Episode 45

Bob Wuisman on Overcoming Hiring Bias and Embracing Diversity in Hiring

TIM: Bob Welcome to the Objective Hiring Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

BOB: Thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me.

TIM: Yeah, it's absolutely our pleasure, and we were chatting, I think, a week or so ago, and what struck me when we were chatting was that your philosophy to hiring was a little bit different from a lot of other people's, and I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit, particularly you're discussing with me, like you're almost sometimes an iterative approach to hiring where you take a sort of broader role scope initially and narrow it in as you go. So yeah, I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that.

BOB: Yeah, indeed, so we used the intuitive approach back in the days when we were a scale-up because we had no clue where we would be in six months time, let alone 12 months, and therefore it's very hard to know exactly who you need to hire even because the roles were changing very fast. and we had no clear role descriptions. We were a bit unfamiliar with hiring data people back then, tech people, so along the way we wrote quite open job functions to get a wide range of people to apply. And I think that's also a great way to overcome your bias because I think if you write a very narrow job description, you only get people back that you really want to get back. And then over time we spoke to different persons with different personalities, cultural backgrounds, etc., and that made us, during the process, also get a better picture of who do we actually want, who do we actually need for this position, and it could be that the first candidates that we spoke to were at first very promising, but then down the line when we spoke to other candidates, we found out during those conversations who do we actually need based on their responses, based on how they presented themselves, how they answered questions, how they would solve issues that we were facing back then. and then along the way we shaped the role and the position, and we were able to hire actually the right people because we had the right variety of candidates.

TIM: And so it sounds like this approach then was helpful and useful in an environment of great uncertainty. Is it the case that if you were, let's say, doing the same thing in a very structured corporate environment where there's like more clearly defined roles and you already have an established business and product, would you also take the same approach, or would you have a different philosophy then, do you think?

BOB: Would I take the same approach now that we're a bit more grown up? We're more in a corporate environment; we know where we are; we know the roles; we know the technology we work with. Would I still do the same thing? Kind of a bit less, because I know now more than people I want to hire. We have now a clear idea about the technology that we're going to use in the coming years. A couple of years ago we were experimenting with different technologies and different ways of working, and we have now established our way of working. We have established good practices. We know which technologies are being used in the coming years, so I would narrow down those requirements more; however, for personality traits, backgrounds, years of working experience, and locations, I would still keep those kinds of things very open because I find it very beneficial to speak with people from different cultural backgrounds. different locations, different job history Yeah, it enriches the process a lot, I believe, with, for example, if you would say in a vacancy you need to have your master's degrees from university, you need to have done a traineeship at a big consultancy firm before X Y Z, you only get those people coming in to you, and then you, yeah, you're hiring with a big bias by default. and I think we should all avoid it.

TIM: Yeah, I think it's not only the big bias; it's also, in some cases, needlessly narrowing the candidate pool down to a really small number, especially once you start filtering on specific locations and specific tech stacks. On things like degrees, which, let's be honest, are only a signaling tool, anyway, for a lot of modern roles you don't really need that degree. It's just an indicator of someone's intelligence or their commitment or whatever, so I feel like it's not overly narrowing. It also helps you have a bigger candidate pool, I guess.

BOB: That's definitely true. Yeah, and I think it's good to have diversity first from backgrounds and cultural perspectives, and then you need to filter out the people who have different optics on the same problem but have the same way of thinking to prioritize priorities or to prioritize developments and to come to have the same idea of how you can come to a consensus on how we should resolve a certain issue. But when you're different optics from different cultural backgrounds, yeah, that helps to get better solutions. I would rather move a bit slower to get to the right solution. One of them, we go really fast because we all agree what we're like; we all have the same background; we come with the same ideas; we think it's great, but then we have less quality, right?

TIM: It sounds like there's a bit of a trade-off between a diversity of thought and speed of execution, so maybe having a more diverse thought process ends up with a better outcome, better quality, but maybe it goes a bit slower sometimes. Is that a fair comment?

BOB: I think it's fair, and I think the same accounts for the recruiting process. You can move about a bit but not necessarily say slower, because I think speed, and we might come to that later, speed improvement is, to me, super important, but yeah, I think selecting or creating that scene where you have different cultural backgrounds and different perspectives on the same topic starts with hiring. a diverse group of people who can align with each other. I think if you hire, I think we don't have that much; we don't have a really masculine culture. I think in the opposite, so if we would hire someone who is really like the alpha male on the rock studying what to do and having, or I did opinion fixes, etc. Yeah, that wouldn't work for us, and yeah, that's where I select for basically making sure people listen to each other, proven to want to learn from each other, and you can filter that out in a process, but they don't know what you don't know, right? And being open to many candidates from different backgrounds enables you to get to know a little bit better what you don't know because sometimes people have really surprising ideas and thoughts on issues that you're facing.

TIM: You touched on hiring people from different locations, and it sounds like you were quite open-minded in bringing in international talent. If you can, talk a little bit more about your experience there and the benefits and maybe some of the challenges you've experienced.

BOB: Yeah, we work almost all remote. We have people from dozens of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds, people living on different continents even, that we all have in the same team for our data engineering, our OBI analysts, and data analysts, right? And it's a challenge to really get to understand certain people who have a very different cultural background. more Asian-oriented without wanting to be too generic or insulting to people, but people from an Asian background have a more respectful authority, so to say, in the Netherlands there's less respectful authority. I don't really want to be seen as a manager. I just want to be treated as normal. I don't expect people to treat me differently because I have a managerial position, but I noticed that during interviews and also when they're hired, they tend to treat you a little bit differently, right? And they want to be polite; not everybody is that willing to contradict you, for example. And then it's sometimes, but when you get to a connection with persons from those backgrounds, and they start to, for them Willing, so to say, to really start a bit of contradicting or asking questions and really be becoming more open to you Yeah, it's fair. I think it's something It's the hard thing. In interviewing different cultures to go through those cultural barriers and really start to reach that person, make you comfortable whenever in conversation where you're both fine with it, and then you can get the right information, and then you can question the background of their experiences. What they actually look for in a job, why they are leaving the current job, what they liked about their current position, and think we can bring that up, for example, those questions, then you can bring that up. It's easy to say, Oh, someone is shy; they cannot present; they do not want to; they're not very open, and those kinds of things. It can just be a cultural background, but as soon as they are comfortable, they start to open up. I think that's difficult; it stays difficult, in my opinion.

TIM: Yeah, and I feel like that's one of the dangers of interviews and maybe being a little bit overconfident in our ability.

BOB: Yeah.

TIM: to make a judgment on someone in such a short period of time as you say, referring to someone maybe shy or introverted or what have you It might just be they don't know you that well yet. It could be they're an introverted personality, and once they know you one-on-one after a couple of weeks, their whole personality almost shifts. As you say, there's cultural backgrounds, so there's just so many things that we need to think a bit more carefully about in our evaluation of candidates and interviews.

BOB: exactly but an opposite is also true it can be very easy and comfortable to hire someone from your own culture background because it's easy to relate where you have the same way of talking speaking et cetera but yeah what I said in the beginning it's easy then also to look from the same perspective to the same Problem and then you lack certain other perspective because people fall yeah in the western world We have I think a low contextual Culture so we do not focus on the true on the full context of a problem We tend to focus on the issue on the problem itself first rather than taking a broader context into perspective and For example for in japan Also for India, for example, there is a more higher contextual level. So there's a tendency to look to the wider context of an issue rather than to focus on the issue itself, so I think that's very valuable. I think you need both in a team.

TIM: Can you expand a little bit on this concept? Because this is not something I've thought about or heard about before, so in different cultures they would take a wider lens on it. Exactly. Yeah. and there was a famous study done where you had one person who was smiling in two photos, yeah, as an example, and at one point in one photo the group around that person was also smiling, and in the other photo people weren't looking sad, and then people from a Western background will ask how is that person feeling.

BOB: And then in Western we say, Yeah, feeling happy in the first picture where everybody else is smiling, and in the second picture we will also say, Yeah, that person is smiling, so he must be happy. In this case, from the Japanese respondents, they said you don't know if that person is happy because all the people around them are looking sad. How can we know that person is actually and that was a dominant response? You have also the varieties within a culture, of course, but I think it's a clear example of how a cultural background shapes your view on problems and issues, but we shouldn't stare ourselves blank. I think someone is from a different country, a different continent. Because what I've also noticed in a time that I work with over 20 different nationalities is that people who have graduated from university tend to be closely related in a cultural sense, like they went through the same sort of system, more or less the same way of thinking, the same sort of tests, etc. and then you have more of a shared understanding, shared vision, shared way of working on approaching problems, solving them, and making it easier to relate to each other because you know where you've been through, etc., so it's quite complex, but to get the right diversity in your team, I think it's not simply how I've hired people from different companies or places with cultural backgrounds. So I'm now a diverse teammate, but you really should look to the first few on the road and how you look against the problem, but to me it's very important that even if you have that, you have the same that you can align on how you prioritize or how you come to a consensus. I think that's then you have, then you can really benefit from your diversity. because if you have different optics on the problem and at the same time you do not have a shared vision on reaching a consensus or aligning with each other or prioritizing, then you're fighting over it, and then you can get in a fight on how to move forward, and what is then the point of having such a diverse team?

TIM: Okay, so the execution is shared, and a greener is agreed upon, even if the thought process and the feedback and the diversity of views are there to maybe make sure you're on the right path, but once you're on it, then you execute it with all your gusto. What I'm trying to just talk through out loud is maybe like any discrepancy or any kind of conflict maybe between that diversity of thought and alignment. like it is, are they in conflict at all at any time, do you think?

BOB: No, but you have to be aware of that possibility, and in your hiring process, it's good to to be aware of that one that you can have that situation and then based on the conversations you can find out if you have if you can reach the consensus if you can if someone is willing to listen to what you say and for myself as well am I willing to listen to that person as well to what they say and it's not only about the candidate but also about the one who's doing the interview, and that can be done by various questions. interview techniques, right? So it's also good to be aware of that you need during an interview I would ask people who have, for example, different technologies on their CV to ask them to explain the differences between those technologies. That's one of the things I tend to use to see if they really use the technologies, if they know what they wrote on their CV, and if they can explain things clearly to me, then I would ask what they would prefer. Would you prefer technology A or B? Would you prefer Power BI or Tableau? And then I would try to have a different opinion on that. And then can we get to a common ground? Can we see if we can get to that common ground? And if you can get that on one or two cases, yeah, probably that can be in the future as well. and that's one of the ways I think you can identify that you have a different view, a different optic, on the same question but can reach a consensus common ground or at least disagree in a good friendship-friendly manner.

TIM: For the international talent that you hire or have hired in the past, did you restrict it a little bit, at least based on time zones, to make sure people were working within a few hours of each other? Can you tell us? Yeah, can you talk through a little bit more of the exact strategy of how you found great talent in different locations?

BOB: Dancers are an issue if you don't watch it right. If I were to hire someone in Australia, it would be very difficult to have proper meeting times with each other, but still we have people in Australia working as well, not directly in my teams, and I can collaborate with them, but it is easier to have people in the same time zone. We also have some people living in India or moving to India, and yeah, that works out as well because then we agree, Okay, there's just a certain overlap in the time zones; we make sure we do our best to schedule meetings in that overlapping period. Same for the US, but then that's the opposite of the time zones. We see if there is an overlapping period; we acknowledge that we schedule for that, and it's a matter of organization and accepting the limitations or working in different time zones. Yeah, it works out, but it's just a matter of making the right agreements and making the right organizational decisions to get there and accept that not everybody is always available when you want them to be available. But for the rest, yeah, you should be careful with that. I believe because, yeah, it's easier to instantly be able to reach out to a fellow team member to ask them for their support to solve an engineering problem, for example.

TIM: We also have run a fully remote company for five years, and I feel like one thing that's probably underappreciated a little bit is just the way that being able to hire in other countries changes your candidate pool drastically, so at the moment it's a fairly employer-led market. Nobody would say there aren't good candidates available, but three years ago it was the exact opposite problem. Every single company in the world was complaining about a lack of high-quality applicants in their area, but we never had that problem because we could hire from any country in the world, and so we had our pick of the bunch. It was very simple on that side of things anyway, but yeah, the biggest challenge for us was our initial efforts to build out remote teams. basically said we're just going to hire literally anywhere in the world; we're just going to find the best people we can, which then we'd run into those times and challenges, which are, unfortunately, I feel like unsolvable because the earth revolves in a certain way, and we can't control that if it's daytime here, it's nighttime in America. Most of the time, that became a challenge for us personally anyway. What we also found interesting was that even though we don't board some candidates who were quite adamant that they could work fairly ridiculous hours to have a crossover with us, some could end up doing that in the long run. Some would just, let's say, be night owls or morning people, but then some others you realize after a few months that it was like eating away at them. It really was a big problem. It is tricky. I feel like you just need to have, I think, a lot of things in hiring have these conversations honest and upfront from both parties and just get a sense: Are you sure you're going to be wanting to get up at 5 am every day to crossover with our team? Are you sure that's something you're up for and not maybe not take their first answer as a face value and really dig into some of those things? What are your thoughts?

BOB: Yes, it's definitely a good point that you make there about whether someone is willing to work weird hours, so let's say not the traditional working hours. I think one of the advantages of working remotely is that you can also give people just the opportunity by default to work at their best hours, which fit their chronotype the best. and especially if you combine that with an outcome-driven focus rather than a result-driven focus, if all else counts, what are the outcomes? What is the impact that you make in your job? And then I don't really care when you work; we only have the—you should be available where you are when you are required to be available and have sufficient overlap that people can schedule a meeting with you and have a little bit of flexibility. But even if you are like me, based in the Netherlands, and you know you are a true morning person who gets up, I don't know, 5 am, does your workout, and then at 6 am you're behind your computer making amazing progress and delivering a high quality of work, then I don't care if you go out to work sports also in the afternoon and do your shopping during what we call office hours. Because, yeah, what's an office hour if you work remotely and/or around the globe, right? It doesn't make sense to me, that concept, personally, and, yeah, and it's also if someone worked in a different time zone, yeah, what is that? What was the concept of office hours worth? It doesn't mean anything anymore. It only makes sense if everybody's in the office and you make that a very true thing in your company. That's almost a holy thing for you. Yeah, sure, but then I think you don't get the best out of people. People have different periods in the day when they are active, and the same is true if you are a night owl. Yeah, sure. Open your laptop at 10 p. If that is the moment that you have the highest creativity and highest productivity, go for it, you know, and if you want to go to the gym, then at 1 p.m. first go for it. I don't really care as long as you deliver.

TIM: Yeah, we have had the exact same philosophy, and yeah, we just relentlessly measure output and results, and however we get there, I don't know who cares. It's really, yeah,

BOB: benefits I think of what the COVID situation gave us: then you, we had you, everybody was forced to work remotely, and it was a big experiment, so it's—and we saw, I think in general, the productivity got bigger, improved for a lot of companies, especially for tech companies. and we will also, when we were at the scale-up, everybody was in the office; we had everybody come to the office that was in the Netherlands, although we had also people working in other places; we had this office culture, and when we were all remote, we noticed, Hey, this actually works. and we actually do a great job, and we facilitate more people meeting their needs, so we see less stress. So let's continue with that, but you have to be intentional about that; you have to do the right measures because, yeah, and also that brings back to the topic of hiring people. You have to find out during an interview again. Is somebody willing to work remotely? Are they okay with being in their own ethic by themselves, or do they need a working station nearby and a shared office place or something? I can really facilitate that. I still myself go twice a day to the office just because I like changing the scenery. But yeah, you have to also investigate how people cope with that, preferably that they have worked in remote positions before so they know what they're going to join, but yeah, it's something you have to dig into in the interview as well, taking that into account.

TIM: I think it's as you say: just not taking things for granted. If someone had never worked remotely before, it is quite a different vibe, and you have to be deliberate with your time and your ego, even your ergonomic setup, the lighting, and the desk. I'm even when I've worked temporarily in a hotel My back would hurt after an hour of a shitty chair and desk, so imagine that compounded every single day for years. You want to get those basics right, especially helping those who hadn't worked from home before.

BOB: Yeah, that's very true, but then when you hire a junior position, someone just fresh out of university or college, it's pretty hard to investigate if they're willing to work remotely or if they just start missing the social life and things, but then it's a trial. I try to identify if they know what it means. What do they know about what it means to work eight hours for your own place from your own house? What is that? Is that their ambition? Try to ask them, and for more senior positions, who worked in a remote company with a remote policy before? For sure, it's easy to identify the right candidates for that, but it's being Very knowledgeable about and sounds easy But how do you work? What do you expect from people? For which places? But it's good to be To have that in the back of your mind when you're interviewing a candidate, you do not lose sight of that—that's good. If you hire someone who will always want to go to the office but you have no office nearby, that isn't going to work out in the long term.

TIM: Yeah, and all those kinds of motivational expectations are really very important. I think weed out in the first interview or as early as possible just to make sure everyone's on the same page. I feel like your hiring in general could be improved so much if you know that first interview is almost like a truth serum from both sides, but the candidates just want to know exactly what I want from the companies. This is exactly what we're offering, and then you can match as soon as possible or say no, It's not for me, and you can be on your way and save everyone a lot of time. I feel like sometimes there's a bit of a dance going on where neither party's really being completely honest with each other, and I feel like that just wastes everyone's time, personally. You

BOB: Exactly, and we should avoid waste.

TIM: Exactly. Yeah, let's do it as efficiently as possible. Speaking of efficiency, AI is taking over the world. If software was eating the world's AI, I would have thought, and I'd be really interested to get your thoughts on the use of AI in the hiring process. Have you started to dabble around with any tools at the screening stage of the interview stage? And yeah, what are your general thoughts so far on AI in hiring?

BOB: AI And hiring, yeah, it's definitely a good tool to use when you're hiring people. I think it starts with writing out the job description. I'm not the best writer, to be honest. I like to draft it and make drafts myself first and then let it improve by ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, get more ideas, just start brainstorming what I could add and what I could not add, and make a good flow, etc. And I would also like to say that, yeah, you should avoid the bias that is still in the large language models available, and I expect, actually, from candidates definitely for the data and technology roles that they use AI themselves. I think it's, yeah, it's a good sign for me if someone used the right tools and knows why they use it. Know the limitations that they're facing, but it's difficult, right? It's easy to write to set up a resume now based on any vacancy that you find; you can just let any tool or AI probably generate the right bullet points that you need on your CV, the right qualifications, right skills, etc. Yeah, probably, but at this stage I don't think the models are that good that it can take over the entire process, but I think it definitely creates assistance to both sides of the table, and yeah, it's good for it can be beneficial also for screening resumes at the same time, but I think I would at the moment not, and I think it probably would never make letting an AI make the decision fully autonomously; I think it would be better just to quote rank candidates based upon given criteria. This is what we think is important: you'd have certain skills, you didn't work experience, age, whatever, and no rain, I have that; that's resume is ranked by an AI-driven system probably. Yeah.

TIM: I'm interested you mentioned that, so you would still want to have a human-in-the-loop situation, but let's just, for example, park any laws and legislation for a second because there are various rules against automated decision tools and all that kind of stuff, so just forget about the legal consequences. Is there still another reason why you would prefer to be in the loop that you feel like an AI currently, or maybe in two or three years, couldn't do the whole thing? Do you feel like there's going to be a missing gap?

BOB: I need to be able to work with the person I'm hiring, my team member, my other team leads, and team members as well, so they also need to be able to work with that person. Like, it's great if they can answer the questions from an AI engine, but if they cannot answer the questions for me, if they cannot explain their past experience, the past challenges to me, if you cannot relate to each other, does it make sense? Not only AI tool data, we'll only be working with, yeah, maybe far in the future, who knows, but until that's the place, it's still humans working with humans, so you have to have the human in the loop.

TIM: What if hypothetically the AI could predict who you're going to select, like it knows the kinds of candidates you like and it's an accurate representation of your opinion or the other hiring manager's opinions? In that scenario, where you had that data, would there be an additional level of trust, or is there still some kind of additional intuition or gut feel that you think the AI simply could never master that is valuable?

BOB: I think, honestly, that's not too far distant a future. Would you just spell it out? But there's never one single, yeah, sometimes there's only one person you interview that's actually fitting for the job out of the dozen you have interviewed, but we have most of the time; there are just several candidates qualified for the job. within the range of personality backgrounds that can actually participate well in a team that they hired for, so then I still think yes, you're right; I think an AI would be perfectly placed to predict certain people's future performance and fit in a team fit with your processes, but still I would like to get a short list back. to review that myself and to speak with those themselves, yeah, but because it's not very different when we did it during a scale-up when we were in a scale-up phase, we also had our talent team basically do the same thing. We had a list of dimensions candidates are ranked based upon the dimensions. I also came through certain CVs, and we have said okay, on a scale of one to ten, everybody up from an eight or above is worth interviewing. Yeah, we'd also go to the talent team and say, Why was this good person given an eight? I think it's more a six because these dimensions are overrated in my opinion based on my previous experience, or I would say, You're ranked as a six; you should be an eight, and then along the way we hired, I think, in the last four years, probably over 30 people or something. You get to an agreement, and the talent team knows what you want. I know our talent team is ranking the candidates more. Yeah, the same model basically, but then with you only humans and intro and talking to each other and explaining your different views on candidates, and then down the line that worked very well; we could really hire people fast and have a quick consensus. and they provided me a short list of people who I should interview, so more or less the same system but not automated, where AI is out, would be more automated and scalable, of course.

TIM: Yeah, it's fascinating to see where this will go. Personally, I feel like we are months away from a level of technology that could automate the entire thing. That's my bold opinion. I honestly feel like humans probably do more harm than good now in hiring in terms of just bottlenecks of the process and bias in ineffective interview techniques. and I just feel like from what I've seen so far, I feel like even just an iteration of a GPT model might be able to cover 95 percent of how we currently think about hiring personally very soon.

BOB: I'm not sure about the timelines, but I think definitely when you have an interview, I think it would be good if the transcription could be analyzed by a large language model on AI too, and where you get the feedback, this person's tone of voice was, I don't know what you would rank it on, or certain questions or answers might have been just thought of on the spot, then you might have answered or questioned this certain answer more, and you get live feedback as well. I think, definitely, that would be valuable. Yeah, we're all just still humans, and we cannot do everything right, and when you have a busy week or a bad night of sleep, that impacts your interview qualities, impacts your mood, and how you view a candidate as well. So yeah, I think we should embrace AI in that sense because it will bring your job and your task to a higher level.

TIM: I think so, and I feel like in a traditional hiring process there is a lot of busy work. I mean, if you break it down to individual steps, as you said, writing a job description, posting job ads, downloading and reading cvs, scheduling interviews, taking notes, and interviewing—there's just a lot of manual stuff that I'm not really sure in itself is the value. Like, ultimately, you're trying to just hire the best person in the most friendly, humane way possible. and I feel like traditional hiring does not really do that well at all.

BOB: I don't think so either, yeah. Yeah, you have to be Yeah, what's traditional hiring? Actually, it's if you have a good candidate, if you know, you have the strong feeling and understanding of a candidate, and it's got the right job qualifications and the right fit in a team, you trust the candidate. This way of working would and his attitude would align with your processes that you have. Their professional ambition aligns with your company's ambition, the team's ambition. You're going to hire that person, then you have to move quickly; right then, within a week, I think you should have your contract signed with them, where traditional hiring processes go through different departments, different signs of etc. I speak to many candidates, actually, and I say, Do you have other I asked them if they have other job applications running at other companies and they said yeah I've been waiting for weeks already for a reply back and I go how can that be you're a great person I really want to have you in my team so by the end of the week we could talk about contracts and that's when you're hired really fast and that's a big plus I've noticed in interview processes good you just you show your interest you show you're engaged you show you really want to hire that people and person and are ready to invest time in them and to make a lot of noise in the company to get the contract done fast I think that's how you should hire and not wait for two weeks let the candidate wait for two weeks it's just bad practice

TIM: Yeah, for sure. The power of a contract in the hand, a signed contract in the hand that's real, not talking about maybe an offer, or we could get to this point. No, you'd be hard-pressed to find a candidate who would sit On a signed contract for more than several days, like you've suddenly got a great chance of securing that candidate If you've actually got that offer to them

BOB: Yeah, definitely.

TIM: One thing we're hearing a lot from other data leaders in Europe, in the European Union, and in Canada is that they're being inundated with applications; like, there's a very high volume of CVs coming through. And the other pattern they seem to notice is that a lot of the CVs are written or optimized using ChatGPT and that they are looking increasingly similar to each other and are matching the job description better and better. Is this a pattern you've noticed?

BOB: We were fortunate to do the bulk of our hiring before ChatGPT and other AI tools came out, but I noticed along the way that indeed, CVS almost now have the same layout. They have the same bullets, the same visualizations, and the same setup. It's easy to align with your vacancy, whereas at first, we'd still have people with only a few years of working experience; they would list out 10 different technologies. They are an expert in that; it is, of course, the first sign where you drop a candidate because it's going to be true, and you see that less and less indeed, so it's in that sense I think what I point to is, yeah, it's harder to base on a CV resume to clearly identify who's the right person or not. And that's a challenge.

TIM: It is a challenge. What I wonder is do we almost need a new data set to make that screening decision because a CV was already inaccurate before Chachibitty; now it seems like it deviates even further from the true candidate. Do we need some other data set in between deciding who to actually interview?

BOB: Yeah, probably, and I would not now know which data set that would be or how the data set would look like. I should curate it. create it at the order to avoid the biases or hallucinations But that's an interesting topic, yeah.

TIM: I feel like one of the main challenges is that a CV fundamentally is not validated because a candidate can put anything they want on there. And so at the point the company's screening it, they basically just have to take it at face value; they have to believe it even though 80 percent of the time it's not perfectly accurate. What I wonder is if this will happen with skills testing. IQ testing Some kind of testing will now sit at the screening layer, and that's going to be used, especially because there's such a high volume of candidates. Companies might be more willing to do a screening test because they're not so worried about the drop-off because there are too many candidates anyway. Can you imagine that taking place?

BOB: I can imagine that especially where you're a bigger company, a more favored company, a known company to work for, you face this problem and that you have to find other ways to select the right candidates, like assessments before you have an interview, but then again that's a rat race, right? Then you find out ways how to tackle those assessments without having the true knowledge of background to get there, and it's happening now as well. I've seen people who've done an assessment that could not explain the ways how they got there or could explain steps they took to get to the right solution. So it's just I think it's an old problem, but now it's scaled, but for us, for me personally, I haven't been in that position yet. We were not overflowing, oh yeah, overwhelmed with so many CVs that it was hard for us to get through thousands of applicants to find that person or that set of persons that we actually like. So I have no hands-on experience with that. We were always able to select the right candidates based on the LinkedIn profile and their resume, and then we give an assessment, basically a simple assessment, not really to challenge the technical skills but can they explain what they have done. Get the handle feedback. Are they coachable? that kind of thing that I think that's where an assessment is great too, and simple assessments can be completed in such a fair and very different way, and then it's interesting to see who did which and who came up with which solution and why, and then you can talk about the reason that they solved an assessment or a model data modeling case study in a different way than other candidates did

TIM: And would these be case studies you've given the candidates to do at home, and then you discuss them in more detail in that interview? Is that exactly it? of operations

BOB: Yeah, because it's, yeah, you have two sides, of course, what you can do in an interview is what do you want to test if you do it on the spot? Yeah, you directly have to show them how they work, but some people might be overwhelmed by that, and at some point some people It's good to have certain things that a candidate can prepare because you don't want to only test the improvisation skills. It's not that they are also not in the team or in the work that they will do; it's also that they just need to do improvisations on the spot all the time. That's not how it is. People get prepared and have time to work on assessments and have time to work on that task on the project, so let's simulate that as well, and then it's important for them to provide clear feedback. clear explanation of what they have done. I want you to know they will always be challenged; of course, how do they handle feedback? Can they ask questions back to us? Can they explain certain steps they have done? But also questions I would ask them in a surprising enough way, most candidates have never thought about it. I will ask them, When do you think you will be successful? What is your vision on the role of a data analyst? Or we are in a list or that, and then you get them on the spot, and they need to improvise, and then you get different conversations, but you need—I think it's good to challenge both parts. like how did you prepare, and how well can they improvise or digest new questions and information, and how to handle those kinds of situations? I think you need both.

TIM: Yeah, especially as an analyst, because, yeah, part of your job is to sit there doing deep thought analytical work, writing SQL, and digging into a problem, and then another part of your job is the polar opposite skill, really, which is communicating that, having quick conversations, and explaining a hundred hours of work in 20 seconds. So yeah, you really need both skills, don't you, to be a good analyst?

BOB: Exactly, and both skills can be tested. One needs to be preparation, like you do in your work, and then the other one is to be able to present it and to handle unexpected questions, and yeah, as we talked about AI before, with the rise of AI, it becomes more, yeah, the entry level for data and technology. positions got lower, like it's very even, especially for Python topics; the entry levels are very low now, but then you need to be able to learn fast to be able to be coachable to really understand what you have done and to explain what you have done, and it's more about being able to understand the context that you're working in, being able to understand the problem, and problem-solving. and solving the problem so that these are more important skills than knowing the exact syntax of your library of your code base, et cetera, et cetera That's less important now; it's more important to be able to communicate than before.

TIM: Is there anyone you'd like to give a shout-out to, like anyone in the data space or hiring space that you've personally learned a lot from?

BOB: I think I learned a lot from my current line manager, Lars Norderweer. I think he's one of the greatest people in creating a fast relationship with someone. Establishing that relationship can really be likable. Make sure the person feels liked as well and gets very good questions. Ask very good questions. I got the right information out of a candidate. I've done several interviews with him, and I was also interviewed by him, of course, to be hired, and I really that inspired me also to change my way of our interview, and now I present an offer to a candidate to make it more persuasive. I think that's what I've still have copied his style and copied his ways of working on this, so yeah, a big shout out to Lars Norderby there.

TIM: Awesome! Great shout-out to Lars Bob. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all your insights, all your knowledge about hiring. That's been really insightful for us and all our audience, so thank you so much.

BOB: all right Thank you, Tim. It's been a pleasure.