Talent acquisition is fundamentally about people making decisions, but how often do we stop to consider why people make the decisions they do? Whether it’s a recruiter screening a resume, a hiring manager assessing a candidate or a successful applicant deciding whether to accept the role, behavioral science plays a role in every step of the process.
Yet, despite its power, the psychology of hiring goes unnoticed, operating in the background rather than being used strategically. What if we could harness it to improve candidate experience, reduce bias, and make hiring more effective?
My guest this week is Stephen Reilly, an experienced Global Talent Acquisition & Talent Transformation Specialist. In our conversation, he explains how behavioral science and psychology influence hiring, why recognizing these patterns is critical, and how TA leaders can apply these insights to transform their processes.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Behavioral science and behavioral psychology
• Why behavioral science is so vital in TA right now
• Transparency in the candidate experience
• Small interventions that make a massive difference
• How recruiters are already using behavior science but might not realize it
• Apply science at scale to recruiting.
• Process optimization and evolution
• Advice to TA leaders on the first steps to take
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Hiring is driven by human behavior, but are we using that to our advantage? Behavioral science holds the key to influencing better decisions, improving the candidate experience, and making talent acquisition more effective. Keep listening to find out how support for this podcast is provided by isims. Isims is the hiring platform that you’ll never outgrow. I’ve got to tell you, some of their customers have some really cool stories about how they’re hiring. And businesses have changed with iSims, like Eagle View, a tech company that saved $2 million on their recruitment marketing and now hires twice as fast. There’s Benefit Cosmetics, a popular brand that saves 20 minutes per candidate during their screening process. And of course, Kingfisher, the home improvement company that will be very familiar to European listeners. Kingfisher increased their job offer acceptance rate threefold. These are just a few examples. For the last 25 years, ISIMS has helped thousands of the world’s largest and fastest growing brands hire the talent they need, often in challenging and competitive markets. Names like Microsoft, PetSmart, Children’s National Hospital, Greyhound Lines, and the Cheesecake Factory. ISims, comprehensive hiring platform, helps enterprise organizations hire by employing AI where and how you need it. To learn more, visit isims.com that’s icims.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:52]:
Acquisition is fundamentally about people making decisions. But how often do we stop to consider why people make the decisions they do? Whether it’s a recruiter screening a resume, a hiring manager assessing a candidate, or a successful applicant deciding whether to accept the role. Behavioral science plays a role in every step of the process. Yet despite its power, the psychology of hiring goes unnoticed, operating in the background rather than being used strategically, what if we could harness it to improve the candidate experience, reduce bias, and make hiring more effective? My guest this week is Steven Riley, an experienced global talent acquisition and talent transformation specialist. In our conversation, he explains how behavioral science and behavioral psychology influence hiring and how TA leaders can apply these insights to transform their processes. Hi, Stephen, and welcome to the podcast.
Stephen Reilly [00:02:52]:
Hello. Good morning. How are we doing?
Matt Alder [00:02:54]:
Very good, thank you. It is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself, tell everyone what you do, and also tell us why behavioral science in talent acquisition is such a focus for you now.
Stephen Reilly [00:03:09]:
Okay, let’s see if I can do this in really simplistic terms. First of all, a little bit about me. So I’m a senior leader in the talent space and I’m probably known for transforming and optimizing TA processes operations. Normally when an organization is going through the significant periods of change, you know, we’ve had some ups and downs in recent years, so that might be right. Sizing, downsizing, whatever else it might be, you know, acquisitions and changes. And I guess I’m also probably knowing. So people that do know me or have worked with me, I tend to be a bit of a master about stating the obvious. And that’s what I want to do a little bit about today as I introduce the subject around behavioural science and also behavioural psychology. So probably in its most simplistic terms, behavioral science could be described as the study of human behavior. And that study could be from, say, observation or experimentation in its highest form. And then equally, behavioral psychology is the study of the environment that can shape that behavior. And for ta, I think the most important element here is that we can shape that environment to change the behavior. So actually we have this control to be able to make change and actually change the behavior of, of humans, of which in our terms, in talent acquisition, those humans could either be candidates or they could be stakeholders or they could be team members. So I think that’s really important that the way that we study behavior and that the way that we then use the psychology to change people’s behavior is all within our power. I think what’s interesting here is marketeers, as I’m sure we would all agree. Marketeers have been doing this for decades. We know for them there’s the science, we know it’s an art. We all see the adverts on the television around Christmas. Some are telling you how cheap an item is. So rush out to a certain food department to go and buy some cheap product, or maybe it might be from those more prestigious brands that want you to, to feel something about their product. So we know that marketeers have been doing this for years about how to open more emails, buy more product, buy more widgets, or how to choose one, I guess one brand over another, but equally serve recruiters. So we also, and I, and I use recruiters in a, in a real broad sense there, whether that be agency recruiters of the past or talent acquisition, that we’ve actually been doing it as well. But we don’t either a know it or recognize it or we’ve never really looked at that in a more. Yeah, in, in a, in a more academic way. Should we say?
Matt Alder [00:06:18]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, I have to say this is one of my favorite subjects at the moment. I just think it’s so relevant and, you know, as you say, and we’ll probably discuss this kind of later in the conversation. It’s something that our industry just kind of does. Does anyway, you know, certainly on an individual persp. Just talk about again, we’ll talk about the sort of, the concepts and those kind of things around this a little bit later in the conversation. But just for now, give us a quick example of this in practice in ta, so people can get their heads around what we’re talking about.
Stephen Reilly [00:06:48]:
Yeah, I’ll give an example and it probably is worth saying, actually, I’m not going to double down here on the science. This is all just about introducing a tiny little subject or a couple of words or an idea and then actually, you know, seeing how that, how that could affect the recruitment space. So let’s just step back and think of something that we’re all familiar with. So we’ve, we’ve all been a candidate in our, in our life. We’ve all applied for a job. I’m hoping we’ve all applied for a job in some shape or form, whether that be recently or sometime in the past. So we’ve all been a candidate, we’ve all been a human that’s wanted to get a job in some shape or form. And then if we flip to the other side, which is the, let’s just call it briefly, the employer, they have a really simple recruitment process. So if we really got things in its spare terms, you would have almost, in four steps you’d have, you could apply, there would be a recruiter sift, there’d be a hiring manager assessment and an offer. Really simple four steps that could be done on a spreadsheet, could be done on email. You know, it really doesn’t matter. So we’ve got this kind of element where, but one, we’ve got the person being the candidate and then we’ve got some kind of employer process. So I’ll just introduce a couple of concepts. So I think the first one is confirmation bias. Now, funnily enough, it’s we, we know this in a, in a different term, which is often halo and horns effect and different areas. But it could be defined as our tendency to process, look at information, process information and interpret that. So it matches what we think from previous, maybe our, our own existing beliefs and from the halo and horns effect that we sometimes understand is which characteristics do you have yourself or do you hold dear and in which case can you then see that, do you confirm what you’re seeing in a CV during that recruiter sift phase that this person is then either good or bad and probably been talked about, you know, years ago about having at the bottom of your cv you know what, what you do or don’t like to do, what football team you may support or what sports you follow. And, and that can be positive or negative. Either someone agrees with the sports or likes, has similar, similar beliefs and in which case sees your capability in this role as better because they’re using that confirmational or flipping it the other way. One thing that I do see quite a lot or you hear about especially with a bit of turmoil in the industry is people’s longevity at organizations. So you might, yeah and you will know this and you talked about it. Someone has three one year contracts or six six month contracts and if the recruiter that’s doing the sifting has been in that organization for three or four years, immediately they haven’t. That candidate hasn’t got the same commitment to the work that they might have and vice versa. And therefore this is confirmation bias. And do you see Matt, it almost is really obvious. It doesn’t take a lot of describing that those things exist. So like there’s no clever science here. It’s really obvious.
Matt Alder [00:10:14]:
Yeah, I think particularly with the biased side of this, once you kind of say it, people, oh yeah, no, I do that or I’ve seen that, I’ve seen that kind of happen. But, but then when you’re kind of in it, it’s like no, no, no, this is the perfect person because I can’t really explain why, but it’s just those kind of things. So yeah, I think that happens all the time.
Stephen Reilly [00:10:30]:
The biases is important because from an HR perspective just the word bias makes us, you know, makes us, it’s a bad thing and therefore everything that we do, we try and get rid of it. So another one just as we’re talking about biases or authority bias, so that’s almost our tendency to be influenced by other people from a position of authority. So now imagine we’re doing again this very simple process, the recruiter sift and Matt sent his cv, I’m sitting there and reviewing it and he likes football or tennis or whatever else it might be in and I’ve got my confirmation bias. But what if your CV was sent by the MD or the CEO person that sits in a position of authority and you know, we have all these referral schemes. So I then probably wouldn’t even look at your CV if the, you know, if the MD’s sending it and then what I do is I would forward that CV on because if the, you know, the MD sits in this position of authority, then. And I would send that to the hiring manager saying, this has been referred by someone very senior. So again, we would find it difficult to have a more critical review of the CV because there’s this bias something in the background. Not because we particularly want to impress the md, there’s just something because they’ve come from a position of authority and they know the market. They clearly see something that we don’t 100%.
Matt Alder [00:12:03]:
And I say they’re definitely situations that people will certainly recognize to kind of dig into this a little bit more in terms of how we can use it, all those kind of things. It’s an interesting time because AI is obviously starting to redefine the process that you illustrate there and change, you know, communication. There’s this, obviously this huge ongoing debate about, you know, what AI should do and what humans would do and all that sort of stuff. Why is understanding behavioral science particularly important right at this moment?
Stephen Reilly [00:12:34]:
Well, that, that is a good one and it’s really difficult, actually, because often within the talent space, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve, eradicate bias or make things faster, quicker. But I think we tend to, I’ve said this previously and had loads of conversations. There’s almost this new shiny thing effect. You know, someone’s got something and it’s going to help us do something a lot bigger, quicker, faster, with less bias. You know, you can, you can review X many instead of, you know, in seconds and plug in particular this AI technology that can do everything for us. Where I think we’re in a really pivotal role is again, just my personal opinion. There seems to be this real wave of AI and actually from a buying perspective or from a consumer perspective, I think that organizations and individuals are just, are almost feeling, if they don’t get on the bandwagon, if they don’t plug it in, if they don’t use it, and we will know that every single TA product out there has AI in it and they will tell you that AI does this better. But I don’t know whether even thinking around that authority bias element, are we listening to, say, people like yourself or people posting on LinkedIn or actually the suppliers that we, we desperately need to use these products and if we don’t, we’re suddenly going to be behind. But are we in a bit of a difficult situation here that it’s almost becoming too easy to plug things in when we haven’t paused, stepped back and said what are we actually trying to do? What output are we trying here? And what effect will plugging this in have? And that I think is the hardest thing to do at the moment because every person in a position of TA that may have bud will be encouraged to plug something in to make their system more efficient, more effective. Big question is why? What bit are they trying to make more effective and why? And that for me is probably the biggest question. Are we just doing it because it’s there and it’s available? And we think again, it’s, you know, from this confirmation bias from our peers or, and here’s another one, actually this relates to you, Matt, probably more, more personally and another one. So an interesting way to answer that question. So we’ve also got something called messenger effect. And, and that is in essence another cognitive bias, if you will, where we will judge the validity of something based upon someone else giving that message, someone that we trust. So actually in this particular podcast, I’m the, if you like, the authority figure, even if it is a self professed role that I’m taking to make this example. And you’re actually the messenger. So because I’m, you’re, you’re the broadcaster in, in essence, and that could even be a newsread or it really doesn’t matter, I’m the authority figure, people are more likely to trust the message that I’m saying and listen to me, because you are the messenger and in which case the messenger is the person they trust. And I don’t know whether we’ve got this slight wave within our industry that we haven’t sort of stepped back and if everyone’s talking about AI and everyone’s talking about widgets, are we just all on the back foot and thinking everyone else is behind or is the reality that we’re actually, we are still a way behind and we are still sifting CVs the old fashioned way and we do still have spreadsheets on our computers. So I don’t know whether the industry is kind of expecting us to all think that we’re 10 years further ahead than we actually are. Do you see what I mean? I mean with that one.
Matt Alder [00:16:44]:
Yeah, and I see exactly what you mean. And yeah, the reality is much more nuanced when you kind of sort of dig down and see what people are really doing. But I think there’s also, there’s, there’s, I can’t, I, I can’t remember the name of this bias, but there’s a, there is another one where the first thing that you hear that sounds credible about something becomes your truth around it. And I think that is working with AI in this industry because everyone constantly talks about co pilots and augmenting and it’s all going to be, we’re all going to sort of work together, humans and humans and robots and it’s, it’s kind of the dominant narrative. And I would challenged to say is that actually the case or will more of recruitment be replaced by automation than we think? Or is that not possible? Will it be more human? So I think that sometimes people take those kind of mental shortcuts and that’s certainly an example of something that’s become the kind of the big narrative in the industry. And it’s also very conveniently quite an optimistic way of looking things. It’s like I’m still going to keep my job, but I’m going to be enhanced by this amazing technology and actually nothing’s going to change. So you know, there’s, there’s kind of, there’s a lot going on there.
Stephen Reilly [00:17:51]:
That’s a really good point as well because we, we within the examples I’ve, I’ve given you, I’ve talked about almost the, relate the, the employer relationship and I think we always think about AI from an employer’s relationship perspective. So the relationship with our process, how can we automate this, how can we save ourselves time, automate this part to give ourselves time to do something else? But I think we often forget and something that I almost started with, it’s our opportunity to change the way people feel by changing their behaviors or the environment. And we rarely think about the candidate. And that’s where I started. We’ve all applied for a job, so we start plugging in technology or thinking about plugging in technology almost exclusively for the benefit of the employer. And we rarely, rarely think, well, actually how will this change the behavior of the candidate? And that’s not particularly. I’ll give an example. So as I started, we’ve all applied for a job. As soon as you hit, you read the job description, it reads beautifully. Well, you see yourself in this role. You prep your CV to make sure you’ve got all the buzzwords because someone’s telling you that AI’s automatically selecting your CV and you hit send and, and you’re really chuffed. You see, you see yourself working for this amazing organization. But then what happens as soon as you’ve hit submit and you know, potentially it’s LinkedIn or whatever else it is and there’s 100 applications or you’re told, you know, in a WhatsApp group that loads of people have applied. What happens to you then? What are your feelings? What is your behavior? Then after hitting submit, you start feeling apprehension. You know, hold on a minute, have I done everything? Did, was my cover letter long enough? Did I put enough keywords? So what will I do? Actually, I’ll leave it. And now wait a minute, should I contact the hiring manager? Should I look for the hiring manager? Should I send them a quirky message? Do I want to use the authority bias? Do I know anybody else in this organization that can, you know, contact the recruiter and give my application a nudge? And then, you know, through this kind of apprehension, you sort of say to yourself, no, wait a minute, I’ll do nothing. I’ll do nothing for a week, I’m just going to leave it. But then that week then goes to two weeks. So then you go through, well, have I done enough? Are they looking at my cv? So all of this is just the feelings and the behaviors of the individual after they hit submit. Now what if on that advert instead, instead of it just being an advert that’s clearly about wanting people to apply. What if you said we review CVs on a Monday and we review CVs on a Monday. So if you send your CV on a Tuesday, you’ve got to wait a week and on Tuesday we get back to everybody whether they’ve been successful or not. And on Wednesdays is when we arrange interviews immediately by putting that information on that job. Advertising would absolutely remove all of the apprehension about the waiting, about what they could do more. You could even put there and say, you know, we don’t take outside influence. We review every application fairly on a weekly basis. So there’s things that we can do and that’s not tech related, that’s just something. It’s just. What sounds really silly is it just feels like good practice. We don’t do it. We spend our time looking for this magic pill to attract thousands of applications and then want to build in technology that can review all those applications and we just forget the fact that through clever, in fact not even clever, just pausing for some thought. How can we make the candidates think and feel better about the process that we’re putting them through? And that to me is a real fundamental of when we have this behavior element and the psychology and the science versus the juxtaposition of cramming in new shiny things that have got an AI type.
Matt Alder [00:22:24]:
You kind of really sum up what I love about behavioral science there. Because actually sometimes the Interventions are really small, putting an extra line on something, but makes a huge difference, you know, radically improves the candidate experience just by, you know, managing expectations in that kind of way. And I think when any kind of technology has been layered into talent acquisition over the last 20 years, things have got worse because people don’t think from that candidate perspective. They don’t think about the behavior of people going through systems. And I just think that we’re at a stage now, you know, with AI reinventing things again, where we can really be scientific about how we think about this. We said right at the beginning that recruiters ta people kind of do these kind of things naturally on an individual basis. How do we do these at scale? How do we kind of systemize this? How do we think more scientifically about recruitment as a whole?
Stephen Reilly [00:23:18]:
Let’s actually just mention something that recruiters do do well. And one for me about manager. You just mentioned it there actually, and it made me think about managing expectations. And then I’ll come to the scale part in a second. It helps my mind work in these different sort of segments. So one thing that agency recruiters do or can do particularly well, not at scale, but from a day to day perspective is closing a candidate. And I go back 25 years to all that training, which was if you can manage the expectation and close the candidate just before they get to offer and close the candidate low and you close your client high and hopefully there will be some ground in the middle and therefore you set the expectations in both areas and if you come back with an offer that’s in the middle, essentially the client, the customer gets the person they want at the price that they want and the candidate gets a bumping Sutton salary and they’re really happy. It’s really tough to do it the other way where you make someone an offer that’s less than they’re currently on and of course they don’t take the role. So that’s something that we’re just that little segment there about managing expectations is taught and it’s taught to agency recruiters. But you’re not making offers every minute. You’re making an offer a day or an offer a week or whatever else that might be. So the question is, how do we do this at scale? Well, I think we’ve got to look at our honestly, we’ve got to look at our training. And this is what I was talking to someone not so long ago and this could be going a little bit too far in the future, but we’ve talked about the center of Excellence now, at the moment, centre of excellence within ta, broadly within TA or talent, has kind of been quite narrow. In essence, it’s been to manage processes or optimization. I wonder whether as we start to introduce more technology and AI becomes more and more prevalent, whether at scale optimization teams that specifically have a behavioral psychology slant to continue to evolve processes to match the technology that is now available. And, and, and you know, it could be an example here. I thought of one earlier actually. So you’ve got verbatim effect, which is basically no one remembers, no one remembers all the detail. If you listen to this podcast next week, you are not going to remember all of the words. In fact, you’re not going to remember all of the things that we’ve talked about. But what you will do is take the essence away that there is some psychology that we can use to help make people feel better about the process they’re in. So if you take that in a hiring scenario, particularly say that hiring manager does their assessment, which might be an interview, we know that there’s great technology out there now that we didn’t have 10 years ago that can listen to the conversation, write it all up and then plug it into machine to potentially do some scoring. Now that is really, really useful because it’s taking a behavioral psychology element that creeps into the process. Hiring managers won’t take consistent notes. We know if they’re taking lots of notes, they’re then not paying attention to the candidate. So there’s little things like this where that automation of note taking and then the analysis could be really, really useful at scale. But how do you build the right process around it? How do you then get to ensure that you have both the consistency for the hiring managers, but then also the consistency of the analysis? Because if you’re then once again recording every single word, are you then asking hiring managers after the interview to then read the transcript? Then that bit wouldn’t kind of make sense, would it? Because then you’ve done the efficiency bit, you’ve listed every word. You then wouldn’t expect them to spend 45 minutes doing the transcript and then kind of scoring off it. So I think we will find that within the center of excellence, we will have really smart process people that bring in some of these things that can do that little bit of a step back. And for an organization, instead of saying great news, I listened to Matt’s podcast and there’s this great little widget out there. I think you should plug it in. Great, we can afford it. I will go and buy this widget we sort of step back and say, hold on a minute, where will this fit into the process? Why do we want it? Why do we need it? Is it replacing? Is it enhancing? Is it making it worse? Is this just another part of the process now that’s elongated the experience? Or potentially if we do have to sit there and review the transcript afterwards and that takes two weeks, we’ve just then absolutely destroyed our candidate experience. I think there’ll be these, I don’t want to call them process people, but those that really look at it from an optimization perspective. Otherwise we’ll just end up plugging in so much tech. It will just be an elongated process that really doesn’t work for anybody, both the client, the organization and also the candidate.
Matt Alder [00:29:02]:
No, absolutely. And I think you’re kind of, I think you’re giving a good sort of vision of future there. So kind of final question, so sum all this up for us. How do you think this is going to move forward? And also, what advice would you give to any TA leaders listening about their sort of first steps on. On a behavioral science journey?
Stephen Reilly [00:29:22]:
Just pause, just pause just for a second. I think that’s the most important thing. We tend to be either really reactive, have these extra influences, act like Magpie sometimes going after those shiny things, the grass is always greener. If we just pause just for a second and thought, and did a little bit of research, thought about the candidate, start asking some of those questions. So just doing a bit of research around, like I said, around the messenger effect and confirmation bias. Are we masters of our own destiny or are we plugging things in because of what people are telling us to do? Or maybe the business is doing. And I’ll give you one example here that really made me laugh. And this is kind of like the state of play that I think we’re in sometimes. So I’m going back about 10 years, but I was working for an organization where the HRD had received an email from the CEO. So based upon some of the psychology that I’m talking about that had, you know, been sent something by a supplier over email that said, we need to use blockchain in hr, get on with it. And, you know, it’s like the new. It’s the new thing. And I’m sure hr, I’ve been told that HR can really maximize this. And so this HRD then, you know, down the chain sends the email again going, we need to look at blockchain and how we review CVS and hr because it’s going to be the new thing. And My response to that was, look, while we’ve still blockchain could be great about, you know, understanding people’s credentials and keeping that safe. But while we’re still telling our hiring managers to photocopy passports that their candidates are bringing in and then leave them in our top drawers, we’ve got a way to go. So it’s great to be aspirational and think the blockchain is going to save everything. But while you’ve got these nonsense processes that you’ve kept for years and can’t get rid of for whatever reason, that’s where you should be looking. That’s where you should be spending your time. That’s where your risk is, not the fact that you’re going to get behind because everyone else will be using blockchain. And I thought about that before yesterday when I was just doing a bit of prep for this. It just makes me laugh how that magpie element and that top, you’ve got to do this. And we never stop, pause, see what we’ve got, analyze. And actually, you could make massive improvements just from doing a bit of research, spending a bit of quiet time. And I think most recruiters inherently, right back to the start of what we talked about, Matt, as we opened this, recruiters do a lot of behavioral psychology themselves every single day, almost through a natural ability or capability, I think just take the time to pause, see what you do best, and update and optimize your processes accordingly. Just pause.
Matt Alder [00:32:39]:
Stephen, thank you very much for joining me.
Stephen Reilly [00:32:42]:
Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:32:44]:
My thanks to Stephen. You can follow this podcast on Apple, Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on 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.
