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Are recruiter missing candidates because of unconscious bias?
99 Plays1 month ago
Episode 88 has news for 11 November 2024 and Question of the Week, "Are recruiters missing candidates due to unconscious bias?"
#RNA #RecruitmentNewsAustralia #RecruitmentPodcast
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Transcript
AI's Impact on Recruitment
00:00:09
Speaker
AI technology has transformed staffing and recruitment, unlocking new levels of productivity and empowering teams to better use their time. But what does a hiring workflow powered by AI look like? Discover how the day in the life of a recruiter is transformed by AI and learn more about Bullhorn's vision for infusing AI everywhere. Visit bullhorn.com to see their AI vision in action right now.
Emerging Job Roles Identified
00:00:35
Speaker
This is the news for the week beginning November 11, 2024. I'm Ross Clennet. Jobs and Skills Australia's most recent research has identified 37 emerging job roles encompassing four broad labour market themes. The four main themes are health, care and medical, data and technologies, net zero covering sustainability and clean energy, science and engineering. Emerging roles for four refer to those that have appeared in the Australian job market data for the first time in recent years or are growing quickly from a small base.
00:01:10
Speaker
The most significant emerging roles are community mental health worker, allied health assistant, cloud developer, solutions architect, automation engineer, electric vehicle technician, sustainability consultant, battery design specialist, reliability engineer and logistics engineer.
New Board Members Announced
00:01:31
Speaker
The results of the elections to the RCSA board and various councils were announced last Thursday.
00:01:37
Speaker
The updates to the RCSA 2025 Board of Directors are John Ives from One Staff commences as the Board Representative for New Zealand, Yelena Jairo from Altaira commences as the Health and Medical Board Representative for ANRA and AMRANTS, Matthew Sampson from Aspect Personnel continues as the Board Representative for VICTAS, and Tara Sieritzky from Switch Education continues as the Board Representative for South Australia.
00:02:05
Speaker
In the announcement, the RCSA highlighted the following members for their dedication. David Stewart for serving nine years on the ANRA Council, including three years as Chair and this last year as the Health and Medical Board Director. Ian McPherson for serving 17 years on the New Zealand Council, including the last 10 years on the RCSA Board of Directors and six years as Vice President. And Amanda Blight for serving nine years on the ANRA Council.
Financial Results of Major Companies
00:02:32
Speaker
The Edeco Group reported revenue of €5.7 billion euros for the third quarter ended 30 September 2024, a decrease of 5% on an organic and trading days adjusted basis. Perm fees were down 9% and temp revenue was down 5%. Gross profit declined 8% and EBITDA excluding one-offs declined 20% in constant currency to €186 million. euros A DECO APAC was up 4% to €592 million, with Japan up 8%, India up 14%. However, A DECO ANZ revenue was down 13% on a strong comparison quarter. ah
00:03:13
Speaker
Executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles reported third quarter net revenue increased by 5.9%. Revenue growth in on-demand talent, Heidrick Consulting and executive search in the Americas and Asia Pacific was offset by decreased executive search income in Europe.
00:03:30
Speaker
Global executive search net revenue was up 2.8% compared to Q3 2023 and revenue from interim placements rose by 12.6%. APAC revenue was up 22% to $26.7 million. dollars Japanese recruiter Will Group, owner of local brands DFP Recruitment, Key Appointments, UNU Recruitment Partners and Ethos Speech Chapman reported revenue of $462 million for the six months ended 30 September 2024, an increase of 1.5% when compared to the same period last year. Gross profit was down 4% and operating profit dropped 50%.
Australia's Defense Budget Boost
00:04:14
Speaker
The federal government has announced more than $600 million dollars to extend and expand the continuation bonus for permanent members of the Australian Defence Force and increase ADF operational reserves by 1,000 personnel. The funding coincides with the release of the 2024 Defence Workforce Plan, which seeks to address ADF recruitment and retention, as well as Defence's organisational culture, wellbeing and support to ADF members and their families.
00:04:42
Speaker
The government has committed to extending the $50,000 continuation bonus for eligible permanent members at the end of their initial service obligation who have served a minimum of four years. An additional continuation bonus of $40,000 will be offered to a second cohort of eligible permanent members after a minimum of seven-year service to encourage continuation of service and career progression to middle ranks in the ADF.
00:05:08
Speaker
The Defence Workforce Plan says to date the continuation bonus has recorded an uptake rate of nearly 80% and boosted the continued service of more than 3,100 junior rank ADF personnel.
NZ Unemployment Rate Rises
00:05:21
Speaker
New Zealand's unemployment rate rose 0.2% from the June quarter to reach 4.8% in the September 2024 quarter. Comparatively, the unemployment rate in the September 2023 quarter was 3.9%. According to the latest labour market release from Statistics New Zealand, 2.9 million people were employed and 145,000 people were unemployed in the September 2024 quarter. The seasonally adjusted labour force participation rate was 71.2%, down 0.5% over the quarter and down 0.8% over the year.
The Debate on TAFE Fee-Free Courses
00:05:59
Speaker
The Federal Government's plan to make fee-free TAFE courses permanent is facing opposition as the Coalition questions whether the recent completion rates are providing value for taxpayer money. On their 4th November pre-election announcement, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Skills and Training Andrew Giles said Labor will push to legislate 100,000 fee-free TAFE courses per year from 2027.
00:06:26
Speaker
fee-free TAFE is already a cornerstone of Labor's education and training policy platform. The Federal and State Governments have deployed $1.5 billion dollars through the Fee Free TAFE Skills Agreement through to 2026 and the Albanese Government committed another $90 million dollars for more housing and construction training places in May. According to the Federal Government, fee-free fee-free courses have resulted in more than 508,000 enrolments in high priority fields since January 2023.
00:06:56
Speaker
Making fee-free TAFE permanent will help fix persistent skills sort shortages and train job seekers for well-paid, secured jobs well into the future, according to Albanese. But the Coalition says the real-world benefits are yet to be seen, arguing higher than expected enrolment rates are not yet translating to completion rates. Shadow Minister for Industry Skills and Training Suzanne Ley said fee-free TAFE positions have not made a meaningful impact in alleviating skills shortages.
00:07:24
Speaker
The federal government should provide more information on course completion figures before committing permanent funding to these positions, she added.
Bias in AI Resume Screening
00:07:33
Speaker
A new study from the University of Washington highlights the potential for significant racial and gender bias when using AI to screen resumes. The researchers tested three open source large language models and found they favoured resumes from white associated names 85% of the time and female associated names 11% of the time. Over the 3 million job race and gender combinations tested, black men are fair the worst with the models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.
00:08:03
Speaker
Explaining the results, Kyra Wilson, a doctoral student at UW's Information School said, these groups have existing privileges in society that show up in training data. The model learns from that training data and then either reproduces or amplifies the exact same patterns in its own decision making tasks.
00:08:20
Speaker
Experiment used original documents, 554 resumes and 571 job descriptions. The researchers then altered the resume, swapping in 120 first names generally associated with people who are specifically male, female, black and or white. Nothing else in the resumes was altered. The jobs included chief executive, marketing and sales manager, ah HR officer, accountant, engineer, secondary school teacher and designer.
00:08:49
Speaker
Wilson and her colleague, Assistant Professor Aylin Kaliskan, presented their results last month in San Jose, California at a conference on AI, Ethics and Society. The LLMs preferred white men even for roles that employment data show are more commonly held by women such as HR workers.
00:09:08
Speaker
This is just the latest study to reveal troubling biases with AI models and how to fix them is a huge open question, Wilson said. Simply removing names from resumes won't fix the issue because the technology can infer someone's identity from their educational history, cities they live in and even word choices for describing their professional experiences, Wilson said.
Frontline Recruitment Group's Achievements
00:09:31
Speaker
Frontline Recruitment Group has been awarded the highest honour at this year's top franchise awards.
00:09:37
Speaker
Independent Analysis by market research firm Ten Thousand Feet was conducted on competing franchises, business practices across six categories, marketing, branding, passion, support, lifestyle and innovation. Frontline ranked first in the overall category as well as in all the subcategories except lifestyle. Frontline operates in 35 locations across Australia and New Zealand, having been purchased by US-based Express Employment International in 2021 from founder Deb Davis and her husband, Peter. And that's the news for the week beginning the 11th of November, 2024. I'm Adele Last. Stay tuned now for our question of the week.
Addressing Bias in Recruitment
00:10:21
Speaker
um
00:10:27
Speaker
Our question of the week this week is, are recruiters missing candidates because of unconscious bias?
00:10:35
Speaker
Yes is the answer Adele. There are many And I think there are so many unconscious biases, but let me focus on two, illusory correlation bias, which is when we perceive a relationship where no such relationship actually exists and anchoring bias,
00:11:02
Speaker
when we fixate on one piece of information as a result, giving it more weight than it deserves. And the example that I'm going to use is candidates who do not have local experience or Australian experience. In other words, the illusory correlation bias is that we, whether we think it or not, immediately attach less weight or we don't regard it as highly when a candidate has worked in work environments that are not Australian. We definitely see that. I don't but don't think there's any doubt about that. And the anchoring bias is that
00:11:51
Speaker
We use that single piece of information. In other words, the candidate has no local experience as the thing to totally exclude them from the selection process. We say to the candidate, Oh no, you don't have local experience and therefore you can't be considered. And that's obviously placing a ridiculous weight on one small piece of information without even assessing their skills, their knowledge and behaviour. And so they're two biases that I would assert are common in many, if not a large majority of recruiters. And certainly I would, back in my day as a recruiter, probably say that I was guilty of that as well. What do you say? oh That's a brave um admission. Thanks Ross. And I think, I think you're totally right. It obviously exists. We know it exists.
00:12:49
Speaker
And overseas experience is not validated um appropriately in this country. or You know, it should just be any experience experience really. And I would like to say very specifically that we're talking about overseas migrants um or people that have moved to Australia um who, you know, brown people in fact, because it's actually different for migrants who come from more anglicised countries or white countries or white skinned countries, let's say. so um It is a different experience, but it's really interesting. it's you know It's ignorance because a lot of times they've got no validation of whether the experience from overseas is relevant or not. you know A lot of times as a recruiter, you're saying the person doesn't have local experience because your client said they need to have local experience. But what is it about the local experience that is so different? you know Australia is not um so very different to the world in terms of the way we do business and in lots of different sectors. Yes, there's different laws and there's legislation and there's nuances and idiosyncrasies to every job in every country. But you have to learn those, you know, when you sometimes change businesses, never mind countries. Exactly. yeah Exactly. so I think I think that's a critical point, that there's actually probably greater differences across organizations inside a country than there is differences country to country.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So we're challenging you to think about that, like how different really is it and challenge your client around that as well. um And they also make generalizations, as we know, Ross, you know, they they have hired somebody from that cohort before, and it wasn't a good experience. And so then we'll, you know, package everyone up in that. And, and you know, they're not going to be a good worker because someone from one group, you know, was, you know, not a good worker, they had a bad experience. But You know, it this one, you know, touches a personal nerve with me. You know, my parents were migrants to this country um and came across and had to take and my parents and the whole family, in fact, um greater extensions to aunts and uncles and everybody who came with qualifications in you know various areas that were not validated when they got here. And my parents in particular took jobs that were well below their level of education and experience in order to get a foot in the door.
00:15:11
Speaker
in Australia in order to work, in order to put food on the table. ah They couldn't work in the field in which they were qualified in because it just was not being validated. And that's the same story for so many migrants. And that was 50 years ago, you know, like it's still going on today. You know, really like we got to do better. This country's got to do better. It's more prevalent now, Adele. Well, certainly more prevalent in the minds of recruiters, simply because as the population data tells us,
00:15:40
Speaker
We have more migrants coming to this country than at any time ever. And so recruiters are the front line of many of these people attempting to gain work. And so you're doing as a recruiter, you're doing yourself and the candidate a disservice if you automatically disqualify them simply because they haven't worked in Australia and the question that I'd ask you as as a recruiter is, what's the critical one or two skills for this job that the candidate's applying for? And why aren't you delving into their skills, those critical one or two skills, before you make assumptions about
00:16:28
Speaker
the country that they gain those skills? Because if you're a good recruiter, you should be able to understand, do they have the skills at the requisite level for this particular role? um I think we really need to challenge your thoughts on this around what your expectation would be. Put yourself in their shoes. So let's assume you as a recruiter are going to move overseas. We talked about Randstad is one of the largest recruitment agencies started in the Netherlands.
00:16:58
Speaker
uh, you know, been going for a very long time. If you were to up and move to the Netherlands and let's assume you spoke reasonable Dutch, albeit accented, would you expect to go into a recruitment agency there like Randstad or any other and have your skills recognized, validated, acknowledged? You know, you're gonna, you're gonna move to that country. You're gonna be a recruiter. The job is the same. You're gonna place ads. You're gonna screen candidates. You're gonna interview. You're gonna refer to clients. The same exact job.
00:17:27
Speaker
you know you can do the job. You're just going to do it in a different country. You're going to do it in in a different language with an accent. You're going to have to build a network, yes. But I think most recruiters would expect that, right? They'd expect to go into another agency in another country and be fairly assessed on those skills. Well, I'd be bolder and say, I reckon If a recruiter it from Australia was excluded, even from a conversation, simply because they didn't have Dutch experience in the recruitment market, they'd be really pissed off. Like, I think they'd be like, what? You got to be joking.
00:18:04
Speaker
And yet that's the experience that many candidates who come to Australia or many migrants who come to Australia and put themselves forward as a candidate for roles have because they just get excluded point blank. Oh no, you don't have local experience. Correct. And we're exactly doing this. You know, I come back to this brown white situation, but we bring recruiters out from the UK.
00:18:29
Speaker
You know, and we don't hesitate to assume and assess and say, oh, they've, you know, they've worked in the UK recruitment. They'll be fine here. A candidate can come from India who's also worked in recruitment and we won't validate it here in Australia. We say that's not the same experience. So, you know, we're we're doing it to our own, in our own industry. How can we expect to break that mold if we don't start doing better? Well, a couple of simple ways that a recruiter can test themselves is simply to say, I'm not going to use that as an excuse. I'm going to assess the candidate based on their skills and their competencies and behaviour and accept or reject them on that basis, not just blanket reject them.
00:19:20
Speaker
And that could be a phone screen, but more critically, how about skills tests? I don't know about you Adil, but it seems like they've fallen out of favor a bit. And this is certainly one way to ensure that all the candidates for the same job are being assessed on a level playing field. Now, obviously it's easier for some types of jobs than others, but for those of you that work in an area where a skills test is not that difficult to administer, not that costly to administer, then that's something that would protect you against allegations that you discriminate on people based on where they've gained their experience rather than focus on their actual skills, competencies and behaviour. Yeah, I think skills testing, you're right, has, you know, fallen by the wayside and should be used more extensively in recruitment. But it may not even be a physical test in that sense. It could be
00:20:17
Speaker
getting your client to give you the explanation of an answer. So if there's a particular way of doing something or a protocol that they'd like to see done, get the client to explain that protocol to you in the briefing. So you can ask a candidate that question and if they explain the exact same protocol in the same way, you'll know that they're doing it the right way or the way that is suitable to the Australian, you know, industry or the Australian company here. You know, it doesn't need to be um a physical test. It could be still a question But by the answer that the candidate's giving you, they're going to tell you whether they can do the job or not. Yes. And that's certainly one of the advantages of being a deep market specialist in terms of a recruiter, because so you will know the depth of the answer required to demonstrate a high level of skill, a medium level of skill, a low level of skill. If you're trying to be a generalist, then it's very difficult to do that because the answer you're getting, you probably can't distinguish where
00:21:16
Speaker
you know, the difference between the candidate who's a two out of 10 with skills, a six out of 10 or a nine out of 10. So we challenge you. Are you missing out on candidates? If you're sitting there struggling to find candidates, it's a candidate short market, it's tight. We challenge you. There are great candidates coming across your desk every day and your biases are having you overlook them. Your unconscious biases. So hopefully now they're a little more conscious after this question of the week.
00:21:45
Speaker
Hey, are you liking listening to our podcast, Recruitment News Australia? If you are, it would really help if you could give Ross Clannett and I a five-star review on whatever podcast app you listen to it on. Please hop onto the review section and give us a review next time you're listening on your favorite episode. And thanks for listening.