In this episode Matt Alder talks to Gareth Jones from Chemistry
A few episodes back I spoke to Matthew Jeffery about an innovative global graduate recruitment campaign SAP had been running. On this week’s episode I dig a bit deeper into the story behind its success by talking to Gareth Jones from Chemistry who were the company who designed the recruitment process.
We also talk about technology and assessment in general covering a number of areas including:
• The biggest mistake most companies make when they are recruiting
• Using personal data to predict future performance
• The current and future role of algorithms in assessment
Gareth also shares his thoughts on the future of work and some of the emerging technology he is seeing in the assessment space.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:51]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 28 of the Recruiting Future podcast. A few episodes ago, I spoke to Matthew Jeffrey at SAP about their innovative graduate recruitment process. I was interested in digging a bit deeper and in this week’s episode I talked to Gareth Jones from Chemistry, the company that designed SAP’s assessment process. Gareth also always has an eye on the future and we talk about some of the tools and trends he’s seeing in the space.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest today is Gareth Jones. Hi, Gareth.
Gareth Jones [00:01:30]:
Hi, Matt. How are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:31]:
I’m very good. Would you just like to introduce yourself?
Gareth Jones [00:01:34]:
Yeah, sure. So I’m Gareth Jones and I’m the head of technology at a company called Chemistry Group, who you may have, may not have heard of. We are a change people, change business consultancy and at the core of everything that we do is assessment and we do an awful lot of work with large corporates predominantly around resourcing and re engineering their resourcing strategy. And my role in the business is to build the technology that we use to do that for a while.
Matt Alder [00:02:05]:
Okay. And what was, you know, tell us about your background to, you know, that got you into this, into this, into this job?
Gareth Jones [00:02:14]:
My background that got me into this job. Well, I’m a bit of a. It’s been a bit of a journey for me. I started in hr, so in the sort of the whole remit of people did 10 years there in large corporates for an HR role. Got a bit disillusioned with it and that’s when I stepped out into a journey of other roles. Sales, business development, consulting, but always in technology and people with. As a flavor. And I did spend some time running a recruitment business as well about seven or eight years ago. So I’ve always been in the kind of the fold of my fascination is technology and people.
Matt Alder [00:02:51]:
A long time in the industry. Yes. Might even say industry veteran?
Gareth Jones [00:02:54]:
No, I don’t think so. No, no, no.
Matt Alder [00:02:57]:
So if people haven’t come across chemistry before. You may have listened to the podcast I did a few weeks back with Matthew Jeffrey from SAP. He mentioned chemistry in the context of a graduate recruitment program that SAP had run where he had basically done automated online assessments for, I think it was 50,000 candidates. Now, I think it was your IP and your technology that kind of powered that. Can you sort of tell us a little bit about that campaign and what you guys. What you guys did and what you learned from it?
Gareth Jones [00:03:34]:
Sure, yeah. So, yes, that was really for SAP’s global graduate intake, which I believe was covering 70 countries and multiple languages. And they needed to bring that together, but didn’t really have the resource to pull that into one, I suppose, central point. So we work with them on that full campaign. So we helped kind of re engineer that whole graduate resourcing piece from initial attraction through to hire. And the key elements to that were the first thing we did was we designed and built the online screening tools which have had quite a bit of, you know, press. Matt’s talked about those that dealt with the vast. The volume of applicants they had and brought them all into a central place where they could. We could consistently benchmark them against what great looks like for an SAP graduate, which is a sales graduate, which is the first group we started on. We then designed and took that same what great looks like DNA, which is the heart of everything that we do, and we built it into the video screening, which are called hangouts, and the assessment centers, which were the third element in. So we had kind of a full suite, but the kind of the magic really happened in the applicant screening stuff because that’s where I think huge amount of sifting took place and allowed them to have a full hiring quota at the end of the process because the funnel was so rich.
Matt Alder [00:04:58]:
Now, one of the questions I think I ask almost everyone who comes on this podcast is, can you replace a recruiter with an algorithm? Now, I’ll be interested to know your thoughts on that, but maybe the question is slightly more complicated, slightly broader, which is, which bits of recruitment could you replace with an algorithm? Do you think that you can replace a recruiter completely with an algorithm? What’s your view on that?
Gareth Jones [00:05:27]:
So I think the answer is, I’d say no, not right now. We’re not into the sort of. We’re not ordering a hire that gets delivered at the door at the moment. But who knows what I do think, and there’s a lot of debate about it, let’s face it, mine. But I do think it’s A bit of a Sun headline thing in that what we knew, what we know is that we can replace some of the, some of the work they do. And it’s the, if you look at where we are at the moment, the applicant screening work, which we know already, just using existing technology that we use, is, you know, more quick and more accurate if you’ve got the right definitions behind it and a lot of wasted time for recruiters to do. So that bit definitely is already replaced by an algorithm, albeit not a hugely sophisticated one. But through a set of assessments we’re able to define what grit looks like well enough to narrow that applicant pool down to a good, well qualified set of individuals. So, yes, that can absolutely be done. And the future technology that’s out there that I’ve been looking at and we’re playing around with, broadens that scope massively to the point where actually the more interesting question for me is not whether you can replace a recruiter, it’s whether you can replace a psychologist.
Matt Alder [00:06:41]:
Can you replace a psychologist with an algorithm? Here we are redefining, redefine the question. We’re actually in your offices at the moment. Better not say that too loudly in case all the psychologists outside kind of storm in. I think that’s interesting actually, because presumably, even with the SAP work, there was a huge amount of presumably design type work that went into that, that involved humans. What was the sort of.
Gareth Jones [00:07:13]:
So effectively it was designing, fundamentally finding out what grade looks like. And we use sort of our IP and assessments to work that out. That’s key. And then simply, then simply it’s then taking that with the applicant screening tools, for example, it’s building bespoke assessment content. So we don’t do off the shelf stuff. So we’re actually tailoring the assessment so they reflect and find the people that are going to be, have the potential to do the role, the real potential, not just based on what university they went to, of what work experience they might or school have been to. So it’s far more accurate in that sense.
Matt Alder [00:07:47]:
And what do you think the biggest mistakes companies are making in kind of assessment and recruiting are at the moment? Is there anything that kind of consistently comes up?
Gareth Jones [00:08:01]:
Yeah, I think the thing that amazes me is that time and time again, even large sophisticated businesses don’t have a good idea what great looks like. They don’t have a consistent idea for key roles in the business. They need to roll out new strategy, enter a new market, transform their retail experience. All of these initiatives require the right people. And when you see how they’re defining what success is for those roles that are going to deliver on that strategy, it’s woefully inadequate. You know, in a lot of cases it’s still a job description or a person spec that’s been written by someone who’s currently in the job. There’s no defined framework to say what are the things that really will predict performance in this job. And it’s missing. And I still find companies with 50, 80, 100,000 employees, they’re still not doing it.
Matt Alder [00:08:48]:
Yeah, yeah, you mentioned you kind of touched on the future and technology that you were looking at and all that kind of stuff. What’s the most interesting and exciting thing you’ve kind of seen in terms of technology that people have developed or are developing that you think could be used within recruitment? Obviously not giving any secrets away about what you guys might be developing, but just stuff you’ve seen from other people.
Gareth Jones [00:09:16]:
Sure. Well, I think the interesting shift is that for a number of years we and others have measured, say our criteria. So in our world, values, motivations, behaviours and intellectual, we’ve been measuring those things in a very structured way for a long time through third party SHL type psychometric assessments. And what we’re seeing now is that with the way the fabric of the Internet now works and the way we as consumers behave and the things that we do online particularly, we’re leaving that vast digital footprint is a huge opportunity for us to add layers of accuracy to those things. So instead of me just asking you a set of questions around, you know, your values to determine what your value set is or what your personality is, actually there’s the opportunity exists out there for me to just kind of in inverted commas, observe you by looking at your social updates, what you’re saying, how you’re saying it, what your likes are, the stuff you put inside your LinkedIn profile, the things you say on social communities, your actual behavior that we can map by seeing how you connect on a social community with others or how you interact with us at work? Your health and nutrition data, all of these things we’re capturing and they, if you can look at them through the right lens, they also predict potential and performance. So for us it’s, I think the core still remains the same, but we’ve now got these fabulous multi layered different data sets that we can look at that can make that prediction of performance more accurate.
Matt Alder [00:10:55]:
I think that’s really interesting because a lot of people would have the kind of reaction to that as well. Actually. No, I don’t put very much about myself out there. And I think when they realize just how much information is trapped and it was too late, they kind of be terrified. And I think there’s a really interesting thing about privacy and how much privacy we actually don’t have. That could be a big. Could be a big debate moving forward.
Gareth Jones [00:11:24]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re coming to a tipping point with that. I think they say that the millennials don’t care about privacy, and I just don’t believe that’s true. I think they do care, but they, they’ve just wittenly walked into, you know, exchanging a. Access to something like Facebook for their entire, you know, data profile. And I think at some point we’re going to be reaching the point where we’re saying, hang on, whose data is it anyway? I’ve just done a post on it around. If I’m moving from company to company as an employee, why shouldn’t I take that data with me? Yeah, I’m leaving it dying in a workday instance or an Oracle instance at the moment. I can’t use that for my benefit. And if I’m the one who’s trying to find my own job, doing my own development, pay for my own benefits, etcetera, I need that data. So I think we’re going to come to a point where some described it, it could be as Magna Carta for proportions. I’m not sure it will be or not, but it could be that moment when we kind of say, hang on a minute, the data landscape has to shift in terms of ownership, part ownership as a minimum.
Matt Alder [00:12:32]:
So final question. One of the other guests I had on not so long ago was Stefan Kazriup, who is the CEO of upwork, which is the talent kind of network where, you know, massively leveraging people working remotely, you know, bringing kind of global freelance talent into. Into businesses. And we very much had a conversation that, you know, he obviously very strongly believes that that’s the, that’s the future of knowledge work. Is that a view you share? And if it is or if it isn’t, how important might, you know, the assessment or how you sort of tell whether people are appropriate for the, for the, for the job? Might be. Would it be ratings, what, you know, what you think? So putting you on there, putting you on the spot. I can see you thinking about this one.
Gareth Jones [00:13:31]:
Yeah, I think it’s all evolving, isn’t it? And I think the businesses like that, you know, there are more and more of us independent or having to do two roles, maybe a job and do something independent. And certainly organisations are looking to try and ultimately have large swathes of workforce either working independently or flexibly. I think with that, if you’ve got an environment like that where people are trading their services stuff and they’re communicating on the platform, actually that platform in itself has some incredible data about the.
Matt Alder [00:14:05]:
Behavior of those people, of course, and.
Gareth Jones [00:14:07]:
Could find some way of putting putting the right lens in the middle of all that and match people much more appropriately. Even you could get into which there which is being done at the moment, monitoring those updates, how often they put in a bid for work or how the conversation goes and using that to define things like trust signals and reputation and stuff like that. And I do know a couple of organizations that started out in the assessment space with new but familiar assessments and what they’re doing is shifting that layering social stuff over the top of it and turning that into your personal recommendation engine. So, you know, the fact is that this will take a view of you across your full social footprint and say you’re trustworthy because of your behavior. So that’s.
Matt Alder [00:15:01]:
We live in interesting times.
Gareth Jones [00:15:02]:
We do indeed. Yes. It’s very good, isn’t it?
Matt Alder [00:15:04]:
Gareth, thank you very much for talking to me.
Gareth Jones [00:15:06]:
You’re welcome, Matt. Thank you for having me.
Speaker C [00:15:08]:
My thanks to Gareth Jones. For show notes and past episodes of the podcast, please go to www.rfpodcast.com. you can also subscribe to the mailing list there and find out more about me on the Work with Matt Alder page. You can, of course, subscribe to the podcast itself on itunes and on Stitcher. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
