Darryl Howes examines the challenges facing workers and how we might respond. Financial World Oct/Nov 2016. abc certified circulation 14,854 worldwide.

1. How many golf balls can you fit in a school bus? If you do a quick
mental calculation and come up with the answer 500,000, then
congratulations – you might have got yourself a product manager
job at Google. But if you answered 57 million or 23 million or
“that’s a stupid question”, then your interview would have been
unsuccessful. Maybe Yahoo has an open position.
The golf ball teaser – along with others such as “how many
piano tuners are there in the world?” – was famously used by
Google to find the smartest people in the world to join its
company. Google, the most analytical of companies, was
unconvinced by the use of CVs and qualifications alone to assess
talent. So it created these tests to gauge mental agility and quick
thinking. But now the company has done a complete about-turn.
It has come to realise that maybe these are stupid questions after
all – ill-suited to finding the most talented candidates.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of people operations, has been
highly vocal about the rethink. In his book, Work Rules, he writes
that such questions “serve primarily to make the interviewer feel
clever or self-satisfied. They have little, if any, ability to predict
how candidates will perform in a job.”
Not that Google has any intention of going back to the old
methods of hiring. Needless to say, Bock is also pretty disparaging
about those. Hiring on the basis of where someone went to school,
what they look like and their GPA (grade point average) does not
pass muster.
In an interview with the New York Times, Bock said: “GPAs
are worthless as a criterion for hiring, and test scores are worthless
too...We found that they don’t predict anything.”
So what is the solution? Bock has attacked the problem
the way you would expect of a senior Googler: he has thrown
science at it. The company now studies the data to see what factors
are most predictive of performance. It sets tests related to the tasks
the job candidate will have to perform and asks behavioural
(“tell me about a time when...”) or situational (“what would you
do if...”) structured interview questions. As such, Google is at
the cutting edge of new thinking about hiring. This is called
“people analytics”.
It has taken the world of human resources (HR) a long time to
embrace the joy of data. Famously, the retailer John Wanamaker
said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble
is I don’t know which half.” But today, online data analysis has
solved Wanamaker’s quandary. Big data allows brands to know a
huge amount about which campaigns work best. Other parts of
business – finance, logistics, distribution – have also used data
mining to improve efficiency.
Hiring, for the most part, still relies on the gut instinct of
(usually) a single interviewer. This is in spite of huge upheaval in
the job market overall. Think about the impact of LinkedIn, for
example. It lets almost everyone know almost everything about
open positions and workplace culture. It also sifts and feeds
information for both jobseekers and employers.
Ryan Hammond, co-founder of hiQ Labs, the US people
analytics start-up, believes the impact of such change is profound.
“Social media has changed how people are connected to the job
market,” he says. “There used to be a distinct group of people who
were actively looking for jobs and they found out about vacancies
either through ads or
through some personal
contact in their network.
But now nearly everyone
is a passive jobseeker.
There’s a ubiquity of
information about jobs,
and recruiters can approach anyone any time. So there used to be
100 people applying for each position and now there can be 5,000.
Obviously, sorting through 5,000 applications is impossible using
the old methods.”
Unsurprisingly, start-ups are now touting technology-based
alternatives to identify the best candidates. One is HireVue. It
developed a platform based on video interviews. Candidates log
in to answer pre-set questions on film and the system analyses
their responses using 15,000 traits to identify top performers.
These include vocabulary, eye movement, dress, speed of
delivery and stress in the voice. It sounds cold and robotic
but the US company insists that the system is not only efficient at
filtering the applicants, but also eliminates conscious or
unconscious bias.
This is good enough for investors, who have injected more than
$90m into the company. Good enough also for Goldman Sachs
and JPMorgan – both of which are already using HireVue.
However candidates are filtered, there still has to be a human
decision-maker at the end of the process. To repeat, most experts
How to find the right
algorithm for the job
Big organisations use data to make decisions on logistics, distribution, finance and sales, but
rarely for hiring people. Mostly, that is still done by managers with a pile of CVs. Now, change
is in the air. Tim Green explores the rise of ‘people analytics’
‘Instead of 100 people
applying for a job, now
there are 5,000’
www.financialworld.co.uk October / November 2016 39
CAREERS

2. agree that this should not be a single assessor working on instinct.
Iris Bohnet, author of What Works: gender equality by design, has
analysed the hiring process extensively and says: “If you’re a
hiring manager, you’re probably happiest getting a sense of a
candidate through unstructured interviews…But dozens of studies
have found them to be among the worst predictors of actual on-
the-job performance.”
So why does this unscientific and ineffective process remain
the norm? Bohnet says
there is some hubris in
it. “Managers are
overconfident about
their own expertise and
experience, and they
dislike deferring to
more structured approaches that might outsource human
judgement to a emachine.”
But the tide is turning against this old-school thinking. After
all, it is expensive to hire the wrong person. Bad hires do a bad
job. They suck up colleagues’ time and may lose clients or fail to
attract new ones. There is also the cost (in money and employee
time) involved in sacking them and finding a replacement.
In a survey by CEB Recruiting, HR managers admitted that
20 per cent of their teams should not have been hired in the
first place. Meanwhile, the Harvard Business Review concludes
that 80 per cent of employee turnover is due to bad hiring
decisions.
So what is the best way to make better ones? Bohnet believes
the answer lies with “decision aids”. She says: “While it is
exceedingly difficult to remove bias from an individual, [we can]
de-bias our hiring procedures. Work-sample tests, structured
interviews and comparative evaluation are the smart and the right
things to do.”
Bohnet’s specific ideas include:
• Formulaic interviews. Interviews should pose the same set of
questions in the same order to all candidates. This eliminates
much subjectivity.
• Scoring answers immediately. This can neutralise biases.
Interviewers are more likely to remember the most recent answers
or those with vivid examples, for example.
• Comparing candidate responses horizontally. Managers
should examine all candidates’ written answers to the same
question, then move on to the next. The problem with looking at
candidates’ answers en masse is the halo effect of one
outstanding answer.
• Finding out which interview questions are correlated with
on-the-job success. If a question can give a clue about future
performance, it should receive additional weight.
• Abandoning panel interviews. Interviewers should be kept
separate. Clearly, four data points from four individual interviews
trump one data point from one collective interview.
• Submitting assessments before discussing applicants.
• It is more efficient to aggregate answers and then create
weighted scores on questions asked in the same order.
Some managers dislike
outsourcing human
judgement to a machine
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
2012
2014
2016
2018
2020
2022
2024
2026
2028
2030
2032
2034
2036
2038
2040
2042
2044
2046
2048
2050
2052
2054
2056
2058
2060
2062
Working-agepopulation(millions)
16-24 25-49 50-SPa
40 October / November 2016 www.financialworld.co.uk
Working age population projections 2013-2033
or why employers will need to combat hiring bias
CAREERS

3. Bohnet’s ideas are more than theory. She has helped the UK
Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) to develop a system called
“Applied” to address the problem of human bias in the recruitment
of new employees.
BIT is jointly owned by the UK government and Nesta, the
innovation charity. It explores how “nudges” can make public and
private enterprises more efficient. Interestingly, the test case for its
ideas about hiring was its own policy.
Kate Glazebrook, principal adviser and head of growth and
equality at BIT, says: “We wanted to get the best people for the
jobs and improve diversity, so we decided to take name, age,
gender and other factors off CVs. But we had to do that manually
and it was extremely laborious. So we then decided to create this
new tool to speed up applications and hopefully take the bias out.”
Candidates would log in to Applied online and then take
structured tests and answer multiple-choice questions. Their
responses were then appraised by a team of assessors following
the listed earlier procedures advised by Bohnet.
BIT did A/B testing to
compare results from a
traditional CV trawl to those
using Applied. Glazebrook
says that 60 per cent of the
candidates ultimately hired
would have been rejected by
a CV sift alone and that three of the best performers would not
have been hired at all using the traditional method. She says 200
UK organisations are now using or testing Applied.
Now, of course, no system devised by people can be without
bias, but many companies, including financial services
companies, are keen to use data analysis to try to hire more in line
with job performance and less in line with perceived fit. That
financial services firms are doing this is unsurprising given what
appears to be the lack of diversity in the sector. In 2014, a report
by recruiting firm Vettery found that 78 per cent of the annual
intake on Wall Street were male, and that more than 65 per cent
came from just 30 schools.
Tackling this is necessary because there is evidence that
homogeneous companies do not perform that well. A 2012 report
by the Credit Suisse Research Institute supported that claim. It
examined 2,360 companies from 2005 to 2011 and found that
those with one or more women on the board delivered higher
average returns on equity, lower gearing and better
average growth.
Cause or correlation? No one can say for certain, but common
sense dictates that having more diverse team members must
introduce new ideas and reduce the risk of a “herd mentality”
among those from traditional backgrounds.
To be fair, banks do recognise this and many are doing
something about it. Deutsche Bank has also been public in its
desire to change its hiring processes. It is working with Koru, the
people analytics start-up, to take bias out of its recruiting. Koru
asks clients to define what they want from candidates and then
devises tests to create unique “fingerprints” for both employers
and jobseekers. Its algorithms then match the top prospects to the
open positions in a few seconds.
Credit Suisse has also launched a people analytics programme.
It amasses data related to pay, promotions and life events to
predict whether staff will stay or leave the bank. This is important
because, according to William Wolf, Credit Suisse’s global head
of talent acquisition and development, a one-point reduction in
staff turnover can save $75m to $100m a year.
One insight was to offer more open positions to people already
working at the bank. Three hundred people have been promoted
‘An HR manager who
is not data savvy will
not have a job’
www.financialworld.co.uk October / November 2016 41

4. 42 October / November 2016 www.financialworld.co.uk
CAREERS
A new way of working
It has been said that the job market is broken. Darryl Howes predicts what future workplaces
might look like and suggests ways to overcome career obstacles
1. PwC (2016), The Keys to Corporate Responsibility: employee engagement.
Available at: www.engageforsuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/pwc-
employee-engagement.pdf [accessed 17 July, 2016].
2. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2016), Career Pathing: the
new path forward [podcast].Available at: www.cipd.co.uk/hr-
resources/podcasts/career-pathing.aspx [accessed 17 July, 2016].
In career counselling and recruitment circles, it is fashionable to
discuss the differences between age groups and their approach to
work. Such discussions spawn a myriad of stereotypes: Baby
Boomers experience techno-fear; Generation Xers are
entrepreneurial but distrust authority; and Generation Y (also
known as millennials) prioritise flexible working, feeling valued
and adding value. They are said to work to live rather than live
to work.
But simple categorisations are not always helpful if we are to
provide useful advice to those who want or need to work. They
also ignore basic human needs – hence this comment from The
Economist’s Future Works
conference in June:
“Millennials essentially
want the same as their
parents did. Good pay and
reasonable job security.”
So, when it comes to the
world of work, rather than consider the differences across
generations, let us see where common interests might lie, what
the future might hold for working lives and what we can all do to
engage more fully with whatever options are before us.
The state we are in
We have seen, and continue to see, a period of rapid
organisational change. Increasingly, management has been
delayered and organisations are flatter in structure. Matrix
working, involving cross-functional business groups and multiple
reporting lines, has proliferated. Traditional linear career paths
are now much less obvious.
Although the main effect often tends to be on the young,
these changes are felt to a greater or lesser extent across all
generations. The younger worker could feel frustrated by a lack of
career progression, but the middle manager might also be stressed
at continual re-application for the same job as repeated
downsizing measures take effect. Even those at the top may be
concerned by greater responsibility and challenges as business
units are merged.
This cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness and discontent has
led to suggestions that today’s careers are not working. PwC’s
2014 report1
identified that across industries, 10 to 15 per cent of
the global workforce can be categorised as disconnected – with
low levels of engagement and a high likelihood to leave the
organisation. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development’s own research2
in the UK suggests that a third of
employees feel it is unlikely they will be able to fulfil career
aspirations by staying in their current organisation – a figure that
rises to more than 50 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.
When it comes to finding new work, the situation is also far
from simple. The ease with which vacancies can be advertised
and, correspondingly, the number of responses received, mean
that base-level jobs and above can attract many hundreds of
applicants. To deal with this, employers use first-cut techniques
involving automated applicant tracking systems programmed to
Life partners will
switch back and forth
as the main earner
this way. Wolf says: “We believe we have saved a number of
them from taking jobs at other banks.”
Momentum is now building to bring analytics to the hiring
process. It seems as if this most human of disciplines – it is called
human resources after all – is finally succumbing to the lure of
big data. Hammond says it is inevitable. “There is lots of pressure
on human resources managers now,” he says. “I predict that in
five years’ time a human resources manager who is not data
savvy will simply not have a job.”
But the robots will not completely prevail. There will always
be a human decision-maker somewhere, not least because
employees just do not want algorithms to offer them jobs.
This point was made forcibly by Prasad Setty, vice-president
of people analytics and compensation at Google, at last year’s
Wharton PeopleAnalytics Conference. He described how Google
flew engineers to San Francisco every year and formed them into
committees to decide who should be promoted. It took days to
do this. So Google created an algorithm that could predict who
would get promoted with 90 per cent accuracy. It then told the
engineers that the algorithm could drastically cut their workload.
Setty assumed the geeky group would love this. Wrong.
“They hated it,” he recalled. “They said ‘these are such
important decisions, we want people to make them. We do not
want to hide behind a black box when somebody asks why they
did not get promoted’. That changed my mind completely about
people analytics. We do not want to substitute the humans who
make these decisions. We just want to make them better.”
Tim Green is a journalist who has been writing about
mobiletechnologyfor10years,firstwithScreenDigest,
thenMobileEntertainment.Henowwatchesthemobile
payments space carefully via his Mobile Money
Revolutionblogandworksoncorporatewritingprojects
for companies such as Gemalto, Bango and Boku

5. www.financialworld.co.uk October / November 2016 43
recognise key-words and phrases that meet specified criteria.
But what hope is there for the jobseeker who is trying to second-
guess these requirements to proceed to the next stage? These and
other challenges have led to suggestions that the job market,
particularly when it comes to finding flexible work, is broken.3
‘The future has already arrived – it is just not
evenly distributed yet’
This quote by William Gibson, the US-Canadian science
fiction writer, is worth revisiting in the context of careers. It has
long been recognised that while there are excellent examples of
progressive employers, engaged employees and flexible career
structures, these can be few and far between.
So what does the future hold for us on a more evenly
distributed level? Here are four predictions:
1. Line managers will become better at motivating and
developing their teams. This will drive a shift away from
promotion-based careers, which only feature upward movement
within silos, toward growth-based careers. The latter are more
about building employee capability through employer/employee
partnerships.
Rather than hoarding talent, managers will share organisational
knowledge and oversight with employees and become more adept
at selling the benefits of cross-functional moves. Overall, this
supports a talent brokerage approach to employee development –
and development opportunities are important for employee
satisfaction and engagement.
2. The future of work across the generations will reflect less
formal structures and, across an individual’s life, will involve
PAYE roles, shorter-term contracting/consulting/freelance roles
and enforced or unenforced periods of unemployment.
Lack of a formal job or career will not be perceived negatively
and time out devoted to community service and personal care of
younger or older dependents will be recognised and even valued
by the job market. Life partners will switch back and forth as the
main earner and this may happen more than once in their joint
working lives.
3. Learning providers will step up to the demand for lifelong
personal development, whether this development takes place on
the job or during enforced or unenforced non-job periods. Career
breaks to learn new skills will become more common. Top
universities will offer on-line access to formal undergraduate and
post-graduate programmes. These will be delivered partly through
the use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies.
I recently heard the story of a US university that, unknown to
its students, developed a computer algorithm to provide
feedback and support for learners. The algorithm then took its
place among a group of human campus support officers. When
learners burning the midnight oil posed a question online, the
algorithm responded quickly and efficiently. At the end of the
year, as students were called upon to cast their votes for teaching
awards, the algorithm won.
4. Robots will not signal the end of jobs. To rationalise this,
we can reference two things. First, we have been here before,
whether we choose to take the warnings of Luddites in the early
years of the Industrial Revolution, or the happy predictions of
extended leisure time that accompanied the rapid growth of
personal computing in the 1970s. Neither vision materialised.
Second, technological advances can lead to temporary
displacement, but this slack is capable of being taken up. Earlier
this year, Foxconn, the world’s
largest contract electronics
manufacturer and the name
behind assembling products
such as the iPhone, Kindle and
PlayStation, reportedly
replaced 60,000 factory
workers with robots. It is also reported to have denied any impact
on long-term jobs, stating: “We are applying robotics engineering
and other innovative manufacturing technologies to replace
repetitive tasks previously done by employees. Through training,
our employees [will] focus on higher value-added elements in the
manufacturing process, such as research and development,
process control and quality control.” (Foxconn could not be
reached for comment.)
What we all need to know
The job market may or may not be broken but, at times, it is
certainly dysfunctional. Relying on it alone to solve a work
requirement is a dangerous game. In short, all of us, regardless of
age, need to take responsibility at a personal level for making
things happen and realising our aspirations for work. What
follows is a behavioural blueprint for surviving in times of change.
The first imperative is to keep on learning. Enlightened
employers are starting to understand that development
opportunities offer a way forward to unlock employee satisfaction.
But this works best as a partnership approach with the employee.
Effective communication between both parties around wants and
needs is essential. The advice from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People remains appropriate: Sharpen the Saw
(ie stay fit, active, happy and engaged with work, learning and
with others)4
.
Second, we need to keep open to opportunity. Too many of us
become locked into a focus that sees us miss out on valuable
activity around us. A useful analogy can be drawn from studies of
the perception of luck. Personality tests suggest those who
perceive themselves as unlucky are generally more tense and
anxious than those who do not. This anxiety can also disrupt the
ability to notice the unexpected.5
More than 30 years ago, Alfred
Bandura, the eminent psychologist, noted: “Some of the most
important determinants of life paths often arise through the most
trivial of circumstances.”
Third, no matter how little non-work time you feel you have,
we all benefit from service to community. The ideas of Stu
Friedman, professor of management at the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania, promote four dimensions in our lives:
work, family, society and self. His “Better Leader, Richer Life”
The first imperative
in the workplace is
to keep on learning
3. Frith, B (2016), ‘Flexible job market is broken' [online], Hrmagazine.co.uk.
Available at: www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/flexible-job-market-is-broken
[accessed 17 July, 2016].
4. Franklincovey.com. (2016), ‘7 Habits’[online]. Available at:
www.franklincovey.com/leadership/7-habits.php [accessed 17 July, 2016].
5. Wiseman, R (2004), The Luck Factor. Arrow, London.
6. Total Leadership (2016). Leadership development [online]. Available at:
www.totalleadership.org [accessed 17 Juy, 2016].

6. programme6
has identified that a more desirable balance across
the four domains actually leads to improved performance at work.
It is as if the revised perspective in terms of what is truly important
for an individual allows for greater clarity and commitment in the
work domain.
Being smart with the use of
time across the domains is
also a strategy for personal
effectiveness. For example,
taking part in a charity
corporate social responsibility
event involving a fun run
could potentially provide multiple benefits in all four dimensions.
It could deliver engagement with colleagues outside of a work
context, an improved personal profile within the organisation,
benefits to the community, health benefits and, if children or
family are involved, a shared positive experience in the family
domain.
Finally, in recent years, we have begun to gain a better
understanding of personal networks. The advent of social media,
coupled with access to increased computing power, has provided
both the raw material and the wherewithal to study the fine grain
of interaction. One early conclusion supports the theory of “weak
ties”.7
Namely, that opportunities do not arise from those in our
immediate social circle, but from “weak tie” connections with
distant contacts, reachable through and across our existing
44 October / November 2016 www.financialworld.co.uk
Population 16-24
Population 25-49
Population 50-59
Population 60-SPA
-1,000,000
-500,000
0
500,000
1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
2,500,000
3,000,000
Projectedchange(2012-2022)
To meet future work
challenges, we will
need new attitudes
Projected changes to UK population
Source: Source: ONS, 2012-based principal population projections for the UK
networks. Social scientists talk of exclusive and inclusive
networks. The social capital attached to each type can be said to
represent “social superglue” and “social WD-40” respectively.8
The meaning here is that exclusive networks bind us to a tribe (the
old school tie perhaps representing one example), whereas
inclusive networks act as a bridge across exclusivity and offer the
power to connect with others who might otherwise remain outside
our circle.
We all experience similar problems and challenges in our
working lives. The difference lies in our approach to solving them
and we can learn much from the unique perspectives of those less
familiar to us.
For many people, notions of career and job are outdated and we
should all come to terms with this. The old adage talks of us not
seeing things as they are, but as we are. If we are to meet the work
challenges of the future, we will need to discover new attitudes
and overcome biases that convince us we cannot, or will not,
change our self-image.
There are many examples of successful people who underwent
a process of personal reinvention – from Ronald Reagan to
Colonel Sanders, Walt Disney to Albert Einstein. It is open to all
of us to take up the opportunities that new ways of
working present.
Darryl Howes is a career management specialist, with
extensiveexperienceinmanagementandacrossarangeof
consultancy assignments. He is a past national executive
member of the Division of Occupational Psychology and
was recently nominated for the 2016 CIPD/People
ManagementPowerListforL&Dprofessionals
7. Granovetter, M (1973), ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. American Journal of
Sociology, 78(6), pp.1360-1380.
8. Putnam, R (2000), Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American
community. Simon & Schuster, New York.
CAREERS