As analytics plays an increasingly influential role in helping organisations make certain business decisions, HR professionals need to help and train line managers in understanding the ethical implications of this process, according to a recruitment expert.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” said Bill Boorman, managing director of technology & innovation at RecruitingDaily.com.
“As much as we should be thinking about the tech and what it’s going to bring, we should be thinking equally about the impact of it.
“With the use of data and predictive analytics, we have to consider the human use of that and how we’re going to employ it in our organisations.
“I hear lots of people talking about the potential, but I don’t hear a lot of people yet thinking about what that’s going to mean when we start giving managers certain reports. Should the data create a question?”
“With great power comes great responsibility”
Speaking at the recent Australasian Talent Conference 2015, which was organised by ATC Events and held in Sydney, Boorman said that as the ability to analyse and leverage data increases, it was important for organisations to use this in the right way.
“Particularly in the HR function, we should be considering the question of ‘because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean we should be using it or drawing conclusions from it’,” said Boorman.
“You could provide us with information that could be a really helpful, positive thing. We can say somebody’s a flight risk, therefore let’s look at the reasons behind that. Or, conversely, we could just say they’re a flight risk, so we need to fire them.”
Traditionally, HR has been reactive instead of proactive when it came to adoption of technology, according to Boorman, who said analytics presented more considerations than other HR technologies.
“If it’s going to change the whole aspect of management and decision making, which is what we are suggesting, are we preparing people for that?
“Or are we not going to do anything about it until they’ve got it and then suddenly start back-pedalling. That’s what we’ve done with everything else.”
“The realisation is that the credibility is not in the message, it’s in the messenger”
Analytics is likely to have a significant impact on the practice of HR in the future, and he said some companies were already using it for business benefit.
He gave the example of Laszlo Bock, head of people for Google, who performed an experiment in which 50 per cent of applicants for a particular job were chosen via machine and 50 per cent via a 13-part interview process with people.
The results of performance indicators showed that 51 per cent of the successful people were human interviewed.
“Without time to adjust algorithms, the machine was performing the same as the person and that’s before we get into corrective algorithms. I think that’s interesting and frightening at the same time,” said Boorman.
“[In the future] we’re going to get machines to do all the transactional things and all of the thinking, which means we can have people concentrate on the right things, which is the relationship bit and the personal bit.”
“If you take a CV, it has 400-500 data points that tell you education, background, experience. When you link those with performance management data and if we look at the top performers, is there trends that they supplied that we could use in the future in recruiting? We begin to get exciting possibilities and lots of potential.
“The realisation is that the credibility is not in the message, it’s in the messenger. That changes our world in recruiting HR fundamentally and we should be talking and thinking and preparing for that now rather than reacting when it happens.”
Image source: iStock
