It’s not often that you get to have a conversation with an actual robot, but that’s exactly what I was able to do at TA Tech in Lisbon last week. TA Tech is an industry conference dedicated to the cutting edge of recruiting technology, and it certainly lived up to its billing this year.
As well as a robot and TNG the company behind it, I was also able to interview a number of the other conference speakers.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Andreea Wade from Opening.io talking about algorithmic bias
- Rene Bolier talking about the importance of purpose
- Adam Gordon talking about world-class marketing techniques
- Pedro Chaves and Laura Visan from the European Commission talking about skills ontology.
- Elin Oberg Martenzon from TNG talking about TENGAI and robot interviews.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment. Advertising in real time spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Robot [00:01:04]:
Hello, my name is Tengai.
Robot [00:01:06]:
And I’m pleased to be on the Recruiting Future podcast.
Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
And I’m Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 187. It’s not often that you get to have a conversation with an actual robot, but that’s exactly what I was able to do at TA Tech in Lisbon last week. TA Tech is an industry conference dedicated to the cutting edge of recruiting technology and it certainly lived up to billing this year. So are robots poised to replace recruiters? Well, you’ll just have to wait until a bit later in the show to find out. In the meantime, I’m delighted to share some of the extremely insightful conversations that I had with some of the conference speakers. To start with, you’re going to hear from Andreea Wade from Opening IO, Rene Bolier from Onrecruit, and Adam Gordon from CandidateID.
Andreea Wade [00:01:53]:
My name is Andreea Wade, co founder and CEO of Opening IO. We are a data science team that built a recommender engine for the recruitment and HR industries. We sell from into ats, into job boards, also big agencies or direct employers.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
So you were talking at the Recx event yesterday. Can you tell us a little bit about your topic?
Andreea Wade [00:02:20]:
Sure, yeah. So I spoke yesterday at reqx and I spoke about algorithmic bias. I think it’s quite a current topic and as a company that it’s, you know, we’ve been in there in the depths of it for the last four years. Sometimes as you listen to the discourse out there, you realize that there are bits and pieces of information that are missing. So my aim with the talk yesterday is to give a little bit more insight into how bias happens, because very often we think algorithmic bias and we think of biased data sets. But what I, what I explained yesterday is that bias can happen way before you collect the data and then it can also happen at various different stages of the, of the building of the deep learning models.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
I mean, that’s a, that’s a really interesting topic. Can you tell us a little bit more about those kind of early stages of bias and how they occur?
Andreea Wade [00:03:18]:
Sure. So I think one of the important things to understand about building algorithms is that, you know, how does that work? The first thing that an engineer does when is putting together a model is going, what is this model trying to accomplish? I was explaining yesterday that let’s say if you’re a credit card company and you say, oh, we want to predict credit worthiness, okay, what does that mean? That could be quite a nebulous concept. So then you have to give it some sort of context and go, well, my aim with this model is either to maximize profits or to maximize the rate of the loans being repaid. So then you build an algorithm and you say, actually your purpose is to do what you need to do in order to maximize profits. But if that algorithm, by looking at all the data that is fed into it and all the patterns that it finds, it could find that lending out subprime loans will end up maximizing your profits. And then it engages in this predator behavior that the company has never, ever intended to do. So there are a lot of unknown unknowns how you know what data points algorithms look at. And it’s a current topic today to build models that police models.
Matt Alder [00:04:38]:
And I know that this is an ongoing debate at the moment that, you know, there’s huge amounts of discussion going on about how we avoid this or make things better. In the recruiting process, what would your advice to buyers be? People who are looking at buying algorithmic based technology for hiring at this stage.
Andreea Wade [00:04:57]:
Where we’re at, we started four years ago and the industry started looking at machine learning and then deep learning. And now we’re moving into reinforcement learning around that time as well. And I think today the way we see when we win in order to be able to tell others how to win, is show evidence or ask for evidence. As a buyer, ask for evidence, there are various ways that you can ask to test, test the algorithms or the full service or product, but talk to other users, other customers of a particular company, and also ask about other potential use cases. What we find is that none of this is defined. Very often when we sell, we’re not replacing something, we’re helping that company to go to market with something new. So that consultative, that partner approach, I think it’s super important when you’re buying, if you’re just buying a bunch of APIs and then you have to figure out what to do and how to do it, that’s not great. So again, proof and that willingness to partner.
Matt Alder [00:06:10]:
So final question, what’s your sort of biggest takeaway so far in terms of the sort of the current state of the talent acquisition tech market?
Andreea Wade [00:06:18]:
I think what’s super interesting to see is how the entire industry is mobilizing and furiously working on providing a better candidate experience, better candidate engagement mechanisms, and with that, providing better tools to the recruiters in order to support that process and to make that happen. You know, I’m speaking a bit later on today as well, and I’m saying that I’m telling the story of how our company started. We had nothing to do with the recruitment or HR industry. We were very frustrated candidates that literally said, we’re sick of this. You know, we were data and product people and we said, surely this can be done in a better way. And I think today, you know, people are talking about candidates, about engagement. They’re seeing value of data, but also they’re seeing the value of actually engaging with humans and technology is aiding that. So candidate experience, giving those tools in order to meaningfully automate processes. And then you hear about AI and automation and you start seeing actual real case studies.
Rene Bolier [00:07:24]:
Hello, my name is Rene, I am 29 years old, live in Utrecht, which is a very nice, beautiful city, most beautiful canals in Europe, about 20 miles or 30 kilometers from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I am over 10 years in recruiting now. Started in a staffing company, moved to a startup that built a network in which you could advertise on a cost per click basis with your jobs. Very hip. 10 years ago. And then I was hired as the first employee of Honor Recruit, a company founded by two brothers. Through the years we built a programmatic company, but we made a big pivot, as they like to say in the tech scene. So we built a more of a, let’s say data management platform or customer data platform within the recruitment space. And since then we have a very different profile, very different market, opportunity growing much faster. So I was promoted CEO January last year.
Matt Alder [00:08:20]:
Fantastic stuff. So you were talking at the reqx event yesterday. Tell us a bit about your topic.
Rene Bolier [00:08:26]:
Yeah, so I was indeed talking yesterday at a reqx event and what I was speaking about is something that I usually don’t speak about. It’s a bit more the soft side. I usually like to talk about tech and data and all those things, but yesterday I talked about purpose, that I learned a big lesson a few months ago because some, some people really laughed in my face basically when I, when, when, when I answered the question of the what is the purpose of, of Oracut our business? And so I learned a big lesson. That purpose is all about the why and it should connect with your heart and all these things. So I talked about what the purpose of our, let’s say customers or people, candidates actually is and that our purpose should be connected to that. And yeah, that we could find a lot more meaning in what we are doing every day as an industry. So I promised that I will be more occupied with chasing the purpose of candidates and of course also recruiters. And I asked the audience to do.
Matt Alder [00:09:30]:
The same to pick up then and ask you that question again. What is your purpose?
Rene Bolier [00:09:35]:
Yeah, so this is, I am, I am in the process to figure this out. So I would say personally, my own purpose as one person at the moment is related to helping others forward. Right. So helping others succeed, finding their natural strength and yeah, thriving. Because when you find your natural strength and you get the freedom and responsibility to act on that strength, you are happy. So I really, really like that development in my personal life that I have found that I really like that. I like making connections and helping others forward. And as a business, this. So this is actually something we are figuring out. I think we have some, some, some answers, but they need, you know, messaging is very important so we need to really nail it down to a very simple message. But ultimately it is connected to the fact that we believe that if you bring data together that you can actually help recruiters help people forward in life achieve their purpose. So this is not about filling jobs. This is about helping other people understand this is how you could be healthier, happier, this is the next step you could take. This would be your natural next step and so forth. So it’s in that space and in the next few weeks we are working very hard on making this message crystal clear.
Matt Alder [00:10:56]:
Final question. What’s your key takeaway from the event about the current state of the talent acquisition technology market?
Rene Bolier [00:11:03]:
Yeah, I would say, and I think this was also a bit the consensus or the common theme amongst the speakers, especially yesterday at the regex, which was obviously a bit more TED style than the talks today, for example. So I think that we are starting to understand and notice that technology is going faster than we maybe want it to go. And this is because we are, we are automating the same thing we are already doing and we are starting to understand that we actually want something different. So we need to first thing about, think about what we actually want before we build the tech to do that. Right. So this has to do with inclusion, diversity, racism, bias, all these different topics. Right. There’s a lot to cover there. But I think that, I think Boomi yesterday called it human consciousness. Right. So I think that we, that we want to focus more on human consciousness, that we want to think more, have a wider array and types of people also involved in the creation of tech. And so I think that is something that, yeah, I think we as an industry, we are becoming aware and are starting to act on it. And I think, yeah, it’s definitely time to do so.
Adam Gordon [00:12:27]:
I’m Adam Gordon. I’m co founder and CEO at Candidate ID Talent Pipeline Automation software. We allow employers to nurture the people that they might want to hire in the future. And we track and score each person’s interactions with that content so that the employer knows in real time who’s cold, who’s warm and who’s higher. Ready.
Matt Alder [00:12:44]:
Great stuff. Now you’re talking at the event, I think later today. What’s your topic? Tell us a little bit about it.
Adam Gordon [00:12:51]:
I’m talking about how we apply world class marketing techniques into talent acquisition. I think this is something that you’ve been working on for a long, long time, as have I, as of other people. But it’s still not mainstream and there’s a lot of things, there’s a lot of changes that have happened in mainstream marketing over the last 10 years and applying those world class techniques is something that we really need to be doing in order to nurture our talent pipelines.
Matt Alder [00:13:13]:
Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. Could you give us a couple of examples of sort of some of the techniques that you can talk about?
Adam Gordon [00:13:18]:
Yeah. So I think that leading with value is a concept that mainstream marketers have cottoned onto much faster than we have in recruitment. And what that means is being useful and relevant to the customer base, whether they’re in buying mode or they’re not in buying mode, so that you can create an ongoing relationship with those people throughout their life and not just at the points where they’re buying a car or buying a house or some other high considered purchase. You want to create an ongoing rapport with people that you might want to hire in the future. And I think that’s one of the techniques I’m going to be talking about later. So one of the other things I’m going to be talking about is the fact that candidates are looking for information in lots of different places and they are receiving information in lots of different places whether they’re looking for it or not. So we believe that it’s important to be where your candidates are and I’m going to be talking a little bit about that. And we’re talking about the concepts of how you go about tracking and scoring individuals in order to build up a really much better picture of whether they’re likely to be ready for a conversation or not.
Matt Alder [00:14:21]:
And finally, give us your view on the current state of the talent acquisition technology market.
Adam Gordon [00:14:27]:
So having been in this market for three years now, one of the things that I’ve really noticed is that the hot areas of technology from three years ago have started to consolidate. There’s been a lot more acquisitions happening and mergers, and there’s been a lot of hot startups from three years ago that have effectively left the market. Today, however, there’s completely different areas that are getting served by the brand new startups and it’s really, really exciting. I think that everybody’s kind of focused on trying to remove human time from the process of recruiting. And that’s something that if you’ve got a proposition that is going to enable people to do things faster, you’ve got a place in the market today.
Matt Alder [00:15:10]:
Next up, I spoke to Pedro Chaves and Laura Vizan from the European Commission about the new European Framework for the Classification of Occupation Skills competencies and qualifications. The interruption near the beginning is the result of my very poor decision to record in the same room as the infamous Chad and Cheese podcast.
Pedro Chaves [00:15:32]:
I’m Pedro Chaves. I’m here at TA Tech today because I work for the European Commission and we came to present, well, an European ontology on occupations and skills that we developed. And we think it’s very interesting for most job boards, both the ones working in Europe or in the US So we came to present this and we are very happy to be here. And it was. Well, it has been a very successful and useful event for us. And I will hand it over to Laura, my colleague.
Laura Visan [00:16:04]:
Hi, my name is Laura Visan and I work as a consultant for the European Commission and working specifically on the European Classification of Occupation Skills competencies.
Matt Alder [00:16:19]:
It’s kind of weird doing this interview with all this going on in the back because I can see it as well. That’s the worst thing. You can just hear it. I’m just like, what are they doing? What are they actually doing? Okay, cool. Perfect. Okay, so you mentioned the sort of topic you were talking on, the European Classification. Could you, could you tell us a bit more about that?
Pedro Chaves [00:16:38]:
One of the cornerstones of the European project is this idea of free movement of European citizens within the European Union. So let’s say you were born in Germany, but at a certain moment of your life you want to work in Greece or you want to go to go and work in Finland or study. And the idea is to facilitate and encourage this kind of free movement of people. This is one of the ideas is a bit too. Do not take into account borders, physical borders of countries. And in order to support this process, free movement of people in Europe, we have to create conditions for finding, very concretely finding jobs in other countries in Europe. And one of the difficulties that we have in Europe is we have, for instance, different qualification systems or different ontologies, classification ontologies at national level. Meaning if I’m again German and I want to go to work in Finland, how do I. If I want to apply to a job offer in Finland, how can I make visible my qualifications or how can I make my work experience understandable in another country? And so exactly to try to support this process, we created this European ontology, this ESCO that Laura talked about. So the idea with ESCO is. Well, ESCO is an ontology where for each occupation in any economic sector, we have a description of the occupation, link to the description of the occupation. We have the optional skills, the essential skills that this occupation has to do, that the person working on this occupation has to do. And we have also linked to qualifications needed for these occupations. So the idea is that in Europe, if we want to try to create a kind of standard for job boards, for instance, for public or private employment services, if we use this same standard, these finding jobs in another country in Europe would be very interesting. And what is very important and very characteristic and probably the main asset of ESCO is that esco exists in 28 different European languages. So you have all these occupations, everything in all the languages of European Union and other languages, Arabic as well. So this is one of the main ideas. You can use it linguistically. And this is very. It’s a big asset. We know there is no other taxonomy in the world that exists in so many different languages. And just to finish, why we are here, because any job board, and I mean job boards are very well represented on this event today. Any job board has to start with the taxonomy and ontology. I mean, when you publish job vacancies, you have to start, you have some initial information, some input that you need. So ESCO works really from the beginning, meaning you publish a job vacancy in the job board. What kind of ontology, what kind of taxonomy do you use from the start? So this is very clear. And the idea with ESCO is that Esco is more and more used, at least in Europe, and with the main aim of facilitating again this free movement of workers of talent in Europe. That’s why we are here today.
Matt Alder [00:20:02]:
Fantastic stuff. So, final question. Tell us what’s been your sort of biggest takeaway from the event so far?
Laura Visan [00:20:10]:
So it was very interesting for us to be here and to talk to the different experts in the room. And what we have learned is that indeed AI and NLP is major in the industry and it’s something that is coming in the future. But we still see that there is a role for classification and taxonomy such as Esco, and we are very happy to see that existing job boards are already using Esko and they had a look at it, they knew about it, and they see that there’s indeed an added value for IT at European level. And it was very nice for us to be here and to talk to them.
Pedro Chaves [00:20:45]:
Just to complement what Laura said, the companies that were present at the event made very clear to us that Esco needs constant updating, mainly on the skills front, because there are always mainly on skills linked to IT programs, new it, well, IT technology, any evolution there? Because this is in terms of labor market, where new skills are appearing almost on the monthly basis, I would say is on applications, doing to it, new applications. And so the importance of keeping Esco constantly updated. It’s the message, one of the most important message that we are bringing back to the team so that we have to guarantee that this constant updating is happening.
Matt Alder [00:21:36]:
So, finally, back to that robot. I caught up with Elin Oberg Martenzon from TNG to find out more about Tengai, the recruiting robot.
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:21:46]:
So, my name is Elin Oberg Martenzon and I’m the chief Innovation officer at the very progressive recruitment agency in Sweden called the Next Generation, perhaps better known as tng. I am also working on the project Tengai, the social interviewing robot that will disrupt the interview in the future.
Matt Alder [00:22:05]:
Now, I’ve just met your robot and it’s a very interesting experience, but for the benefits of everyone listening, could you tell us about the robot, what it does and why?
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:22:18]:
Yeah. So Tengai is a diversity and inclusion software that is unbiased by design, yet, as you’ve seen with a human touch, it is a human face. And Tengai is a social interview robot that will assist recruiters and managers in the early stages of the process, screening for soft skills and personality traits, giving more objective interview data so that we can make better hiring decisions.
Matt Alder [00:22:42]:
Fantastic. So could you sort of really quickly sort of run through the workflow, you know, what kind of interview situations is this robot for? And if I was coming to be interviewed, you know, what would that experience be like?
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:22:56]:
Yeah, just first, it is truly an experience. I know that most people are sort of afraid of this new technology, but the whole purpose is the experience. So you will meet Tengai and Tengai will ask you sort of first a small introduction why we’re doing this and how we’re doing it. And then the interview is based on a competency framework and it asks skill based questions as of like personality traits or co working place. Teamwork was the word I was looking for and service orientation, etc. So it will, it will screen out for your, for your soft skills in order to make predictions of your, of your performance in the future.
Matt Alder [00:23:42]:
So I have a conversation with the robot. The robot, you know, asks me questions and it kind of, you know, its face reacts to me and it records the answers. Tell us about the technology at the back end. What happens to the answers the robot records?
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:24:00]:
Yeah, so the technology is very, very sophisticated and very advanced. So it records everything that you are saying and it sort of takes all of that information and it structures the information in a way that we could use it for understanding what kind of behavior that we’re looking for. So we are using behavioral anchors to understand as if problem solving, for example, we use different kind of anchors to understand what is good problem solving skills and what is not that good problem solving skills.
Matt Alder [00:24:31]:
Now you’re just launching at the moment. Are any companies using this or is it still in the sort of very early stages of its rollout?
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:24:40]:
Yeah, it’s been used by TNG for tests up until now and in a week we are launching the first product. So TNG will be the first company using this in the world and it will be using it for their internal processes and as a part of our recruitment service.
Matt Alder [00:24:56]:
Fantastic. So final question. What’s been your biggest takeaway from this event in terms of talent acquisition technology?
Elin Oberg Martenzon [00:25:05]:
Yeah, well, this is one of the first actually things that we’re doing with Tengai showing up Tengai for the world. So we’re here to, you know, we get lessons learned. We learn a lot from this, from the audience here. We have been had the possibility to test out Tengai with different kind of thought leaders in our industry and the feedback is, have been, you know, very important to us.
Matt Alder [00:25:30]:
Thanks very much to Elin as well as Andreea Wade, Rene Bolier, Adam Gordon, Pedro Chaves , Laura Visan and of course the Chad and Cheese podcast. Before you go. I just wanted to let you know about a webinar that I’m doing with HR Grapevine and Saber Loom s on Wednesday 22 May. It’s all about the future of talent acquisition and it’s free to attend. You can sign up at www.and that’s all in lowercase. If you’re listening to this after 22 May 2019 and you’re interested in the content, then please just drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy of the recording. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting feature in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
