A need for speed? For and against the 48-hour hire

Fill­ing a senior-lev­el vacan­cy in 48 hours sounds too good to be true, but that’s what AI-enabled recruit­ment plat­form Ver­voe claims to have done when it appoint­ed a new VP of sales in Feb­ru­ary. Using its own 10-ques­tion assess­ment of key skills, the Mel­bourne-based firm believes that it secured the best can­di­date in the most effi­cient way.

But is speed real­ly that impor­tant when it comes to hir­ing? Effi­cien­cy doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly trans­late to effec­tive­ness, after all. Is a great can­di­date always some­one with all the req­ui­site skills, or is the AI-depen­dent recruiter miss­ing out on vital ele­ments of a good employ­ee by dis­re­gard­ing some of the key fac­tors – cul­tur­al fit, for instance – that the algo­rithms can’t rate?

Let’s find out what those for and against accel­er­at­ing the hir­ing process have to say.

For: move quickly or risk losing talent

Nat­u­ral­ly, Vervoe’s co-founder and CEO, Omer Molad, believes that speed is essen­tial, giv­en that the most tal­ent­ed and capa­ble peo­ple are rarely on the jobs mar­ket for long before get­ting snapped up.

“The best can­di­dates have options and aren’t will­ing to wait around,” he says, adding that most of his clients are tak­ing just a few days to recruit at most lev­els. 

Probe Group, a provider of call-cen­tre ser­vices, has cut its time to hire for front-line jobs from four weeks to a mere 24 hours, for instance, while mar­ket­ing agency Klient­Boost has filled man­age­ment roles with­in 72 hours.

G4S has been able to reduce its recruit­ment process for secu­ri­ty guards and cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers from 20 to 15 weeks. This has cre­at­ed sig­nif­i­cant resource sav­ings for its head of tal­ent, Richard Rush­ton, whose team was man­u­al­ly review­ing up to 600 appli­ca­tions at a time. AI assess­ments have also increased the qual­i­ty and diver­si­ty of appli­cants, he reports. 

“It takes uncon­scious bias out of the equa­tion, because a recruiter can still look at a CV and make a judg­ment based on someone’s name and loca­tion before they’ve even test­ed the candidate’s skills,” Rush­ton says. 

While G4S is ben­e­fit­ing most from AI in high-vol­ume hir­ing at present, he feels that it would be pos­si­ble to cut stages from the process at the pro­fes­sion­al lev­el to achieve 48-hour recruit­ment – pro­vid­ing that the right ground­work is done before­hand.

“If you can build the assess­ment quick­ly enough and you’ve got the desire to run things through that quick­ly, you could do that,” Rush­ton says. “A 48-hour hire would be a nice thing, although I’d prob­a­bly want a bit more dili­gence and work to be done on can­di­date sourc­ing. If you took out the sourc­ing aspect, you could push things through quick­ly enough to get to that point.” 

Indeed, the can­di­date that Ver­voe suc­cess­ful­ly hired in 48 hours was ini­tial­ly referred by a well-con­nect­ed con­tact in the CEO’s net­work. 

Kat­ri­na Col­lier, an expert in can­di­date engage­ment and the author of The Robot-Proof Recruiter, echoes Rushton’s views about the prepara­to­ry work required to enable a short hir­ing process.

“A long-wind­ed hir­ing process will pre­vent you from hir­ing the right peo­ple. But, before you post your advert or seek refer­rals, invest time in under­stand­ing whom you real­ly need to hire,” she advis­es. “What prob­lem will they be solv­ing? Where will they devel­op and grow?” 

Col­lier con­tin­ues: “Assess what is miss­ing from your cur­rent team too. This will ensure that you don’t hire some­one because they’re like you when you need the oppo­site. Once this is done, you can go out to mar­ket and keep the process short – even 48 hours if you want. But be wary of being over­ly reliant on AI to make the deci­sion.”

Against: a machine cannot judge culture fit

Big com­pa­nies such as Xero and Exper­ian acknowl­edge the ben­e­fits of AI in the ear­ly stages of the hir­ing process, but strong­ly believe that more detailed tasks should be han­dled by peo­ple. 

Humans are bet­ter able to iden­ti­fy can­di­dates with the right cul­tur­al fit and elim­i­nate any bias that algo­rithms can inher­it from pro­gram­mers or exist­ing data sets, accord­ing to Nicole Reid, Xero’s chief peo­ple offi­cer. 

“We hire for cul­tur­al fit first. AI won’t pick that up in the way it could pick up a par­tic­u­lar skill,” she says. “As much as we’re inter­view­ing a can­di­date, they’re inter­view­ing us, so they know what they’re com­ing in for, what we val­ue and what we expect of new recruits. Those are key fac­tors for us, so we won’t change our human approach.”

Exper­ian is sim­i­lar­ly reluc­tant to use AI in short­list­ing and selec­tion, as it feels that there’s too much risk of algo­rithm bias.

Its chief HR offi­cer, Justin Hast­ings, explains: “We con­tin­ue to train our hir­ing man­agers and tal­ent acqui­si­tion teams to recog­nise and reduce bias in our selec­tion process­es – and we’d set the same bar for any AI tools we might adopt. AI is about improv­ing the qual­i­ty of the hir­ing process and help­ing us source and iden­ti­fy diverse and high­ly skilled peo­ple. But we still need to bring tal­ent into our organ­i­sa­tion based on human-to-human inter­ac­tion.” 

While G4S has attract­ed a more diverse range of suc­cess­ful job can­di­dates when using AI, behav­iour­al sci­en­tist Diar­muid Har­vey observes that employ­ers need a sub­stan­tial data set to achieve this. The short­er the time frame, the small­er the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attract a suf­fi­cient­ly diverse pool of tal­ent, he notes. 

“If your process has come down to days, do you have a large enough pool to enable you to test whether or not your mod­el is biased?” says Har­vey, who is head of sci­ence for the Chem­istry Group, a tal­ent strat­e­gy con­sul­tan­cy. “It would take mas­sive amounts of data to sup­port an approach like this.” 

He adds: “Even if you did test this on very large data sets, it doesn’t take away from the fact that there’s a lot of upfront work required in iden­ti­fy­ing the role’s com­pe­ten­cies. And, if you’re going to assess someone’s intel­lect – their per­son­al­i­ty, moti­va­tions and behav­iour­al com­pe­ten­cies – all of that requires some inter­ac­tion with the indi­vid­ual.”

Speed, Har­vey con­cludes, is clear­ly an impor­tant fac­tor for recruiters, but it should be sec­ondary to ensur­ing a fair selec­tion process. “The ques­tion should be: ‘how effec­tive is this speedy process?’ As opposed to: ‘how speedy is this process?’”