Understanding and assessing talent is something I don’t think we talk about in enough detail in our industry. Advances in both technology and neuroscience are challenging traditional thinking in recruiting if this will be another key topic for me this year.
To get the conversation started my guests this week have a simple fascinating story to share. Eric Castien and Andries Van der Leij are the founder and CTO of Brainsfirst. Brainsfirst is a Dutch company that uses cognitive psychology and machine learning to help elite football teams identify future talent. They have brought their learnings into the business world and have some incredible insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Talent identification in elite football
▪ Studying the link between specific brain function and performance
▪ Learnability over capability
▪ How understanding brain skills can drive talent redistribution
▪ Only assessing skills you can actually quantify
▪ Seeing a role as a set of desired behaviours
▪ Focusing on future fit
▪ Eliminating bias
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Chronofy, the scheduling platform for business and HR professionals. Don’t let impersonal and slow interview scheduling stop you from acquiring top talent. Interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting. All that back and forth makes for a poor candidate experience, and finding a time is simple. When you offer slots based on real time availability, it’s totally secure and you stay in complete control of who can book times in your calendar and when. Start the new year right and transform your interview scheduling with Chronofi Scheduler. To find out more, go to www.chronify.com recruitingfuture. That’s www.chronify.com recruitingFuture and Chronofy is spelled C R O N O F Y.
Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 329 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Understanding and assessing talent is something I don’t think we talk about in enough detail in our industry. Advances in both technology and neuroscience are challenging traditional thinking in recruiting, and this is going to be another key topic for me this year. To get the conversation started, my guests this week have a simply fascinating story to share. Eric Castien and Andries Van der Leij are the founder and CTO of Brains First. Brains first is a Dutch company that uses cognitive psychology and machine learning to help elite football teams identify future talent. They’ve brought their learnings into the business world and have some incredible insights to share. Hi Andries. Hi Eric. Welcome to the podcast. Could you just introduce yourselves and tell us what you do?
Andries Van der Leij [00:02:24]:
Yes, absolutely. My name is Andries Van der Leij. I have a background in cognitive neuroscience and now I am CTO at Brainsfirst and I am a little bit in between science and products and actually translating science to business needs and vice versa.
Eric Castien [00:02:47]:
My name is Eric Castien. I have a background in journalism and entrepreneurship. My role as a founder is bridging between theory and practice and trying to make all science work for HR professionals and professionals in sports and education too.
Matt Alder [00:03:10]:
Now the reason that we’re talking is I don’t think in our industry we talk enough about assessment, how it works, the science behind it, where that science meets technology, and how that sort of relates to making great decisions about talent. And you have an absolutely fascinating approach and way of working that I just really want everyone to hear about. So give us a bit of background to what you do and how you got Here.
Eric Castien [00:03:41]:
Yeah, I think it’s a good idea that I will start with the history of Brainsfirst. I think it was about 2011, 2012, those years I was living in Spain, to be precise, in Barcelona. I was writing books about talent identification in elite football. And with Barcelona, the club just around the corner of my house, and Real Madrid a few hundred kilometers away, I was able to visit both clubs frequently to gather information about the topic I was writing a book on. And if you visit a training of such a football club the first time, you are a little bit impressed by those football stars, and you’re looking around and everything behind you and in front of you, everything is impressive. But the third time, or maybe the 25th time, in my case, you have to discover something new or you quit visiting the trainings. And so the 26th or 7th, I don’t know, one of those times, I was standing behind the sidelines of the training center. I was looking at very intelligent performing people, the football stars. They were recognizing patterns, they were processing information. They were switching their attention so fast I could not really understand how they are able to do it. And at the same time, I realized that those football stars, like in that time, Ronaldo at Real Madrid and Deco and Ronaldinho at FC Barcelona, it was a little bit earlier, they are called dumb footballers. Footballers, football players. So not so smart people and just footballers. And I was not getting that, because if I was looking at those players, they were performing at such a high level and not only their, their muscles or their body, but especially in between their ears. And that was fascinating me then. It still fascinates me, by the way. And I was writing that book about talent identification. And I went back to some people I was interviewing before, and I said, where exactly do you think the. The difference is made between elite football and not or non elite football? And every theoretical and every expert was telling me that difference is made in between the years. And I was thinking, okay, but what exactly is happening in between their ears? And they were all telling me that they didn’t know and they really wanted to know, but they had no clue what was happening in between all our ears. And then I was going back to the neuroscientist I was interviewing for the book. And they recognized the strange thing, that smart people are doing stupid things in certain context and vice versa. And in this case, not so smart school smart football players, I don’t call them not so smart, but in the streets behind me, they were cold, not so smart, and they were performing on a very highly intelligent level. And that was the start that I wanted to find out how is it possible that intelligent people performing not so intelligent in other contexts and vice versa. And that was the seed what was planted to finally grow into brain first company.
Matt Alder [00:07:48]:
You’ve got me hooked now. I’m kind of hanging on, hanging on what happens next? So I mean how did you break that down? How did you find out what was going on in the brains of footballers and turn into a science?
Eric Castien [00:08:01]:
Yeah, I went back to the neuroscientist. I asked them is it possible to do, grab that specific intelligence I am looking for to understand what makes them specifically intelligent? And they said yeah, how do you call it? And I said it call it football intelligent or game intelligent. And they said I don’t know what you exactly mean by that, but let me introduce you to two persons on this. One of them, and Ilya Slichter is our colleague, is a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam and Andy Snilya told me we are busy studying that kind and Andy’s going to explain it later that kinds of human performance magic as we call it in the streets. But let, let us try to, to measure the brain functions of elite players and find out if there is a link between specific brain functions and their field performance. So we created assessment games, the brain based assessment games of brain. First we call it the Neuro Olympics and it was based on neuroscientific tasks used in healthcare. Instead of boring tasks, it was gamified. We made it online adaptive and the aim is to challenge four brain regions to outperform yourself, to challenge yourself to perform well on those brain games. In 2016, three years after the start, it proved that there was a clear link between brain function performance and field performance. We measured about 800 pro players and youth players aged 10 to 30. And the pro players, they showed incredible performance on specific tasks. Tasks, sorry, for example, speed of information processing. So we all can see things happen on television or in the stadium, but are we able to make the right choice and decision at lightning speed at the pitch too? Those people are. The speed of attention is another example. How fast are you aware of changes in play? And another one is overview. You need working memory capacity at highest level to really grab in your head what’s in your mind, what’s going on around you and take that into consideration to make the right choices or to make the right decision on the pitch. So if you know what you’re looking for as a club, what you’re looking for in youth players Then you can use the specific brain configuration in talent identification. And that’s what we finally made possible. So you can use the assessment games of brains first until 2016, especially in elite football, and after 2016, also outside the football world.
Matt Alder [00:11:15]:
Tell us a bit more about that in terms of what, what have you sort of found out about talent and how can elite football or elite sports translate into the sort of the broader business world?
Andries Van der Leij [00:11:28]:
So when we first started off, we had a quite the unique problem. So the logic approach is to, for instance, study football intelligence, is to craft an intelligence test. And there were a lot of companies who were doing that at the same, at that time, basically a sort of test that resembles a test that you would take when you have your exam for your driving license, football situations, and to see indeed whether players can recognize football situations that ask for specific actions better or faster or more accurate than others. However, we soon discovered that that was not the right approach. What we needed to do is not to assess the capability of a football player, because what we wanted is to assess learnability, to assess specific skills that make a young player, because that was the business case, very young players that still have to learn how to develop into a football player and to assess whether these players are actually have the brains to absorb all this information and to learn faster than others and indeed develop into the professional players that these clubs wanted them to grow into. So it was another kind of approach. So what we did was what we tried to find out, because we have a background in cognitive neuroscience. And what that field does is that they try to map functions, cognitive functions, things like memory, attention, how you decide things, how you group, how you group the things that you observe into, into structures or in how you organize information inside of your working memory, how, how you anticipate on information that is that that evolves while you are observing the world, how that maps to brain structure. I myself was doing studies on individual differences. I was involved in a huge project where we were scanning hundreds of people in MRI scanners and having them perform all kinds of tasks. IWIA was specialized into working memory and basically the prefrontal cortex functioning. And we developed the task that was tapping into this very, very low level cognitive building blocks of cognition, things like memory, attention, speed, anticipation, decision making, workflow. We developed these games with a specific aim to say something about learnability in very young football players and gamified them so they were also fun and easy to do in a relatively uninstructed way for very young children with all these different backgrounds in terms of educational level, because football is a sport for everyone, right? So we collected thousands, we made these games that were fun and we collect thousands of data points. And what we do is we crafted these games in a way that they make maximal use of validated academic tasks, but were more fun because academic tasks are not so fun to do. They tap into all these brain structures that are distributed across the entire brain, but they’re predominantly tapped into what we call prefrontal cortex functioning or executive functioning. What we discovered that basically every brain of those football players was unique. And what talent defines is a complex interplay of background and sort of natural talent and the way you start to learn within the environment or the context. And what we now find is that almost all brains, whether it’s a footballer or a person that applies for a job in a company, has at least one brain scale that sort of strikes out or is actually quite, quite strongly present or dominant compared to these other brains. And that is what fascinates us. We go, we go, we go past the traditional assumptions underlying this IQ that you have to be good at everything, language, numeracy, etc. And have to sort of make a sort of homo universalis, a person that is good at everything and can do everybody and see a way more interesting pattern that all these brains are unique, but what makes them unique is a specific, specific talents on a level that is so hard to assess from the outside because they are so fundamental and so low level.
Matt Alder [00:16:41]:
There’s so much stuff there that is so relevant to how talent acquisition works and spots talent for businesses and how people do their job. So much stuff. I know that you use this in sort of lots of different industries. Could you give people some examples of roles other than footballers that, that you’ve used this approach successfully in a good.
Eric Castien [00:17:04]:
Example of someone who was performing at the highest level in, in football. And during the first years we were focusing on the dentistry, as, as I told you, and in 2000, I think it was 16, and we met someone and he was performing in the early. No. Yeah, in the early 90s in the. On the Dutch national professional level in football. And he got injured and by accident, his neighbor, he was asking him, he was inviting him to his working environment and he, he asked him, why don’t you come to have a look where I work? And you’re at home recovering and every day is the same, so come and join me for a day at my working place. The working place was the, the, the air traffic control tower at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. And this football player, he was not thinking even about working in another environment than in football. But he was going there, he liked it, and he forgot about it, and that was it. I think it was one and a half year later, he seemed to be injured too badly to recover and to come back at the professional level. So we had to choose another career. And the same neighbor, he asked him, why don’t you come work at our place? And he said, why? I’m a football player, I don’t have an education, and I can’t do the smart thing you were doing in the air traffic control tower. And the neighbor said, yeah, but what exactly do you do as a central defender in football? And he said, well, I try to recognize patterns, I try to act fast, I try to process information fast and things like that. And the neighbor, he starts laughing and he said, okay, so you’re doing the same thing as I do. And the football player was thinking, you’re kidding me. No, no, I think you’re doing the same thing as I do. Please come again and talk to my boss. And okay, for this story, it takes too long to take it from day to day. The punchline of this story that that football player, he applied for a job and he was tested, and he turned out to be the highest level of air traffic control tower agents. At this moment. He’s still, after 20 years, he’s still working in the air traffic control center. And he introduced us after hearing our story in 2016 to air traffic control industry. And after two years of internal research, andriy s they proved that also air traffic control centers are looking for specific brains. And finally, it’s a little bit similar to the football brain, but not to a football general brain, but for a specific role at the football field, namely central defender. And the central defender’s brain has similarities with the air traffic controller brain. And what Anders told you, if you are able to dig deeper and to look at another more biological level, then you can switch talents, then you can help talent distribution redistribution work. So if someone can switch from elite football to air traffic controller, it’s also possible maybe, and to switch from financial controller to a software tester or from an accountant to a data analyst. So what we do is enabling talent distribution by collecting objective brain data matching cognitive demand and supply. And that’s what we basically do in the core. So enabling talent redistribution.
Matt Alder [00:21:16]:
And that sort of brings me on nicely to my next question. I mean, this is. This is fascinating stuff that I could literally talk for hours about, but to kind of pull that down into some sort of Practical outputs for talent acquisition leaders who are, who are listening to the, to the show. What would your advice be in terms of how they think about talent and assessment and mobility between jobs based on the research and the findings that you, that you’ve discovered?
Andries Van der Leij [00:21:44]:
What we discover again and again is that a lot of the things that we do are still, even if we try really, really hard, still based on a lot of assumptions. So a lot of the traditional psychology based assessment world is basically, okay, let’s make a competency list and map out all the skills and the hard skills and the soft skills that we need. This person needs to do a lot with texts. So probably verbal IQ is important. So we make these assumptions and we try to stay close to the thing that we think that we want working with text and try to assess that. But that is assessing on experience. Just like this example where it didn’t work with the football players that you can’t assess if you are good at the ability to learn football by assessing football, because they have to still learn football. And I think that companies need to, they have to start thinking alongside the same ways. So be more flexible in what you actually want because the world is so rapidly changing that you have to be more abstract in what you want. Jobs are disappearing. They become roles right now. And if you want to hire for more abstract roles, don’t keep, don’t think that you can solve that puzzle with, for instance, stating out lists with soft skills because the problem stays the same. How do you assess these soft skills? What does it mean that you want a lifelong learner or an agile worker? As long as you, if you can’t quantify what you want and if you can’t assess whether a person is actually good at those soft skills because what does it mean that the person is a lifelong learner or an adaptive player or a team player, whatever. If you don’t have a good model, especially in a big organization where you as an HR professional have to work with other HR professionals who might very well have completely different ideas about what you are trying to achieve, then that won’t help you as much. And the solution is actually to make it even simpler. Our solution is to make it simpler. What you should do is to start thinking. If you think about work or roles, you have to think about work and roles as a set of desired behaviors. And those behaviors you can assess, just like a football player is performing, behaving in a certain desired way, you can assess those behaviors and then you can start working down from there to translate those behaviors to Skills you actually can measure objectively.
Matt Alder [00:25:10]:
That’s really interesting in terms of a lot of the conversations that are going on at the moment about bias and assessment, whether that’s unconscious bias or conscious bias or systemic bias, or whatever type of. Whatever type of bias it is. So is this a kind of a genuinely objective way of working? Is it a way to get bias out of the recruitment process?
Andries Van der Leij [00:25:33]:
We were involved in football for a long time and the bias discussion is not new at all. But it wasn’t nearly as hot as it is for the last two years. We just happen to have a very good solution for specifically this topic. Because of course, our premise was that we wanted to make a test that gives every young football player a valid shot. And indeed, what we try to do is, okay, what is what you can objectively assess without prejudice, without ambiguity or a disagreement between coaches, I.e. the desired behavior A person needs to be a keeper in football needs to be very, very fast. You know this because a slow keeper just won’t make it. And we try to translate those things back to the unobservables, basically brain scales. And indeed we really strongly feel that that is one of the solutions for this bias problem. Because if you want a person, for example, that is a fast decision making because you know that the business is evolving in a way that the speed of delivery needs to increase, etc. You should be able to say just that. I want fast decision makers. We, or a solution like ours, can translate that to basic brain skills. And then we just compare candidates to those benchmarks. And none of the CVs or letters or educational backgrounds or college degrees matter then anymore because you do a direct mapping from brain talents basically to desired behavior. That’s actually what we’re trying to do right now. So our old solution, or our football solution is that we measure, like Eric told you, we measure a lot of people, hundreds and hundreds of people, and we do data modeling and we translate success marcus value of player or position success in a football team back to two brains. And then we have benchmarks and we translate young players to scores. Now, since the world is so rapidly changing, we see that machine learning is not always the good approach, because a data driven approach is always by definition historical. You use the people that are already working for your company and then you make a model to translate the successful employees of the past. And we can translate that to a desired brain model. But those people are around there for quite some time and it doesn’t allow you to hire, for instance, future fit or learnability so right now we are trying to or we have a system where we actually go in behavioral scientists and psychologists and neuroscientists and we assess together with the team what is the desired behavior of this specific role for the future. Then you have roles or T shaped or even M shaped now. Or people have. These organizations are changing rapidly, but we try to make it as tangible and concrete as possible. How should the decision making be? What kind of problems do these people have? Should a person be very, very meticulous and not make mistakes? Or should is speed of acting very important? And we map it out and then we get a sort of behavioral pattern and that that pattern we can translate to a brain profile. And we think that that’s the way to go because that allows you to align your HR strategy with basically your business strategy. What should our business be doing in the next couple of years? What kind of roles will help us be more competitive, perform better, etc. Etc. And you also accept that the people that you hire still need to learn whatever age they are, whatever background they have when they come into your company. The learning just starts. And that you see all around. For instance, in companies like Google that don’t ask for a college degree anymore, train them at the location, have these own in house training programs. You see it all around. These old premises are changing and looking back to data doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s not fast enough.
Matt Alder [00:30:45]:
Andries, Eric, thank you very much for talking to me.
Eric Castien [00:30:48]:
It was a pleasure.
Andries Van der Leij [00:30:49]:
Absolutely. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:30:52]:
My thanks to Eric and Andries. 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.
