Reducing bias in the hiring process | with Annie Boneta

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Hello everybody. And you are very, very welcome to this week's edition of Social Talents, the shortlist. I am Holly Fawcett. I'm the head of content here at Social Talent and I'll be your host for this week while Johnny is in New York. So I thank you so much for spending your time with me, whether you're sharing with us live on the live stream on LinkedIn and YouTube or they listen to the recording of this on the podcast afterwards. So you're very, very welcome to this session. This week we are looking at reducing bias in the hiring process. And while there may be a really, really tight labor shortage at the moment, talent can still be found as long as organizations know where to look. But even with the increased dialogue around diversity, equity and inclusion, it is actually disheartening to see the number of companies who, who don't or just won't engage with talent who doesn't fit that prescribed status quo hiring and talent acquisition. You know, these two functions have a big, big role to play in this. Learning how to mitigate bias and understand how underrepresented groups could be the difference maker in this unique war for talent is key. So joining us to chat about this topic is Annie Bonita. Annie is a senior consultant with Recruiting Toolbox and is passionate about talent acquisition and DE and I in all its forms. And in this show, we're going to talk about the nature of bias in interviews and we're going to hopefully suggest some actionable ways that organizations can look to tackle it. We'll also look at the recent rise in layoffs and how this could specifically be affecting bias as well, and some practical tips, hopefully to create the fairest hiring process. So, Annie, you are very, very welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Thank you. Annie, perhaps you can introduce yourself for those who, who don't know you as intimately as I do. If you could share a brief, brief background as to who you are, where you've come from, why you love drinking coffee too much, etc.

I know what are my hobbies. So people always remark about how large my coffee mugs are on whenever I'm on camera. I'm Annie Bonetta. I am with Recruiting Toolbox and Recruiting Toolbox is a small, small but mighty consulting firm. We help global companies, you know, improve their hiring practices through a DEI lens, through unconscious bias, through setting a hiring bar of what great looks like for different companies. And so I've been in talent acquisition for probably close to 30 years now. All of us have been heads of TA at former companies. And so I've. In the last five or six years, I've been head of TA of small startups that have grown. But I've also been at companies like Starbucks where I've led international recruiting. Thank you.

And also where you got your coffee addiction, is that right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, at Starbucks, you know, we start every day. And that hasn't changed for me, you know, have to feel my representing.

Representing Seattle. That's right. Represent Seattle all the way from California. Andy, thanks very much for joining us. And I think the. The experience at Recruiting Toolbox and that you, over the breadth of your career, I'm sure, has really seen that bias comes into the hiring process in lots of different ways. And you spoke about a hiring bar. About what? That, you know, if we think about a hiring bar, as well as the baseline minimum of what everybody needs to have in order to be able to be at this company. So how does bias present itself in the hiring process? And could hiring bars perhaps be to blame for this or people's perception of what a hiring bar might be?

Yeah, I think sometimes people think with their heart and their gut more than their mind when it comes to hiring. And so that's where bias comes in. I mean, it's called unconscious bias for a reason. I mean, people are. Don't consciously know that they're presenting bias into the process when they're evaluating candidates. I mean, it even happens on Zoom. I'll hear an interviewer say, oh, their background was really messy. Or, you know, they. They did the. They were wearing a hat, a baseball hat and a T shirt. I don't think they're taking this interview very seriously. So, I mean, bias comes in all forms.

A baseball hat and a T shirt on. Well, on a job interview, I mean, maybe. But if that's also the uniform of your organization. Exactly. Then then they're doing the right thing. Right. That's it. And do you think people are just. Do they make up reasons? Do they find reasons to. To decline a candidate that they just don't quite think fits? Are they making a reason to hire somebody they think fits? Is that what it is?

Yeah, sometimes you'll hear cloaked bias in some of the feedback. For example, I think that they're overqualified. That can be a. A cloaked firm for ageism, you know, bias against older people. So I think that you have to challenge people when you do hear bias because they might even. They might not even realize that they are having bias.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So obviously, within the talent Acquisition function. And many of our listeners to this are people within the talent acquisition function or in staffing agencies and in recruiting. How much can we really push back in those hiring managers that cloaked discrimination that they may be having? Do we really have much power there?

I think that's the whole question, you know, do you. Do you have that power? Do you have that relationship with the hiring manager? And I always try to build trust where they can say anything to me. I. I once had a hiring manager who said, annie, I met the candidate, and she's. She's lovely, but she's pregnant. And I was like, yes, she is pregnant. You know, but I was glad that he was opening up to me to talk with me about that, because he could have just declined her and made up something else. Right. But, you know, he. He allowed me to have the conversation with him or when pedigree education bias comes in. I had a hiring manager who would not. Did not like people who went to junior college, for example, or had no college education at all. And after working with this executive for a while, I. I pushed back and I said, tell me, share with me why, you know, you have this education bias. And he himself had worked really hard to go to an Ivy League school. He and his mother had, you know, so he believed anybody could go to Harvard or to, you know, Stanford or Yale. And so we had this discussion, and I shared how I didn't have my degree, and he was shocked by it. But I share that I did not have the access, My family did not have the funds. And, you know, so I wasn't able to go to an Ivy League school. And so it helped. The conversation, helped him to open up his mind and his parameters and. And then even his hiring standards eventually.

That's fascinating, I suppose, because, yes, we. We often like this. There's enormous debates, I suppose, and very polarizing debates about people's beliefs in a whole range of different areas in this. This very polarized and political world we're all living in. But once we know individuals who, who are part of our. Our friends, our family, our neighbors, our community, who we can identify very clearly and have that story about that you don't have a degree, it suddenly opens that possibility that, well, Annie, you're amazing at your job. Why, therefore, you know, should I also look at people who don't have a degree? Is that kind of vulnerability, though, something that recruiters are actually willing to open up about? I think it's, you know, you built a lot of trust with this particular hiring manager. I think that's probably going to have to be where the, where the beginning of that relationship is formed, really, to. To be open.

I think that recruiters definitely have that ability. I mean, I believe that you form a better relationship with even your candidates by being more vulnerable as well. And when you have that vulnerability first, I find that it's very much reciprocated, you know, from your hiring managers, and they're much more open to, like, sometimes they just don't even realize. And so your job as the talent advisor is to find out information about people and to share it. For example, did you know that this engineer on your team doesn't have a degree in CS but actually has a degree in biology and you share with them or, you know, recently on some trainings, I've had people who are in tech and they came from being a weatherman, a fireman, a music teacher, and they're on these teams doing amazing things, but people don't know. And so allowing them to be vulnerable and share their stories really helps expand everyone's minds on who could be on the team and what backgrounds they might come from. And, you know, that's all part of the education and influence that helps break down the barriers of bias.

Yeah, absolutely. The understanding of how diverse talented people could be. You know, we aren't all this one thing. Yeah, for sure. In terms of this talent scarcity, though, that we're. That we're opening up this about, particularly for the market we're all operating in. There is a very, very strange market phenomenon in that we have huge inflation, incredibly low unemployment figures, and some layoffs happening at the same time. And it's a weird. It is, it's just a weird time right now to be, to be recruiting, possibly. It's a very advantageous time. You can take advantage of, of, you know, opportunity where there are teams, very talented teams, hopefully, but unfortunately also being laid off in, in some of our competitor organizations that we might snap up that talent. But there's a bit of a snobbishness about. Yes. People who've been laid off.

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up because, you know, I speak to my TA friends every day and you. I know from being a recruiter, as soon as I hear there's a laugh, I'm like, oh, me, go to LinkedIn and see who, you know, who got laid off. But then I present them this amazing candidate to a hiring manager or an executive and they think, oh, they got laid off. That must mean that they're in the bottom quartile. They must be a, a poor performer. And it's so frustrating. I know. I, I'm sure there are other TA people who are like, yes, because that is true. And it's again, if you have that relationship where you can be a talent advisor to your hiring manager or executive, you can share with them that. Did you know that this entire group got laid off? It wasn't like just the low performers. I got laid off in my past. It was because I made the most of my team. So to help them again, break down their bias or their preconceived notions of why people get laid off, I think really helps them.

Yeah, absolutely. And to that end, right, you know, who's the most expensive member on the team? You know, that's very unfortunately been your reason for being laid off. I was, I was laid off in my past as well. I, I was laid off because the entire company went out of business and it was bought up by a competitor who just took the stock and the brand name and that was it. Everything else, thank you very much, employees, off you go. See you later. And it, it really does sting, I think. I think when you put that on a resume that, you know, my reason for leaving is redundancy. Yeah, redundancy. Because it's very hard to come up with that reason because if not everybody was laid off or you were the highest performing or highest paid member on the team, etc. And they're just making very crude job cuts to save cash, it can be, it can be really difficult to overcome that bias of, well, they must have been poor performing. So how do we. Again, I've been thinking about, you know, people who are coming into the workplace who, or sorry, coming into the interview process. We in recruiting have screened these candidates. We've gotten them excited or they are very, very excited about interviewing our organization. And now we're going to put them forward into the hiring manager who, you know, potentially may or may not read their resume, let's face it, may not. You know, they're going to be met with a barrage of, of different unconscious biases that may, you know, that may impact positively or negatively whether or not this person is going to make it through to the next round. And as is the format for this particular show, we often present different news articles that have been, you know, in the news in the last couple of, in the last couple of days. And this one in particular from Forbes, this is a, a very helpful article, I think. 16 Ways to Remove Unconscious bias in the Hiring process. This was a collection article from From a lot of different people. From the. From the. From the. What do they call it? The Forbes Council? I think the Diversity Council. To give really, really helpful insights on how to remove unconscious bias from. From hiring. And a lot of the techniques, I think, were. Were very much aimed at leaders, which is wonderful. Around the examples of what they need to do to get rid of hiring. So, you know, we're presenting candidates and their resume to a hiring manager. One of those techniques that we might do within. Within the recruiting organization is remove identifying information about this candidate so that they don't see, oh, this is a female candidate, or this candidate is from a different country, or didn't go to that school that I thought that I want them to go to. So this kind of blind hiring process, does that actually work? Does it actually move the needle, getting people hired at the end of the day? Or does it just get them into the. Into the interview room, but not actually hired?

Yeah. I have not personally worked at a company where we implemented blind resumes, but I've worked with many clients who have implemented that. And so I've asked them, how has it helped you? What are the pros and cons of it? And they said, for a hiring manager, for an interviewer, screening a blind resume has been helpful to them. It does help because if someone went, I went to the uw. You went to the uw. It's natural that I might be like, oh, look, this person went to the uw. You know, Holly, I'll flag her as someone I want to speak to. It's just an unconscious thing. And so what this does is it really does help people focus on the particulars of what they've achieved in their resume, etc. I think another great tool that's similar to that is if it's a technical role, having the technical test right at the beginning of the process. So that if they pass the technical test, it means it doesn't matter where they went to school, what company they work for. So more people enter in that might have been screened out just at resume review.

Yeah. And more people may have been screened out that may have gotten in based on pedigree as well. Oh, great. They worked at this other company. They must be good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's very. It's very tempting to recognize that even fabulous companies that we all admire, even they've made bad hiring decisions in their past.

Yeah.

You know, or people may have been there as a contractor and somehow just got absorbed into the organization. And actually, generally they're not Brilliant.

I, I would have loved a blunder. I. Not too long ago, I presented a candidate to Chief Product Officer and the candidate had a Chief Product Officer title as well. And he was like, annie, I don't, we don't need two Chief Product officers at this startup. And I said, well, actually he's a Chief Product Officer of a team of two. So he's actually looking at joining a startup where he can learn from additional product people as teammates. And. But at first, this, this executive was not going to interview this candidate. But because I was armed with information and standing up, I think that's what a lot of TA people do. They, they have to be the voice of the candidate. And I think it's also, you know, like you were talking about this interesting time where, you know, we have, it's, it's a candidate's market right now, yet we're having layoffs. And so the, the experience that a candidate is going to have going into an interview where some people might, you know, treat them badly because they've, or grill them about why were you laid off? Why wasn't, you know, somebody else, this other team laid off? And instead you embrace them. You know, we have a saying at RT where we say, we try to help people to understand that their job as interviewers is to bring talent into the company and not screen them out. And I think that that brings a different dynamic, you know, with a candidate and the conversation that you're going to have with them.

Yeah, bringing talent into the organization, not screening them out, I think that's really, really important. And obviously when you, when you frame that for a manager, for, for a hiring leader who they often come to the, to the interview with the, with the distinct, you know, objective of finding out what they don't know. We had a very interesting conversation a few weeks back with Chris Calland from a few weeks, but really just understanding where when he was formally at AWS at Amazon Web Services, they dug into the data of the interviews that, that the hiring managers conducted an extraordinary amount of time in the interviews across all of their hiring loops were finding out what the candidate doesn't know rather than finding out what the candidate does know, and really checking that out to be a very positive example. So I think you're shifting that shift, shifting that mindset for a leader to be more around bringing talent in rather than, you know, keeping our hiring bar. Keeping everybody out is really, really key. There was lots of other examples, I think, in this, this, in this Forbes article as well, or other things that managers have to do in terms of self work, how important is it really for leaders to put time and really invest their energy into identifying and understanding where their own biases are and perhaps trying to actively catch themselves and doing this in real time?

Oh, it's so important because as a leader, as a hiring manager, you set the example and the tone for your interviewing team, for your group, for the people that work around you. And so if you're open and you say, for example, one of the things that helps challenge biases is to provide an open forum, an open environment where you say, look, I'm looking for discussion, contrary opinions. I'm looking for us to disagree in this, in this recruiting process as we're looking for someone to join our team. So if you say that up front and you use terms like we want someone who's going to add to our team, add to our culture, not fit in our culture, fit on our team. I think again, as a leader you're setting the tone of what your expectations are and how this recruiting process is quite.

Absolutely. And like we all are aware that of that business case by now, let's hope that you know, more diverse teams and more inclusive teams are higher performing and are much more innovative. And so recognizing that by bringing innovation in it can shake things up. And that can be. That can only be a positive thing. Yeah, absolutely. Was there anything in that article in particular or any of the techniques out of the 16 Jesus is loads of them that you felt. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with those or any. Any particular. Maybe that stood out to go. I really don't know if that that applies in. In real life or we. We may know better now.

Yeah, I mean I loved number 16 challenge your ideas about what matters because I think again, it really focuses not less on gut and less on fit on a team and culture and what someone else can bring elevate values you unconsciously de emphasize I thought was another great. So I think, you know, how will if someone thinks different or say, for example, the team has a bias toward extroversion, as a lot of people, you know, the interview process sometimes favor it definitely favors extroversion.

Yeah.

But there are tons of great neurodiverse introverted people, you know, that are already working on teams and so to even have them on the interview panel so that other more introverted people can connect with them in a thoughtful way, I think is great. So they see me who's extroverted, but then they see, you know, Holly, who on the team is more introverted. I think it's great for them to meet a variety of people that they can connect with.

Yeah, for sure. I know there's a lot of misconceptions about introversion versus extroversion. And my son, I won't name who this was, but somebody did recount it to me that this, I, they had this vision of I can't imagine what two introverted people doing in a job interview together will be like. It would be a very quiet room, which I don't really think is what happens at all because introverted people are just more likely to ask great questions and just listen to each other. So that's great.

Well, they say that even about recruiters or sales people. They're like, there's no way. You know, Annie, you know, as a recruiter you have to be selling. And I've known some really great recruiters who aren't naturally extroverted, but they're very thoughtful. They're very good at hearing and listening to the candidate and what their needs are and listening to their hiring managers. So I think that you can over emphasize certain skills and not value enough of other skills.

Yeah, actually it's very interesting about the, the curiosity aspect of a job of a, of a recruiter or somebody in sales or even customer success as well. A really, really key relationship building type job, job role that we often think salesy, customer success. They have to be, have to be that extroverted type of person. There's a wonderful book by Susan Cain, Quiet, which is really so, so, so beautifully written about introversion and the different aspects of what introversion really, really means. I, I found that just fascinating to learn how, how much it applies in terms of the different types of jobs that we have and how different we, we all could really feel about it. I just thought it was fabulous. For me, I think the, yeah, for me, I think the, the piece that I felt most disagreed with was about the purely just knowing that, you know, having to just find out what your biases are. It's important. Yes, we understand where our biases are, but knowing that we have a bias and, and doing something about it are two completely separate things. And biases are unconscious and they trip us up without us knowing for a reason. But for me it's all about process. And we often rely process down to technology and you know, trying to take things out or automate some of the decision making or automate some of the, some of the tools. Have you seen any recruitment processes where technology has been used to either make pre screens or make decisions about how we bring candidates through a process? Or automate its recommendations, who we hire.

I mean, there are companies like is it Pymetrics hirevue that try to help automate the first tranche of candidates. And, you know, I'm not very familiar with them myself. I haven't used them, so I can't say. But I mean, I think that they've. I think like any technology, any, any of them out there that we use, there are pluses and minuses. Right. To them. And I am a personal believer of there are certain things that you can't automate in a recruiter's job. I mean, that's why people are worried, you know, robots are going to take over our jobs. I never worry. I never think about that because I think there are just certain things that can't be automated.

Sure. Yeah. And that decision is really key. Or as you say, getting to know deeply about the candidate and therefore advocating for them with a hire manager. A piece of tech isn't really going to do that. I don't think the next article that we have might be a little. An easy segue is from the Business Insider. I felt was really weirdly interesting to me. Don't worry about AI becoming sentiment. Do worry about it finding new ways to discriminate against people. So this was a very interesting article. Pop this one into the, into the comments here if you're watching live on LinkedIn or YouTube or it's also in the, in the show notes there on the podcast as well. I thought this article was very interesting as it kind of comes off the back of the Washington Post investigation and, and breaking the story about Google's Lambda technology. It's chatbot becoming relatively human and really like having sentient knowledge. Please don't turn me off. Freaked me out.

I know, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So if, if AI isn't actually true, like everybody from Google on downwards and loads of other people have come out to say not don't be worried about Lambda. Lambda isn't real or it's not really sentient or whatever else that was all made up. I listened to that podcast. I definitely know it's real. But when, when AI has, you know, some ability to decide or make or have thoughts and have an opinion, which is weird.

Yeah.

But it is saying, you know, AI actually could just be plain old discriminatory and, and show us or, or mark people down or promote others based on things that really we shouldn't be promoting. So it mentions in particular relying too much on tech. Can we see a way of abdicating responsibility? How do you feel about this rising AI and that, that piece of advocating responsibility.

I, I do agree that that is, that can happen, especially because, you know, there are great examples of that. You know, I think there's the story of Amazon and about they had an algorithm and a hiring tool that they had to scrap because they found that it discriminated against women. And that's because it was based on 10 years of hiring practices. So it's kind of like a referral program. A referral program is great unless you don't have a diverse set of people in the first place. Then you're just going to get more of the same. So more growth. Yeah, so that, that's a great example of how they build that, you know, or even on, I can't Remember if it's HireVue or Pymetrics where they base it on 50 people at your company taking the test as the benchmark. Well, how do you choose who those 50 people are? Could be my favorite people who I think is a, you know, high performer, etc. And so you might be building bias in just by who you select and then you're basing everything off of that after that as the benchmark. So I think it is a little dangerous.

Oh definitely. And like there's been so many examples of, of where technology, not just like technology within the hiring process, but technology that we use every day where it just is not built for, for everybody because they just don't have a reasonable sample enough of people who are, who are different in order to interact with it and to discover it. So as an example, there was a story of an automated faucet, an automated tap in a public bathroom where you put your hand under the tap and the computer vision would recognize that that's a hand under there. So we better put the water right. This was a way of saying if something else slipped in there, like tissue paper or something, it wouldn't go off, but if a hand went underneath the tap, it would, it would turn on and it would outcome the water anyway, so out comes the engineer to test, demonstrate how this is how working. And then along comes a black person to, to put their hands underneath the tap and it wouldn't go on.

Yeah, I'm telling you, it's so interesting because AI, I mean, AI is so interesting. I mean technology is just interesting. Like you know, where they give the examples of if I were to go and browse for something, I might get different ads because they know my demographic, they know the income, they know certain things about me different than you. So you're going to see different ads that I see.

Yeah.

So again, there's already a bias in there of what I should see and what you should see.

Yep, yep. And that kind of that echo chamber effect. And I think that's another way in which discrimination and discrimination in hiring can be really strange because if we're. If we're placing ads in a programmatic fashion where, you know, we're advertising on Facebook, we're advertising on Instagram or across other social channels, it's going to choose people who are more likely to respond to that ad. And so they're more likely to choose people based on other demographic information, which we shouldn't be discriminating against.

Absolutely.

There was a quote as well from this article. The. What was it? Which browser you use to apply for a job could mean that AI and recruitment systems either favor or derank your application. Is that like a pure bias against people who are using Internet Explorer?

I know, right? I mean, I will tell you, I do know of hiring managers and interviews who do joke about people's email addresses. So they have an aol.com they're like, ooh, I don't know. I think they're old school, Annie. I don't know if they could adjust to our, you know, fast pace. So, again, I think it's just a data point, but it's not everything. And, you know, one of the things I did like, that I read about was that they're implementing more AI audits, which I think are really important, is that if you are going to implement this kind of technology, to always be evaluating, is it. Does it have discriminatory practices? Are the outcomes exactly what you had intended them to be? What do the metrics look like, you know, pre and post implementation? So I think those are important things to continue to do.

So is this more like a, you know, AI audits or even just audits of your recruitment process? I think in general, I mean, that's often done where in, for example, the United States, where you're a federal contractor or a federal employer, you know, you would have. You'd have to do those audits as a point of that's actually implemented by law. Are there other organizations who are doing these things as well and seeing, is there a disparate impact without the legal requirement to do so? They're just doing so because it's a good thing to do.

I definitely know that there are companies who are doing audits proactively, maybe, and some. Some reactively based on a lawsuit, et cetera. But I think you can learn certain things. Even great practices need to have audits. One example is, you know, some people implement having at least one diverse candidate on a panel. But if you do the audit and you look at the data, you realize there's a. There's a theory of onlys that if you only have a woman on a hiring panel and you have two white men, the chances of her being hired are zero.

Yep.

You know, so again, even though it was a great practice implemented with great intentions, it ended up not having great results. So I think those kinds of audits and data and learnings and knowledge help us as TA professionals implement and suggest and create better practices in our interview process that prevent less bias.

Yeah, I know. Over this side of the water versus the United States, where there is affirmative action in place. You know, in the European Union, for example, we have anti discrimination rather than positive discrimination.

Right.

So you cannot discriminate on the basis of. Of nine protected characteristics that, you know, you simply cannot discriminate in when it comes to an interview process or in an employment process either. And so, for example, I know there are some organizations who will be like, I can't actively select a person to go onto a shortlist of an interview panel because they are female or because they're a person of color or because they're from some other marginalized group. That is a protected characteristic. For example, I can't do that. They, you know, because that's. That's considered discrimination. And there are some of those types of barriers where some recruiters just feel a bit icky about it or, you know, actively choosing somebody who's going on to this. How can we get over that? Because obviously these people are qualified. It's not as if they're not qualified. Right. Otherwise they wouldn't be on the shortest.

I just had this discussion with a training group of engineers as well. I was sharing how I had a CTO that was, you know, we were doing an interview panel and around, and the. It was a female who was more junior in her career, but had accomplished a lot, worked for great companies, had done a lot of great projects, and then a more senior engineer who was a white CIS male, and they were the finalists. She was qualified, but she was. She didn't have as much experience as he did. She saw a great experience. The interview team recommended the woman. The CTO is new, and he said, guess what? We're going with the best candidate, and he is the best candidate. So he. First of all, he discounted what his team was recommending because I think the team, having run her through the technical tests, also saw the potential that she had. And then. So I had to take him aside and challenge him. I had to challenge why, what was his bar of the best? You know, and so, you know, he took it as the best school, most years of experience, et cetera. So I challenged him with why the team considered her the best, what their criteria was, which was again, a great example of why we needed to be aligned on what the criteria was. But, you know, it was great to, to share with him and to put. Push him to think differently about what his idea of great was and what the team's idea of great was. We ended up hiring both of them. So it was, it was a great outcome, but it was a great, even better, a great discussion.

But who's. Whose opinion weighs more in that circumstance? The team that this person is going to be hired into or the manager of that team? Because obviously only one person can be the one who makes the decision.

Ultimately, the dynamics are different in every company and in every group. So, I mean, I think as the talent advisor, it is your job to broker those discussions, to push. Now, if the CTO came back and said, nope, we're only going to have one hire and it's going to be this gentleman, you know, that's, that is his prerogative, that is his decision. It is my job, though, as a ta, as the talent advisor, is to stand up for the team in hr, to speak for other people who, because he was the new cto, they were, they didn't have the relationship, they were hesitant to push back. So I think it's, you know, and my job is to also speak up for the candidate, you know, to give them opportunities and to talk about what things she would be bringing to the team different than what they had already.

Yeah, definitely that difference that you're bringing, like, we all know that there's a simply building a team of the best, you know, may not necessarily result in a great team. There are lots of other characteristics that go into making a great team and actually where people all learn from one another. Was that the diversity bonus, as Scott Page recommended, where, you know, this person knows these few things, this other person knows these complete other things.

Yes.

Therefore, the size of the skills and the team is double.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. Oh, we do have a comment, actually. Sorry, there's one from a LinkedIn user who. I can't see your name. So if you did want to put in your name in this, I can't see it. Unfortunately, the implementation of GDPR which is the general. Sorry. The directive on. For the data protection is where a cantor can legally request their application is reviewed by a person if they're unhappy with any element of the process that doesn't involve human interventions. This is like for software or AI cv. Now what also in terms of this is in terms of positive action. This, this piece of software has to also be completely transparent. You have to be able to. To specifically outline what decisions it is making, which is actually more than often. It's actually shied companies away from implementing tech in the decision making process with this regard. Also, what GDPR has, which a lot of people have have availed of since its implementation 2018 is the. What's called a subject access request. So you can actually request every single piece of data that the company has about you as a candidate, including the job interview notes. So if your hiring manager has made loads of notes and your whole hiring team has compiled this like book on you or whatever, you can request that. So just be mindful of what one writes down is what I'm going to recommend.

I have a funny story about that. One of my peers, he worked at a company and the hiring manager was taking notes and the candidate, she was saying that she had quite a few other job opportunities. And so he writes down hot candidate. And she immediately, she saw what he wrote upside down and she marched out of that interview over to HR and she's like, I am so appalled. I think you're right. You have to be really careful what you write.

Oh my gosh, what an. Oh, what a night. Oh, oh God, that. You know what, that's another one I'm going to add to my bucket of things.

Yeah, exactly.

Right? Yeah. Oh yeah. I've, I've heard loads of stories so where people. Because obviously when you're, when you're, as soon as you come into an organization, you're being interviewed. It's not just when you, once you sit down and it's like, okay, clock starts, let's go. This is the interview. So a candidate was coming into an organization where she was met by reception. And then somebody from the interview team, I think was actually somebody from HR came down to meet her at the reception desk. They brought him in, they brought her into the lift and they noticed on her, on her, on her wedding finger that she had a really sizable engagement ring. And this HR person just was like, oh my goodness, your ring is absolutely fabulous. And she, you know, had a little admirer or whatever else. Anyway, she got into the interview room and then afterwards she this candidate made a complaint that that was a discriminatory action, which it is, of course, because suddenly you're introducing the fact that this person's engaged and that could have been discriminatory.

And it' what, the size of the ring? Yeah. So I have a friend, I have friends who I, I share in my trainings where they put the city that they live in on their, on their cv. And so one lives in Beverly Hills. And so the, the comments and questions that she gets, you know, do you see stars? You know, where is your, you know, and they, and they ask her though, do you even need to work if you live in Beverly Hills?

Yeah, I guess I need to pay the mortgage.

I know, right? Even more so, I need to work.

Exactly. Well, I mean, putting down the city where you live rather than your specific address is becoming much more common now because people are Google, Google Mapping where it is that you live and trying to see what kind of property do you live in. Is it rural, is it urban, do you, you know, live in an apartment or is it a, you know, is it a self contained house? Whatever it is, it doesn't look fancy. All those, like, I've heard the works. When it comes to discrimination and hiring.

People see a dream. I have heard most hiring managers Google that information is because they want to see how far out. So they have proximity bias. So they say, oh, you're going to have a 45 minute commute that's too far. You know, if it was 40 minutes, 42 minutes. And so they, they wanted to climb. And luckily again, the hiring manager shares this with me so I can challenge them. And I'll say, I have a friend who has commuted for 10 years an hour each way, but he uses the time on the train to listen to podcasts and to, you know, expand his knowledge and things like that. And who are you to judge for somebody else if they show up to work every day on time for 10 years and. Fabulous.

Yeah, absolutely. I know that, that kind of proximity bias in terms of physical proximity. Yeah, certainly before COVID Right. When, when we all worked in a location where offices tended to be the place where we work rather than necessarily working from home for many of us. But even in Ireland, where I live, there's a, there's a toll booth, which is actually a virtual toll booth. There's no actual physical thing anymore. It's just like a computer that scans your registration plate. But there's a toll booth that exists around this big ring road around the city. And once you pass that toll booth, it Costs you money, obviously, to go any further than that on the, on the, on this road. And so there's a belief that anybody who lives south of the toll bridge will only work in that part of the city. Anybody who lives north of the toll bridge will work in the north. And that's it. And that's, that's the rule, apparently, that people.

That's a broad generalization.

Right.

Anyone pass. This is not going to work out at our company.

Yeah, regretfully, I pass through that toll booth all the time.

Right, right. I think that also happens even with things opening back up and some offices having hybrid or you know, come back to work, to the office. There are some hiring managers and executives who believe that if someone is not in their seat at their desk, at, in the office five days a week, that they're less productive than someone who is hybrid or remote. And I think that's again, another bias.

Yeah, oh, absolutely. And I think that one's been debunked now that we've all had to work in this greatest experiment for the last two years, having to all work from home and realized actually how remarkable, remarkably productive we all have been. So, yeah, we're breaking through all of these glass barriers of biases left, right and center, which is great. I've just realized the time we are probably about three minutes to go before we all get cut off. But Annie, if you wouldn't mind, you've shared a lot of wonderful insights. If you could share one more. We ask every one of our guests to leave us with a piece of advice to leave into our shortlist bucket of advice. What piece of advice have you received or that you possibly give others that you'd like to share with everyone today?

You know, I loved a quote from, and I could be pronouncing her name incorrectly, Leela Jana. She's a social entrepreneur who did great things and unfortunately passed away much too early. But she has a quote that many people utilize it. It says that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. I think we need to recognize untapped and underrepresented talent globally where they're at and you know, again, we need to find where people are and, and to open up our minds about, you know, the opportunities that people have or have, don't have, whether it's socio. Economic situation, where they live, et cetera. Not all the great, all the great tech talent is not centralized in San Francisco, California, you know, for example.

Yeah, that's very, very true. Talent is not. Sorry, talent is deeply distributed. But opportunity, opportunity is not Yeah, I will remember that one. That is so very, very, very true. And look, you know, some interviewers are great, some interviewees are great, but that also can, you know, just because you're a great interviewee does not mean they were the best talent either when it comes to interview bias either. So there we go. That's a really lovely piece of advice to land on. Thank you so much, Annie, for. For your wonderful experience and advice for today's show. It's been really, really great chat. Thank you very, very much and hope to drink more coffee over your morning. And if you can join us for our shortlist, it won't be on next week. Next week, we're taking a week's break, but we'll be back the week after. And what date, though, you think that's gonna be? The 13th? 13th of July. We'll be back with Christophe Niebel as well. We'll be back to us talking about the workforce of the future. So please do join us on the 13th of July when we're back after our brief hiatus. Other than that, we'll see you next time. Thank you so much, everybody.

Bye.