Speaking in Code - are we ready for Big Data and People Analytics?

RSG Director Adam Meadows isn’t quite sure…

A recent BBC article on the benefits of big data and social profiling in the recruitment process really got me thinking about what this brave new future holds for all involved when selecting the right people for the right job.

I admit, I’m usually skeptical of anything that is called the ‘next big thing’ in recruitment – especially when it is IT-based. This is because the ultimate test of people is, well, people, and quite frankly the development of this new ‘people analytics’, as it is known, only proves this fact.

Don’t get me wrong – I remember the painful days of hundreds of files and sifting endlessly through piles of paper trying to read and define what they contained. The advent of social media has changed this in recruitment, mostly for the better, and it’s right that systems should continue to develop and enhance these benefits.

However, it’s hard for me to believe that software will replace humans in selecting the best candidates for jobs in my lifetime.

This is not because humans don’t make mistakes. I’ve witnessed countless excellent candidates, with a variety of exciting attributes, being excluded via human screening functions. As a simple statement of fact, a CV cannot accurately reflect a candidate, causing many to be overlooked.

It’s rather that, given that these people-based mechanisms can be flawed, how can we expect a computer to do it any better?

The whole issue makes me think about two extremes of computers trying to represent humans – one designed to compete in a highly-structured game of chess, and one designed to imitate human interactions (those computers trying to beat the Turing Test). The Turing Test, named after one of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians, Alan Turing, was developed to see if software could fool human beings in to thinking that it was itself a human.

Chess has been a target for computing enthusiasts for a long time as the game has a finite number of possibilities, albeit an inconceivably high number, and a number of clearly defined rules that need to be followed. The most famous example of this is the 'Deep Thought' computer by IBM, which later became 'Deep Blue'. On the other hand, we have software trying to imitate human beings and defeat the Turing Test. 

Most years there are contests to see which software is performing best in this regard. In 2014, the University of Reading ran one such contest, with the winning software fooling 33% of the human interrogators in a text based conversation which lasted five minutes. Such a short conversation cannot account for all the nuances of physical conversation and body language.

While elements of these two examples are successful, the comparisons only further convince me that a high-quality interview technique, combined with experience and sound emotional intelligence, are the only way to ensure that your recruitment process is the best that it can be and to minimise failure rates. People analytics will no doubt go on to play a major role in all our futures; their development demonstrates that HR, in conjunction with the business, needs to be involved in long-term strategy as opposed to fulfilling a process-led function. But to enable a world where the skills, personalities and jobs are matched, the actual issue that needs to be addressed is how the whole process happens culturally. There are no ‘quick fixes’ for this, no matter how technologically advanced it may appear.

‘The cart has at last caught up with the horse’; great news for job seekers in August’s Labour Market Statistics

Bristol, the home of Sanderson’s head office, is the 10th best city in the UK to find a job, according to the Staffing Industry Analysts. With 0.48 job seekers per vacancy, Bristol is one of the most independent and stable cities outside of London.

For Bristol and the rest of the UK, employment continued to rise, following the general direction the labour market has been growing in since late 2011. There were 30.61 million people in work in September, which is 74,000 more than for April 2014. Usually, high levels of job creation, as we are experiencing now, are accompanied by low wages. However, as employment has risen in recent months, so have real wages ('real' wage is income expressed in terms of purchasing power as opposed to actual money received). This is the first time that UK real wages have grown since the financial crisis, and the first time that wage growth has exceeded the rate of inflation.

The salary gap between the highest and lowest paid regions has significantly reduced over the past year. For instance the gap between London, the highest paid region, and Northern Ireland, the lowest paid, has shrunk by £1,718 since August 2013. However, this may be more to do with London's slow wage growth compared to the regional cities. Alexandra Jones, CEO of Centre for Cities, said that “we are failing to make the most of cities’ economic potential”, and advised that "devolving more funding and powers to UK cities so they can generate more of their own income and play to their different strengths will be critical to ensuring this is a sustainable, job-rich recovery". The Minister for Cities, Greg Clark, pointed out that"in the last two years the UK has created over a million jobs, of which over 750,000 are outside London".

In terms of candidate availability, the number of both permanent and contract available workers has fallen further, maintaining the upward pressure on pay. The pay pressure is being fed by a combination of ‘strong demand for staff and shortages of suitable candidates’, according to data collected by REC Corporate and KPMG. They found that around 32% of consultants reported higher salaries last month, with just 3% reporting a fall. According to APSCo, there has been ‘a loss of momentum for jobs and sectors that performed remarkably well over the past year’, as permanent vacancies begin to plateau (rising at their slowest rate in 10 months) and temporary placements almost stall. Based on current growth forecasts, there are now predicted to be over 1 million vacancies available by the end of 2014.