Tuesday, December 25, 2018

HR / ANALYTICS SPECIAL HOW BEHAVIOURAL ANALYTICS WILL REDEFINE HIRING

HOW BEHAVIOURAL ANALYTICS WILL REDEFINE HIRING
 
Looking at the advancement in AI and ML, the time is not far when the moment a person walks in for an interview, complete profiling of the personality will be done

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things (IoT), data analytics, big data etc are likely to redefine practically every aspect of our lives. One of the crucial areas where AI, machine learning and data analytics is making long strides is behavioural science and hiring.

WHAT IS BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE
Though behavioural science for understanding the personality of a candidate made its presence in the corporate arena somewhere in mid-1900, it was majorly restricted to large corporations as it required a lot of manual effort and resources. The process often led to the candidate going through lengthy paper-based assessments and then the HR had to do manual calculations and analysis to come up with a broad understanding of the person’s traits. But now, with the advent of cloud computing, advanced data processing and machine learning, even small to medium size organisations can make use of behavioural science, at an affordable price, to pick the right talent. Technology has made it possible to figure out a personality in less than six minutes, as it gives the details on the working style of a person. Looking at the advancement in AI and ML, the time is not far when the moment a person walks in for an interview, complete profiling of the personality will be done. Even today, solutions exist which claim to analyse the body language, facial expressions, voice modulation etc to develop deeper understanding of the candidate’s personality.

BEHAVIOURAL ASSESSMENT
Many organisations make the new joinees go through the predictive index behavioural assessment which gives an insight into traits such as their leadership style, communications style, multitasking capabilities, comfort with team work and much more. It can help in uncovering the true motivating needs of a person and how a person is expected to behave in different work scenarios. All this helps the organisation in predicting how a candidate is expected to perform in the particular role and what can be the possible challenges in doing day to day activities. It is not enough to understand the traits of the people.
Rather, even more pertinent is to determine what are the competencies required for a particular role. This has been a blind spot of a lot of psychometric systems that existed till date. The contemporary advanced systems allow the organisation to exactly determine the ideal traits and their intensities for performing a given job. Recently, one of our clients employed a person for new sales position that was created for foraying into retail segment. This position required the incumbent to be good with strategy, comfortable with ambiguity, think out-of-the-box and be decisive. They hired a person who was amazing in the interviews. But about 10 months down the line, top management realised this person was very different from what they thought during the interview. When this organisation got his predictive index assessment, it clearly indicated this person’s natural traits were very different from what was required for the role.

ADVANCEMENT IN DATA ANALYTICS
AI, machine learning and advancement in data analytics makes talent analytics more accurate, fast and reliable. The systems are now increasingly able to self-learn from the data and its usage patterns. Top it up with the information and insights derived from the social media about an individual. Systems of tomorrow would be able to combine all such pieces together. Even these days such systems have become user-friendly and does not require any special knowledge of psychology. The HR and top management can get relevant actionable information for making the right hiring decisions. This brings talent analytic system into what the manufacturing sector would terms as – ‘Kaizen Mode or Continuous Improvement mode.’

(Vinaya Bansal -a workplace behaviour expert and is co-founder of The Predictive Strategy Group)
TOI17DEC18

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