Human and Beyond: The Future in Unbiased Recruitment

Last week TNG hosted the annual trend event and eight trends were presented to forecast the future for the Swedish HR-community. With the theme being “Unbiased Recruitment 2020: Human and Beyond”, several trends highlighted how technology will contribute to fighting unconscious bias, by making objective and fair assessments for job-seekers and hiring companies. The event was also the official pre-launch for TNG's social interview robot Tengai Unbiased. 

The recruitment trend forecast reflects how prominent D&I HR-technology will be to recruiters in the future. This year’s eight trends were:

1.Authentic Employer Brand

Today’s job applicants are looking for an employee who will show genuine involvement and engagement. It’s no longer enough to show pictures of employers on the homepage as “proof” of a diverse team. Job-seekers want to see true an equal, diverse and inclusive work environment where the company shares best practices on how to succeed with its diversity recruitment.

2. HR-Tech goes Diversity Disrupt

New companies and investment in diversity and inclusion software are booming, according to several reports. More and more companies want to combat biases in the recruitment process with HR-technology as an effective tool. This trend highlight different technological solutions in various stages of the recruitment process thereby making more objective, fair and data-driven hiring decisions.

3.Polymath Recruiters

A new kind of recruiter has entered the HR-field, and they are challenging the traditional way of doing things. Polymath recruiters are strategic, data-driven employees, who promote and strive for more diversity and an unbiased recruitment strategy by always choosing the most objective approach.

4.Soft Skills

Being one of the leading recruitment trends identified by LinkedIn, soft skills entails creativity, originality, critical thinking, problem-solving and taking initiative. A trend that evolves quickly and becomes more important as digitalization, the gig-economy and future of work demands new skillsets. Everyone looks for soft skills but are unsure how to recruit and measure soft skills.

5.Smart Voices – Voice Tech

Automated voice-assisting programs and smart speakers are becoming more common as recruitment tools. More and more companies are using voice tech to simplify the job search process, find candidates in ATS and even recruit through cars. The job-seeker can be anonymous and close to the recruiter which makes it very popular.

6.Conversational Recruiting

Recruitment borrows from the marketing world - again. Conversational recruiting allows job-seekers and companies to easily interact in an unbiased manner though chatbots, texts, and other automated solutions. It is a way to engage applicants and encourage direct communication, on the candidate’s terms and it decreases ghosting. Tools that recruiters and hiring managers are using more frequently today.

7.Cognitive Diversity – Deep Diversity

Hiring a diverse team will promote creativity, innovation, speed up decision making and create an exciting and agile company culture. This trend is pushing recruiters and managers to see the value in being different and having employees that provide different perspectives to strengthening the business long term

8. The Biased Job Interview – Time For a Change

The traditional job interview is being re-evaluated since data now shows that unconscious bias influence recruiters to assess a candidate fairly. This insight is making companies question the interview process and anew, objective, data-driven tech is being tested and integrated into the recruitment strategy.

Previous years trends can be found here.

At the event – TNG also did a soft launch of its interview robot Tengai. Tengai is now offered as a part of TNG’s unbiased recruitment method and the robot will be integrated as a tool during the early stages of the recruitment process. By using Tengai during the initial recruitment process, candidates can be assessed more fairly and objectively and the chance to find more diverse employees increase. 

Tengai is unbiased by design, as she doesn’t take age, looks, gender or background into account when performing an interview. She also asks the exact same questions, in the exact same way to all interviewees allowing for a more fair process. The final interview transcript will give the recruiter a data-based, objective evaluation to base the hiring-decision on. Tengai levels the playing field and giving all candidates the same chance to show their competence and personality, without having any unconscious bias affecting their evaluation.

Tengai is unique because she is the first social interview robot in the world. TNG has, in collaboration with Furhat Robotics, developed and programmed Tengai during the last nine months and the robot is today leading the way in the future of D&I recruitment technology.