, maximize efficiency and plan for the road ahead. You can Register today@phenom.com imhr and Phenom is spelled P H E N O M so phenom.comimhr and unlock access to over 55 hours of on demand content, binge worthy sessions and HRCI and SHRM credits.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 319 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As employers increase their efforts to improve diversity in their hiring, there’s a growing debate about the role technology can play in solving diversity challenges. It’s evident that tech isn’t a silver bullet here with something that’s very much a human problem. However, there are certainly ways that technologies such as AI could help to identify the scale of the problem. My guest this week is Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co founder of Phenom People. Mahe is a thought leader in the AI space and has some valuable insights to share on the role it can play in diversity, equity and inclusion. Hi Mahe and welcome to the podcast.
Mahe Bayireddi [00:02:08]:
Hi Matt, thank you for inviting me.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Mahe Bayireddi [00:02:15]:
Yeah. I’m Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and co founder of Phenom People. Like, as a person, I’m born in India, I grew up in India for my first 20 years and then I moved to US and I’ve been here for the last 20. I’m more a business guy, a tech guy and constantly think about spirituality and how we can combine all those three things to understand how the world can be viewed and how I can realize the world.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
Tell us a little bit more about Phenom People.
Mahe Bayireddi [00:02:45]:
So Phenom People has started in 2011 with a simple philosophy. Why can’t job search be more like shopping? Why are the experiences so bad? How can we fix it? So that’s where the company has started. We always have a viewpoint about like how experience has to be delivered. So the category, what we really work on is called as Talent Experience Management. How do you deliver experience throughout the talent life cycle? Which is very relevant for who the user is. We believe there are four stakeholders throughout the talent lifecycle. The first one is the candidate, second one is the employee, the third one is the recruiter and the fourth one is the manager. How can you give each one a very unique experience based on how they look at job, how they look at talent, how they look at a company? So the that’s what our journey is. And we give four different products. The candid experience product, the employee experience product, the recruiter experience product and the management experience product. And that’s what the TXM is all about. It’s a holistic approach throughout the talent life cycle.
Matt Alder [00:03:57]:
So 2020 has seen a massive growth in focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Very encouragingly, lots of employers are now looking to really address diversity in their hiring. Now in the conversation we’re going to talk about how technology can play a part in fixing this. But before we do, I just wanted to get your take on where the danger areas are in terms of bias in the recruitment process.
Mahe Bayireddi [00:04:25]:
The recruitment process has a lot of bias because human has a lot of bias, right? Like we all carry bias and which is everybody knows about this. So that anyway exists and now what happens is throughout the recruitment process, the most critical problem right now is what is hiring manager doing is not well documented or captured effectively within every experience. We are only focusing on a recruiter activity, we are not focusing on what is team doing. That’s where most of the bias is sitting. The bias is not sitting on recruiter side. The bias is sitting exactly on the hiring team side. But that is only an interview. Feedback is captured and that’s where we have to create more awareness, we have to create more transparency about what we are doing and really creating this unbiased training and thought process towards people. And there is a reason for it. If you look at like in a company which has 10,000 employees, the number of recruiters you have are hundred. But if you have how many hiring managers exist, they will be thousand. And how many people will interview in that? 10,000 people like to hire, let’s say 1,000 people into the company is almost like in the order of three to four thousand people. So if you really think about diversity, inclusion, it’s not about what we do with recruiters, but what we do with this three to four thousand people who are really involved in this whole hiring and interviewing process, but also promoting people within the employee pools.
Matt Alder [00:06:11]:
How can technology particularly AI really help to fix things here?
Mahe Bayireddi [00:06:17]:
One thing matters like diversity and inclusion is not An AI problem, it’s not created by AI, it cannot be solved by AI. It is actually a gap created by inhuman hacks done by either humans or nature. And that’s what is diversity inclusion is all about. And if you have that clarity now, what happens is AI can help only in creating the awareness of where these things are happening. It can crunch data effectively and really identify, hey, this is where your bias is or this is where we are not doing the right things. That awareness is what AI can give, but it’s the human thought process has to be changed to make sure diversity inclusion has to work effectively. And that should start with the leaders and they being transparent about what the goals they want to really go through. And that’s where the most important element is. AI can assist and make sure, hey, this is where it is going wrong. But experience can help you in terms of manifesting them at the right spot so that you can take action at the right moment.
Matt Alder [00:07:38]:
I want to dig a bit deeper, deeper in a second around some of the specifics of those things. But I suppose one issue that we should sort of really flag up now, which is, which is related to what you’re, you’re talking about is a lot of the publicity around AI and recruiting when it comes to things like bias really focuses on where things have gone wrong and AI has kind of amplified existing bias and there’s, there’s not as much focus on the positive stuff. What’s your view on that? Can it make things worse or is.
Mahe Bayireddi [00:08:09]:
That overblown AI will make things worse? There is no doubt about it. The reason is for certain time, but that’s what makes everything better for everyone. The reason is till now there is no clear documentation on people having biases. Nobody documented them. What is AI doing is it is looking at the data and creating a clear documentation of where all biases are happening. Now will that really create a rift? Of course. But how do we react to that is the most important thing. If we think like how all these people are mean and stupid and really idiotic, that’s why they are doing it, then there is no meaning to it. Okay, this is what is the state right now? What is that we can help these people with so that they can evolve to next level. If you take that as an angle, then AI will really help a lot more. But till now the most important thing is lot of areas people know that something is happening, but there is no clear details about it. But right now you are digging into data and really creating them. The data is only there for where you are really creating the processes on a digital footprint. And there are a lot of things which you really do which are not captured in the digital landscape, like how you interview, what questions you ask and how you interpret the answers, and then how you really think about a particular person and how you think about your current team structure versus how this person fits into this team structure. Those things were not documented and they’re not digital footprint. They’re still in human heads. So wherever there are, there is a digital footprint where it has a documentation around it, where the data is stored, you can predict where it is going wrong so that we all can get better. And if you can really look from that angle, it’s a very, very positive thing.
Matt Alder [00:10:11]:
Absolutely. So it’s really shining a light on what’s going on and helping people to understand where the bias exists within their organization. I suppose. Moving forward from that, what would your advice be to talent acquisition leaders in terms of what they need to do to ensure success here? I mean, where does the data come from? What kind of interventions do they need to take? How can make sure that they’re really getting the most out of this technology to help solve this problem?
Mahe Bayireddi [00:10:40]:
There are two most important things. What we really think about. The talent acquisition leaders should align with the leaders of the company about what are the goals and what are we accountable for. Because diversity inclusion is not talent acquisition job to really solve. If the CEO, the cfo, the COO and the chief people officer are not aligned to what the goals are, then whatever the talent acquisition person does is waste of time. So and once you set up the goals at a leadership level in a C suite, then you can start thinking about how do you make them accountable. So for that you have to really look at like what is your current state of diversity inclusion of whatever the values you really take, whether it is Black Life Matters or women in a particular segmentation or in leadership or in tech, or you’re thinking about lgbt, whatever your stand is, just make sure you have goals towards it. And some of the goals are not easily accomplishable. Some of them has to go to the early talent side because you might not have enough pool to really play with. Once you have these goals and accountability setup really happening, then you really create awareness throughout the process of hiring and throughout the process of internal movement of employees. So are we really aligning to the goals and are we accountable with that? Can we create advocacy and stewardship within every employee? There are some companies which did exceptional work on this. Like if you look at like Zendesk did a very good job in terms of goals and accountability. Microsoft did a very phenomenal job in terms of how they really think about what are the different layers of diversity and inclusion they really think about. On top of it, they also include accessibility, people with disabilities, how they really include and how they really standardize the overall process. And now with that, what happens is once you have these goals and accountability measures, you can look at the complete funnel of talent lifecycle from a person really sourcing all the way, the person really leaving the company. So now you look at each particular step, what is all going on and then where all you can use AI and where all you can deploy automation now at each particular person level, with each particular user level, you have to manifest them. So when you’re really creating a job, let’s say as a hiring manager, you can start looking at, hey, what is the diversity and inclusion goals for the company has for this type of a job or this job category? What is the market really having? Like what is the market standards again is what is our current standards? Let’s say we have a mandate of 2,000 new women in tech and we open a developer job. The industry average is, let’s say 30% female. And the goal is to really bring 35% of the females in tech. And if that is the case, now, when you’re really writing the job description, when you’re really creating this job itself, whom you ask, referrals, how you really coordinate, everything can really rely on on that particular factor. Now when it goes to a recruiter or a sourcer, you have the same goals to really think about. And when you are sourcing, where do you source from? Do you go to a particular job board or do you really do campaigns or you really target people specifically for the diversity goals we have on top of the time to fill and the cost to fill and the quality of hiring. And now how do you differentiate them and now how do you discover them? How do you ask referrals, how you create diversity scores? Now once you really have a pool of people whom you can consider, now it goes to back to a hiring manager from a recruiter. And now based on the candidate preferences and how candidates were really connected with the diversity concepts and diversity messaging, you’re creating these codes and sharing who these people are. And then when employees are interviewing and the employees are really talking about who can really be promoted, you start thinking about like, hey, how are we aligning with the same goals? And if we can really play this throughout the talent life cycle, then it has a Much more stronger impact. Instead of really doing one shot equation about like what talent acquisition has to do. But the talent acquisition is the one which can take a very good unique take towards it, saying like, hey, this is the goal, this is what we need to do. And keep the awareness open across the talent lifecycle, from employee to a candidate to a hiring manager, then it becomes much more stronger. And then when you’re creating this employee resource groups within your employee experience, how do you really encourage people with specific backgrounds to really come forward and really push themselves to go to next level? At the end of the day, how leaders can view all this data together of where we are improving and where we are not. All this AI plays a very significant role in identifying people, in really creating scores, in matching people at every spot, giving a very personalized view view crunching data in the back end, looking at like what is the probabilistic value of somebody being a particular ethnic group or a particular gender to what is the deterministic based on the candidate’s validation or the talent validation, saying, okay, I’m this person, I really want to get into this particular segment. And then AI can really play a very, very significant role in crunching data and really showing very unique value.
Matt Alder [00:16:55]:
Props this year has shown us that it’s incredibly difficult to make predictions about what’s going to happen that are accurate. But I’m, I’m really interested to get your take on where do you think this is moving to? Where’s technology moving to? Where’s experience moving to? If we were having this conversation in sort of 12, 18 months time, what would we be talking about?
Mahe Bayireddi [00:17:17]:
So there are a couple of things really going on, right? So actually the whole digital transformation got accelerated by 10 years because of COVID And because of that there are a lot of trends which came into frontline how we view work. What is AI and automation going to do, how virtualization is going to really impact, what does decentralization means? Because if you’re too centralized, if a country goes down, you have, you have a major problems. So these are some of the things what we have seen with this talent is getting redesigned. So when you really think about talent is getting redesigned, talent itself has their own expectations and they have their own kind of requirements of what they’re expecting and where they want to go. But if you also think about employees and communities, they have different needs and they are struggling with entirely different problems altogether. Whereas companies are struggling, there are some companies which are doing really good, there are some companies which are doing really bad. And Based on the company’s stability and growth sectors, they’re looking the whole world differently. So now when the talent redesign is happening, from the expectations and the needs and the desires of enterprises to talent to employees, now you also have the work is actually reimagined right now. And when we really think about work, we never thought workplace will be disrupted at the level what we really thought. Even in US or even Canada, in most of the parts of Europe, 60% of the people can’t work from home. We talk about work from home as really ramped up and everything, but. But it’s only for the 40%. In that 40%, only maybe 10% used to do work from home. Right now all the 40% of the workforce are really doing work from home. But there are still 60% who are frontline workers, like manufacturing unit, line of sight, people who really work on specific jobs. Healthcare, retail, they all have to go to work. So if that is the case, what does workplace going to be look like? That’s a very complicated thought to really think about for that how do you design experiences? Because if people are not really meeting in person as they used to, and if they do meet in person, what is the kind of experience you need to deliver for them? And in that DNA plays a very important role. Then how are companies thinking about workforce itself? Because automation and AI are here for real. That particular reliance have right now accelerated to a next level, you name it. Right now, in every industrial company, specifically manufacturing units, AI almost went into like 4x in usage, whether it’s automation or robotics. And HR is no different. It will get really utilized at a different level. And I also believe after Covid, CHRO is in the spotlight and never previously chros have this kind of an admiration. In 2008, the hero is CFO. Right now the hero is the chro because it’s all about creating jobs and really bringing back so that companies can get stabilized. Where the companies are really weak or not really doing right things on top of it, the shelf life of knowledge and skills are getting shorter and shorter. So people have to be constantly learned. Those are the things where people have to think through this in a much more thoughtful way. But the last one is about work life. If you think about work life, employee wellness and engagement is right now in the forefront after Covid, like how we think about giving comfort, but also really making sure people can really be part of the purpose is top of the mind for most of the companies. So how these will shape up is a very, very unique spot. And those are the trends which we will think about in redesigning talent versus reimagining work.
Matt Alder [00:21:53]:
Final Question Tell us a bit more about your upcoming I Am HR event. What dates the event on and how can people sign up?
Mahe Bayireddi [00:22:00]:
I am HR is on December 8 to December 10. It starts on 8 and it is packed with a lot of really beautiful speakers who has a lot of unique thoughts about what they’re doing. And you can really register on phenompeople.comIMHR site where the registration is free. We have over 2000 already registered. We’ll be hitting more than 3000 people to this event so you will have an awesome experience throughout this event. Amateur is all about like bringing the unique minds of HR to really share what’s working with them and what’s not and what are the best practices in the middle of COVID and what are the things we can do together so that we all can get better at what we do? We believe there is a front stage and a backstage for hr. What we see in the front stage is what is a candidate and an employee doing in the backstage? What is a recruiter and the manager and the C suite is doing that’s not visible? So what we want to do is we want to bring all those different aspects into the the event so that people can know what is really working, what is not, so that they can really get better at what they’re doing.
Matt Alder [00:23:21]:
Mahe, thank you very much for talking to me.
Mahe Bayireddi [00:23:23]:
Thanks man.
Matt Alder [00:23:24]:
My thanks to Mahe. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
