Talent Recognition – Talent Management
Hard skills and experience (as detailed on a CV) are important, but even at recruitment there will be a larger number of applicants with those hard skills, than available interview places. What the recruiter wants is to be able to identify the applicants who are going to shine in the role, and for that you need to identify the applicant’s soft skills as well.
The Problem Identifying Soft Skills
How likely is it that 7+ billion people fall into 1 of 16 different personality types, is it any more likely than fitting 7+ billion people into one of 12 horoscope signs. For Soft Skill identification there needs to be
- an objective scale to measure soft skills effectively and since the 1990s psychologists have built on the Five Factor Model (FFM) as this objective scale
- a method ensuring that candidates cannot ‘game’ the process either consciously or unconsciously
- consistency when interpretating the data and the removal of unconscious bias
- a process that achieves the above while remaining cheap, fast and easy to operate.
Getting the Best Out Of Your Talent
When Talent is immersed in an environment in which it can thrive, it’s performance improves and retention is increased. Most studies on the cost of employee churn (up to middle management) agree that the cost ranges from £11,000 to £36,000 as it takes 32 weeks for replacement staff to reach optimum productivity.
Pre-Covid employee churn was running at 15% p.a. so statistically a company could expect to turn over its staff in under 7 years. It is rare for someone to leave their job because they don’t feel they are capable. The major reasons given for leaving are: cant get on with supervisor(s), don’t feel comfortable within the department, don’t like the culture. Namely personality/soft skills failure due to culture and environment (not the work itself).
The Solution
Most Talent management agree on what needs to be done – recruit or promote people who are well matched to the environment as well as the work. The problem is how to match Talent to the best environment for it to thrive. The questions that need to be addressed are : Where to get the expertise, how much will it cost and how easy is it to use.
Existing HR infrastructure focuses upon data retention, and, where applicable, big data analysis. Trying to apply the derived trends down to the granular level. Big data analysis does have its place, and can predict how a group of people will react/have reacted to a given set of circumstances. What it cant do is predict how John/Joan Smith will react to those circumstance. It is not capable of being that granular.
The Talent Recognition Approach
We differ from other HR Tech providers’ approach. Their method tends towards big data analytics in order to spot trends which can then be applied to predict responses from a smaller group or (at a stretch) the individual. It is easier to predict how a group of people will respond to a given set of stimuli, than it is to predict the individual response(s) with any accuracy.
While we recognize that big data analytics can be productive, our approach is far more granular and focuses on the individual, using groundbreaking (patented) technology. Furthermore we make our technology quick, friction free and extremely easy to use. You should not have to be an expert to get the most from an expert system.
Finally while big data tends to move the decision making process from the hands of the rightful decision makers, Talent Recognition doesn’t. What we do is give the decisionmaker more and pertinent information with which to make their decision. The result is better decision making.
The Talent Recognition Platform
The Black Box generates from a series of real time images (taken via a devicecam) a psychometric matrix with 195 values in seconds. The TR Platform interprets this data through a number of product channels.
- TR Recruiter, is aimed at recruiters/recruitment consultants (roles less than £50k), it analyses soft skills, and ranks applicants in the order of best fit for the vacancy, immediately identifying the most promising applicants to interview cutting time to fill, improving employee retention and eradicating unconscious bias.
- TR Miner, currently under development – MVP by 2022Q1, beta deployment by 2022Q2. The TR Miner is designed to identify untapped potential within the workforce. With the 15% pre-covid employee churn, and the perceived shortages in the labour market, there is an increased focus to put more resources into employee wellness. TR Miner is designed to help managers mentor and guide their ‘charges’ to a more fulfilled work ethos.
The Science
Genetics and hormones effect facial structures, at one extreme people with Downs Syndrome (genetic) are easily recognizable, and Testosterone levels (hormonal) have an effect of facial width. With the origination of the FFM in the 1990’s psychologists, had for the first time, an objective scale to measure personality, since when there have been in excess of 3,500 peer reviewed papers on the relationship between facial morphology and personality. The Talent Recognition ‘black box’, is the subject of a peer reviewed paper in Nature, 200,000 FFM tests, 5 million images, 100 million data endpoints, patented AI algorithms and advanced machine vision.
What the Black Box does is analyse a series of (6) images taken by the user’s device camera and generate a matrix of 195 fixed and floating point psychometric values. The whole process takes less than 40 seconds after which the images are deleted.