Episode 67

Chris Richter on The Role of AI, Data, and Human Intuition in Modern Hiring Practices

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

CHRIS: Yeah, you're welcome. on our pleasure to have you, and I would love to start our discussion today with probably the most talked-about topic in the history of the world, arguably. I reckon it probably is, if we could somehow measure this, and that is AI, and I'd love to have a chat about AI in the context of hiring and just

TIM: big picture First, have you started to experiment with any kind of AI while you're hiring people? Have you started to see perhaps candidates use AI during their application process?

CHRIS: Boar, I think I can tell you this: since everyone is talking about AI now, we need to do AI, but I still see AI as data science and machine learning when I hire, and I need to do the role specs. I would usually ask a large language model to help me out but then go back and forth in the interview process. I would use it to make my persona or my notes ready for HR so it looks like not just crazy bullet points that only I understand on the candidate side. I have no idea; I would be surprised if they wouldn't use ChatGPT or any other language model. but I've never experimented with it, so I think even in interviews, if I were to go to practical stuff, I think if you do a coding challenge on-site, everyone is so nervous that we just keep coding, and no one has probably considered looking into AI. Well, I think on the other side, even if I write applications myself, I don't think I would ask an LLM to help me out to hit the right keywords and make sure I'm saying the right thing. Basically use it as a sparring partner.

TIM: Yeah, for the job spec job description, that seems like an absolute no-brainer to use a large language model, as you say, maybe just for at least the first draft, and then you're going to have to tweak and adjust it, but it seems much better than now running it from scratch. The interview notes are an interesting one. I think there's such a room for improvement there because it's such, yeah, it's the note-taking; it's a summarization; it's, as you say, making it understandable. I am also similar to you; maybe I get to the end of an interview, and I've written down some stuff that would make no sense to any other human being in the world except me exactly at that point in time. And so surely we can do better than that, and I also find sometimes in meetings or interviews having to write notes and focus on the conversation at the same time, it's just like you've just split your resources across almost two different activities, so I wonder whether outsourcing that to a large language model might actually make the interview process better itself. What do you think? I would say yes, but I also would say no, yes, because you talk from a techie world. When we had our first, I'm going to say, check-in, you probably still remember how I was surprised that who is that dot AI person who is listening in? I think in the environment, so I'm working at a government environment.

CHRIS: I would not be able to push through an AI who listens to me and looks at me while we do an interview just for some data security reasons, which are just, I would not say, deeply ingrained, at least within the German law, and this is a fight I'm probably not going to be winning anytime soon.

TIM: Okay, maybe if we think slightly abstractly, if you remove yourself from maybe your current business and current organization and current scenario and we think of some future world where maybe the AI laws or privacy laws are slightly liberated, is there a benefit, do you think?

CHRIS: Oh, that's 100 percent. Yes, I don't need to write anything down; I can just focus on my questions so I can start listening rather than listen plus remember plus write down, so you take a lot of cognitive ability away from me, so yeah, that would be a no-brainer on my side.

TIM: I also wonder whether

CHRIS: and

TIM: We got to a point where interviews are recorded, transcribed, and summarized using AI, which, by the way, current technology can do that, so this is not assuming any advancements in AI at all, like the current state can do that very well. I wonder if that will break the back of the feedback problem, as in the single biggest complaint of every candidate probably in the world is either getting no feedback or very crap feedback, and candidates expectations over that feedback go up the further they are in the process. So after an interview, I think any candidate would expect feedback and some level of specific feedback, so if we had a tool that was doing the summarization, had the data there, had it ready to go, and was integrated in with an HTS ATS system, or maybe part of it, would that then mean that employees could much more easily give the feedback? And is that the main barrier at the moment, or maybe even with that, could there still be other reasons why that feedback would not be shared with candidates? What do you see happening?

CHRIS: I'm going to say yes to no, so we start saving a lot of work on the HR side on the admin, but it gives me time to do other tasks, so the question is now how high do I value as a company the feedback to the applicant, or do I value my HR, my human resources, to train my existing staff and/or make just more revenue? So that's my no on the S side. Technically, every company should value a good relationship with an employee, so I had, for example, a very good interaction with Red Bull years back, and after the interview, they started sending me, I think, sending me a little box with a thank you card for my time in my interview. At this time I had to reject the Red Bull offer, but I know that any time I see something from Red Bull, I get a very positive experience memory back, and I would apply any time point, and I think if I were to go interview again, I actually would even feel guilty that I have to take the role so they have At least we have a deep emotion in me. So here it depends on how the company values it, but also I think for applicants it's, I think we have this tool already doing interviews; sometimes I do record myself and just listen to the crap I was telling you in the interview and see how they responded. It's technically quite easy to take your iPhone, do a voice recording, and then listen to it afterwards. and I think the best feedback you can get from yourself is just listening to this recording again. It makes a huge difference if you do it once or twice. I hope I haven't said too many umm's or uh's so far. You can actually change your own talking pattern, I think, but that comes back to also the applicant. Now do I take my time to listen to that recording because it takes another hour out of my time? Again, it comes back to Yeah, where do I put my preferences, and do I want to listen to my own stuff? Do I really want to have hard feedback from a person I like the most, AKA me? So yeah, I think it depends.

TIM: Funny you mentioned that scenario of listening back to your recordings; that was something I've used ChatGPT for recently with these podcasts, but the very use case you mentioned, which was I just uploaded a whole bunch of transcripts and said, Hey, like, stack rank me across whatever criteria you think a podcast host should have; give me feedback; give me concrete ways to improve the things that I was doing. What I found in getting that feedback from a large language model was that I feel like I received it better than if a human had given it to me because there was no sense of defensiveness about getting criticized by someone else. I wonder if you've ever tried a large language model for that task.

CHRIS: I I would say no because, or even say, listen to your own voice recordings because you don't hear the s and s; they don't get transcribed, and I also think if you listen to yourself, you're your own judge. If you start using a large language model on the actual voice sounds, you do take something away even though we have a video. So one thing I can also do if I recorded with a video, you will have noticed just Oh, why did Chris make this movement? It was actually my point off. But here you can then receive a lot more information rather than just language, so we have now you can analyze your language, you can analyze your voice, and you can analyze your picture. and even if I now go back to voice, I can start playing with my voice. I have a completely different emotion, so for your podcast you probably want much more information than just what are you saying; you also want to know what's your tonation. Oh, if you want a good example, I have one: I gave a talk a while back; I cracked a joke and didn't give people time to laugh. you don't get this from a large language model; you actually need to hear Oh, he didn't even let them laugh; he just moved on, so there you can also now start your strategies. Oh, Chris was so nervous during this process; Chris needs to remember the joke and give a 10-second break.

TIM: 10 seconds That's a big laugh.

CHRIS: It was a big joke, but I didn't give him the time.

TIM: That's really letting it settle. Okay, so we should lean into the discomfort, the cringe of watching ourselves, and just be honest and be our own judge because, yeah, there's those extra data points that at the moment a large language model doesn't have access to because, as you say, it's just the transcript. Yeah.

CHRIS: and I would say a podcast is because it's sound. I would say your voice, your tonation, is much more important, but yes, you hire for data, so if I'm only good at one dimension, I'm missing a huge amount of information, and especially when we are hiring, I'm looking at your body language. I'm looking at your tonation at hiring; it is still a gut feeling, yeah, so I have some data points, but there will be five or six candidates who will have I don't know 80 points or 85 points, and I think the gut feeling then will tip you over to be at the top or to be in second place, and if you want to be hired, you want to be in second place. So you cannot just tick off one domain; you want to have all three.

TIM: That is a perfect segue to something I wanted to talk to you about, which was this data verse gut feel spectrum. I guess you could say, and I'd love to share an observation with you that I've noticed over the years, so for the last six years, I've spoken to a lot of analytics leaders, probably a thousand, around the world. and I would say 80 percent of them when it comes to their hiring philosophy and how they actually approach making a hiring decision 80 percent would rely primarily on their gut, so they wouldn't necessarily be measuring anything specific in the process; they would rely more on interviews and then them interviewing the candidate and ultimately making a decision. yes or no, based on some combination of experience, intuition, gut feel, or something like that, and I find that curious and interesting, especially because in their day jobs, when they're not hiring, they are making data-driven decisions; they are preaching the value of data literacy to their organization. They are doing product analytics, marketing analytics, sales analytics, whatever, and yet when it comes to hiring, they switch hats almost and go for a more intuitive gut feel approach. Have you noticed that yourself? Do you have any thoughts as to why that might be the case?

CHRIS: But you can add one to this 80%, so I would do the same. I would say what we have you do is look at your data points. You have a CV; you have a tech interview. You can ask, Does the candidate have the theoretical knowledge? Everything else you need to know is, does the candidate fit into your team? So if you just destroy your team, there's no work going to happen, or you have a lot more. I'm going to say I like to play with data, but you also have people management. If you hired a wrong candidate, you have a lot more people management. I think you have a moment; you have a theory the candidate has the knowledge, the theory, then it's only about personal fit and team fit at the end of the day. I think also every data person knows there's a certain error within our data. In an interview I can tell you so much I don't know what's true or not, so I usually like to poke with questions that the candidate cannot answer to just see how they react in an uncertain field, and then again it gives you also a point of how does this person, I would say, react under pressure, how does it fit in, and then also you figure out yourself if you want to work with that person. So it becomes more in line with what I would want to be friends with that person because you have ticked off if you come to, I think, one of the last interviews with me that means I'm totally comfortable that you can do what you should do, that you have the theoretical knowledge that the team likes you, and then it's just down to one last thing, and that's literally God for you.

TIM: What about so we've got in this hiring process some things you mentioned that are a bit more, let's say, objective? So you said, Okay, you could test their skills; for example, that's reasonably measurable, at least their technical skills. You've then mentioned how well they'll fit in with a team. Does a team like them? Can you imagine being friends with them? Even within that set, these are essentially other criteria; it's just they're a bit more subjective than measuring SQL knowledge, for example, but there's still criteria. Have you ever made any attempts to at least measure them against these subjective criteria? So you could say, for example, I'm going to give them like a likability score out of 10: how much do I like them? 10. They're going to be my best mate. One is I never want to see them again. Have you ever contemplated almost like overlaying a data-driven approach on top of subjective criteria?

CHRIS: I would say probably yes, probably not this noticeable. I need to think back about the last people we hired. I think it's more when I put a subjective skill over it. We had recently a candidate who was very good and would have been perfect for the role or would have done the job very well. but I also had to feel that he was, and I hate to say this, overqualified, but overqualified in the sense that he was capable of completely different things that he wanted to do different things, so he wanted to go out, go on conferences, and talk to people, but within the role I would just not have been able to make that work out for him. So I had to feel even if I would want to hire him in, I don't know, two or three years time, he would have been unhappy; he would have left. I would have left. I can't read the wrong word here. I would have lost a very capable person, so I think he is also the subjective evaluation. Is it the role fit to the person? Good. And this is a tough one. I would say this is a tough one with this guy. I think in our feedback interview he didn't like that he got rejected, but he could also understand it, and I also think he's probably going to get a very good job somewhere else.

TIM: In this kind of scenario, from his perspective, presumably he understands what he wants to do; he understands what this job involves and that maybe he's not going to get the opportunities that he wants.

CHRIS: Yes.

TIM: And you're almost putting on your experience hat, saying, I know inevitably he's going to get bored, or it's going to want to do other things and leave. whereas he's probably thinking, I want this job; I can make it work. Is it fair that if you think he's a good candidate, you wouldn't still offer him the job? Ultimately, it's his decision. I'm just trying to think of it from his perspective.

CHRIS: Yes, and I'm going to say It is fair; yes, it is fair. You said he wants the opportunity, but it's also that we are now, if you come out of university, you're in a stress; you're like, Oh my God, I need to find a job; if I don't find a job, I'm going to be a failure. I'm going to be unemployed forever, so what usually happens—and this happens to me too—is you jump on the first thing, and you're like, Oh my God, I need to get this job, but you don't see the other things out there too. You just don't have it. Also, a personal story from my life: I think I had an interview a few months back, so I do this sometimes, as I told you before, just to stay in practice and see the other side, and I had a lovely interview. I had a feeling everything fits; I love the company, but I already, as a candidate, had a feeling that it might not be the best role. So the interviewer asked me within the interview, Chris, what do you think? and I just told him it feels like it's not the right thing for me, and he just shut it out: Yes, you should apply for my role for the director role. So I actually also appreciated this feedback; it helps you, at least in my head. and now I might be wrong here, and he might have seen it wrong or differently. You opened up a new perspective again; he opened up a new dimension so that the candidate can also see this, understand it, and can now, like with this information, I would now much better know what to look for next, I think here, and this is why I had the feedback call with the candidate. My response, my responsibility, was just to explain to him why and how and just give him a few more tips so he got the feedback I think he deserved because, as you said, I felt bad for him. I would have wanted to hire him, so for me it was totally appropriate to put in the one-hour call where we discussed where he had done very well. Why don't I see you for that role? And yeah, at the end of the day, good luck, so I think this, yes, you can now turn it from every side like Oh, he was so mean; he should have hired him because he was fitting, but it wouldn't help either of us if he had gone through, and unfortunately, I haven't seen an update from him on LinkedIn, but I'm certain that he's going to find something that is more suitable.

TIM: And so you mentioned you gave him, it sounds like, quite detailed feedback, then, so you, even after you'd made the no decision, were able to have a call with the interviewee, run through, and provide him some useful feedback.

CHRIS: Oh yeah, why wouldn't I? It's as you said, so I would value it at the end of the day. I believe we always meet twice in life, and in five years time it might be that he's interviewing me, and he will hopefully have a positive memory of myself, the same as with a Red Bull example, or he might just know someone like how it is that some applicant applies to see, Oh, my friend Tim knows him. So I'm just shooting you a message: Who is that guy? And it could very likely be that at one stage he's going to ask, Oh, who's Chris? And he's going to say, Oh yeah, he didn't hire me and didn't give me feedback. So we also have, Oh, he didn't hire me, but he was lovely and gave me feedback. You could spin that thing like in one perspective I was very selfish and have a perspective. I hopefully helped someone helpfully help.

TIM: I would have thought the vast majority of candidates don't get feedback, and so the fact that, yeah, you took the time to give detailed feedback is fantastic.

CHRIS: I'm sorry I'm going to interrupt you too, but also one thing is we often don't give feedback; we don't because we don't get asked. That's another thing, so if you're a candidate, no, and listen, it's the worst thing I could say; it's no, but he also was so far the only one who asked me for Chris; can he give me feedback?

TIM: Okay, so you've flipped it and said maybe it's not just up to the employer to give it or not give it; you're saying ask and you shall receive in a certain way for the candidate.

CHRIS: At the end of the day, if the company doesn't reach out with more feedback, it's always your chance to ask the hiring manager because you now know who the hiring manager is, and you can just reach out on LinkedIn and say, Hey Chris. This didn't go through. Can you tell me why? Yeah, two things could happen. I could say no, I'm too busy, and I could say yes, I want to do it. I'm not going to say, and it's an interesting one because even when I'm in the applying position, I don't always ask for feedback. I have asked certain people for feedback, and I would say more than 50 percent of the time I would have gotten feedback. So if you already had a talk with or if you already have gone through the recruiter, so the recruiters, I would say 80 percent goes to you. After this is done, there are a few who give you feedback, but if you have met an actual person and had a, I'm going to say, an interaction with them, they're not going to ghost you.

TIM: I haven't actually heard this discussed in the narrative of the sea of complaints about lack of feedback and ghosting.

CHRIS: We definition

TIM: As obvious as it is, did you ask for it? I haven't actually seen that discussed, and so your experience of saying when you've asked for it After that interview stage, you've gotten about 50 percent of the time. Is that so? Do I understand you correctly?

CHRIS: Yes, so I really need not to think, but I can think. I cannot think about cases when I had seen a person talk to an actual person. They would have usually given me feedback. It now depends on length and quality, but they still have come back to me. You haven't been hired because of

TIM: That's great. That's a quick and simple win then for candidates. You may as well ask, as you say, because how much of it does it take to at least ask the person you've met for feedback if you haven't heard it yet? So great, that's

CHRIS: Yeah, it's a tuned line; it's a two-line text on LinkedIn, and it's also a fast response on my side. It's a yes or no, and yeah, the hiring manager is in the lead, so he or she can decide: Do I make it a call, or do I just make it a quick note? And I would say based on how you have performed in the interview, it's probably a quick Oh, you have just not been fitting. Hey, you didn't know what cross-validation is; other candidates knew. Or you actually sit down and say, Listen to the following things that let's discuss, and if you score a call, you get so much more information because you can then start ping-pong question answering.

TIM: While we're on the theme then of candidates and feedback and helpful tips for them, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Based on all the conversations I've had in the last month or so, it seems to me that particularly in Europe and North America, candidates are facing a quite difficult environment. They're looking for jobs on LinkedIn and other job platforms. They're seeing on LinkedIn, Oh wow, there's been 500 applications in a day for this data analyst role. Oh my God, and they're seeing these huge numbers and probably thinking to themselves, Oh, if I thought before I needed to apply to 50 jobs to get one interview, now I probably have to apply to 500, which I then think is causing a continuation of this almost like a vicious cycle where then candidates are applying en masse to more and more jobs, creating more and more applicants per job. and it's snowballing for the candidates, then like if you were a candidate now and you had to get a new role, would you go through job boards? If so, how would you stand out, and how would you think about your job search process? I know you've simulated this a bit recently, so maybe you've got some fresh experience.

CHRIS: First of all, I think if I see on LinkedIn that 500 people have applied, that also means 500 people have clicked on something, and I don't know if they have applied because what usually happens is you click on LinkedIn, and you get forwarded to the actual employer's whatever workspace. God knows what it is. Clicking on it is pretty easy and pretty fast, but when actually sending in an application, it's a completely different thing, so from a data point, I would say the 500 are probably not 500. Obviously, I cannot tell you how many applications I have at the end of the day. Not sure if more applicants get through, but yeah, most of your question is what I got. How would you stand out? So I would usually look for, yeah, if I look for something, I look for something I like, and how do I stand out? I, again, check if I know anyone within the company. I do find out who the hiring manager is. I do find out how their recommendation scheme is, so this happens before I would apply to anything, so that means Yes, I have already. I probably have already clicked five times on that LinkedIn thing, so you can already put I'm already boosting their statistics. Yeah, and then you would just get the insights. The first insight: Do I fit into the company? So I'm talking from a very different perspective now, as probably about applicants. I have a job I love. I would only take a different job if I really find it's the next step. Everything is fitting, so I have absolutely no pressure. I can go on a much, much more relaxed path in here. and I can put much more thought into the process, but even let's say I get sacked tomorrow, I would follow the same process because through the personal recommendation you find out so much more again. a recent example job post I knew the director of marketing; two minutes later I had a hiring manager's private email You basically got already ahead of the curve, but for this now you might say, Oh, Chris, but you need to know people, and is this all not just, I don't know, checking hands? I would've thought so 10 years ago too, but at the end of the day, it's because you have worked, because you have done your favors, because people know, Okay, he's good, or He's bad. Basically, when I say he, I mean me, so there is already you have worked on your credentials, I would say, and even if I get asked usually, or I get a call from a friend, I would usually hire him or her because you wouldn't hire him or her because the hiring manager is exactly the same. I would say data points like me I know he's a great candidate, or she's a great candidate, but she wants to be a speaker, or he wants to be a speaker, so in this role we don't have speaking parts, but if I also then hear Oh, I have a role with a speaker. I don't know if you need to go out and speak to people, but I know the person cannot do it. I can now go into the interview and say, Hey, you take everything else. I have heard you're not a good speaker. What do we do about it? Can you tell me how you feel about ABC? And then the candidate again has the chance of explaining himself or herself, so I think there is a preparation. and I would say it's funny now we talk about data and AI is using the human aspect as well as your data brain, so I think for the data people, both things need to be switched on if you want to have fun looking for a new job.

TIM: two other meta patterns I've noticed right there, based on our discussion, so one is Up through time, you could only have built up through being competent and good on a consistent basis, and so that's a really interesting kind of long-term thinking. and also with the feedback to the candidate, again thinking of the future, realizing that, yeah, spending half an hour giving feedback to a candidate now maybe doesn't help you in the short run, but there's a sense of it probably will in the long run; there's a sense of karma and doing the right thing. So I feel like for junior candidates listening to this, they could view your job strategy as a little bit almost unfair, you know what I mean? Oh, it's going behind; it's like leveraging your context; it's cronyism, but I think that's a terrible takeaway and that the real takeaway should be you've done a good job for 20 years, and you've been a reasonable person, and now you would benefit from that, and anyone should have that long-run thinking. What are your thoughts?

CHRIS: There are two things here: yes, I could be in this example I gave you; I was lucky I knew the right person, and I got a personal introduction to the hiring manager, but there are also cases when I got a message, Hey, this is the hiring manager. I have no contacts to him. What do you do then? Because here I'm in the same position, I would still say what the fuck do I write to that person to not look at it like a total jerk or like a total stalker? Here I cannot give you any feedback yet because I usually would like the call, because if I get the interview, at least the person has heard the name Chris Richter before. And I don't know why, but this brings me more presence, so at least I have caused some thoughts, some I don't know, something in the head, so I would say you already have an edge. I would also not say that when you say the young listeners to job search, you have done a good job on a consistent basis. I have also done very poor jobs on some stages; unfortunately, you cannot fight any, or you cannot win any fight you have, but at least you're right. I have always tried with the thing in mind that we always meet twice, so if I have an employee who doesn't feel well anymore, I would go and help. Then, to actually have a successful exit, help them to prepare their presentations and their CVs and point out different jobs. I just did a recent case of this where we worked for quite some time so that the person could actually leave into a good position, and again this leaves on a personal level with this person on any time I will be able to call whatever job and here she's taking on I will be part of this, and I might be even called in Hey Chris, we need to be a data lecturer, or there needs to be a data project to be done when this is the first person. I think nowadays you have all the social media and all the social networks, but the one thing you shouldn't forget if you have worked with someone three or four times and you have liked working with this person three or four times and this person is within your, I'm going to say, within your budget, is that I think so much more wiring in us almost no one would go with the unknown candidate or with an unknown person to go into a project. So I think even for the young listeners, it's important to have this in mind: you're building bridges throughout your whole life, and especially in the data world, now everything is changing so quickly I cannot be on top of everything all of the time. I changed from a startup So for me personally, I changed from startups towards the government's worlds. It was a very good thing for my network but also for the startup world. I now look like I'm working in an old environment. I'm slow; I'm not moving, so now I probably have the same problems going back out. So we had huge discussions with my wife about whether I should take the job because this comes too, so if I would now want to go out, I don't know if to AWS or to any company where they say speed American property I would need to overcome this stigma as well, but now if you go to conferences and meet AWS people or Google people, whatever, you can already Again, start creating a relationship with them, but yeah, the networking requires work as well.

TIM: It requires work, and it is again for the long run. When I see some recommendations on networking to get a job that's being pushed, especially to more junior candidates, I feel like the perception of networking is bombing someone on LinkedIn with an irrelevant, spammy message in a CV asking for a job. That's not networking; that's just annoying. Networking is about meeting, ideally in person, offering something of value, expecting nothing in return, being a reasonable person, and playing the long game. It's not a transactional I need something from you right now, game

CHRIS: Yes, also it's funny when I call it out because I had exactly the same thought, like, Oh my God, hopefully I don't get a million messages on LinkedIn now. In this case, my apologies to all hiring managers who now get spammed.

TIM: I have to say, even in my experience, for the past few years, when I've gotten direct outreach from candidates regarding open roles, it's always been fairly mediocre. Like, I would actually be if I was hiring a role and someone who was clearly relevant, had the right skills, had the right experience, was in the areas we were looking to hire, wrote a crafted, personalized email to me saying, Hey, I noticed you're having this role. I have these skills that you mentioned. I'm looking for a role. Here's what I like: if it was customized and personalized to us, that's solving my problem. It's when you get a generic message from someone in some country, and I'm hiring in with no skills that are overlapping and a generic CV and a misspelled message that then means it's a problem for me. That's annoying. That's not solving my problem, and I feel like there's a wide spectrum of how you could do this outreach, from very poor to very good.

CHRIS: I would say it's not your problem. You've gotten the perfect data point. The person hasn't spent the time to look you up. The person hasn't spent the time to look up who your company is. The person hasn't even managed to spell check, which now in the days of ChatGPT, you literally just need to paste it in and say, Please make suggestions, and copy it back in. At the end of the day, you have also now already gotten the data point that that person just didn't care and just applied for 500 jobs. Maybe we should take it back there and say apply for five jobs but make it good, but I think now also these are good tips to give in the position we are in. If you are unemployed and you are under pressure, you need to go much quicker, but again you should spend the time because every time I interview you, I will notice that you haven't prepared, that you're not in the game, and then you look very fast unknowledgeable, which is an issue, the worst case when you also try to cover up with something, saying something like, I know you, you're lying. The moment you lie, you're out.

TIM: Yeah, it's a game of trust, isn't it? As soon as you've lost that trust for whatever reason, that's good night, I think. Okay.

CHRIS: That's actually a good word, which I now forgot. Trust is a good one because if you come into my team, I need to know when you tell me, Chris, something is wrong, even if I don't like it, and for this I need to trust you.

TIM: Because I'm piecing this together, I don't have direct evidence, but just anecdotally, it sounds like a lot of candidates are using it to either optimize or rewrite the CV, which on paper is fair enough. But what I'm guessing is happening is that it's like the truth index of a CV is going down because candidates are almost outsourcing the writing of it to a large language model, maybe not scrutinizing every detail and maybe almost passing off the morality of whether or not they're telling the truth to a machine. That's my interpretation, and so I feel like CVs are being less reflective of reality than they've ever been. If you had a candidate who clearly exaggerated or lied on the CV, would that be something that would really put you off if you discovered that in an interview?

CHRIS: It's again a trust issue, so yes, and again you have just used a tool and haven't even bothered to check it properly. So yeah, it's a deal breaker again. I would use that to be T for this stuff too, but he would go through it again and give it my personal note. So if you talk to me, you will note very quickly that I'm doing things probably not the way everyone else is, which is not a common way. I try to have this in my CV as well so that my CV is also reflecting myself, and yeah, if you would apply, you look good on the CV, and I talked to you for five or ten seconds. I don't know if there was a you owe flas on it, and I know you don't even know how to open the browser. It's again, it's come over, but it's when also you clearly have applied for the wrong job, or you haven't prepared yourself well enough for that kind of job, so you should go back and do some continuous development.

TIM: Yeah, and even pre-GPT or large language models My biggest pain point as a hiring manager was always that initial stage of getting a whole bunch of CVs, finding those that seemed to look right on paper, seemed to have the right skills and experience, getting to that first interview, and finding there was a gulf between what they pitched and the skills they had. I can remember one example of a candidate who'd finished a master's of statistics recently, apparently, but couldn't really articulate the difference between when they might use a median and a mean, and I wasn't trying to trick them or anything like it was fairly foundational stuff, and so I feel like this has always been a problem, but I also get a sense it's been exacerbated recently with

CHRIS: But do you think this was an issue with knowledge or with the ability to speak?

TIM: So this is years ago now. Whenever I think back to that particular candidate, it seemed to be both. I remember they gave a very verbose answer that seemed to go nowhere and lasted minutes, but also, from memory, their answer was wrong. I think they confused a mode with a median, and maybe you could say these are just terminology things. They still understood the core concept, but I was left sadly disappointed in either case.

CHRIS: Mean with this, I usually have the feeling that what can happen is that they are so nervous they just don't get it out, so they are always back I had a very significant, I'm going to say, situation back in the time when I was a postdoc. I was helping bachelor students, so basically I supervised them. And I know there was a group of people where we had a very bold person and a very knowledgeable person, and the knowledgeable person came into the room during the oral exam, and there was nothing, and everyone in the room, no boy, all of this stuff just say it; we don't want to give you a bad grade. The candidate just couldn't get anything. It was great, like you could actually see everyone was like, Oh no, the candidate deserves an A, and you're like, Oh fuck, she cannot. Why can't you not answer that? Then the second person comes in, and okay, from the work before, from the thesis, where it's not that much knowledge in, and just bang, like absolutely No, I'm going to say no fear of saying the wrong thing or knowing that this is obviously not the right answer, and so there you just have the different people, so the candidate you described, I usually would go into this and try to come on, give it to me. I know that you can do it. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I'm also not going to turn it around. You said the candidates try to fulfill everything. How do you usually react if someone tells you, I'm lacking the following skill in my CV because I usually like that, so if we have, I don't know, you need to have information, or you need to have worked in the FDA, you need to know some certifications where you clearly don't have a skill? Do you like them when we are pointing out that we like it usually when some candidate also tells you I have the following limitations?

TIM: Oh, I would love that. I can't say I remember many candidates doing that, but yeah, that level of honest transparency is brilliant. I feel like that's one of the almost systemic issues with hiring: both sides A kind of restricting how much truth they release in a kind of gradual process, like a dance to the hiring process Whereas I reckon it's just getting your cards on the table as soon as possible. You want a hundred thousand pounds a year; this role is for 70,000. We can't give you a hundred thousand. Let's end it here. You know what I mean: the sooner we just get it out on the table, we'd save everyone time. don't you think

CHRIS: Yeah, I agree, and also heartbreak, because if the candidate doesn't like the job and I was like, Oh, I cannot; I don't want to take it, yeah, I'm fully with you.

TIM: Yeah, and the other point you were mentioning was around candidates in the interview and the fact that, yeah, so the one I interviewed years ago maybe was just like unbearably nervous, and so she just couldn't get out the knowledge that she must've had. I feel like that's another fairly systemic issue with hiring: I'd say for most hiring managers at most companies, the most value is weighted on the interview performance. Even if there's some kind of test involved, really, if you bomb a bunch of interviews, you're not getting hired, but interviews are so biased in favor of people who are very good at talking and quite extroverted and comfortable in that environment, good at talking about themselves, probably biased in other ways, like handsome and tall people, I suspect perform better than others in at least the perception of the interviewers. And so I wonder whether our overreliance on interviews is part of the challenge in hiring.

CHRIS: I would say extroverts have it easier; that's for sure, and that's a problem. This is why here, when I told you the example from the bachelor thesis, I would usually—you can feel nervousness too; I don't know, there are probably no good strategies. I would usually just lay back and say, Listen, I'm asking questions deliberately to make you nervous; just go into yourself. So I think there I would also switch into a more calming tone and try to calm them down because for me the biggest thing is, and that's why I asked the question, introverts can be a significant asset to your team; the problem is finding them because you do have the same problem. Yeah, if the extroverts come in, they love talking to you. If you have a person then with good social skills, they have checked you out before they know okay with Chris I'm going to have to talk about ABC, so even interviews like I don't know years ago, I caught me like I'm already biased here; he's saying too much what I want to hear. So we need to break the vicious cycle; otherwise, I'm going to make a decision that is not good. The introverts have a problem: they don't do this while they would be a perfect asset to your team, so yes, a hiring manager, you are in this unbearable situation, but I can also not tell you how to solve it. So I would go back because I'm aware of it. I would go back to my gut feeling, so if I have the gut feeling the person knows it, I try to go back and ask the easy question I know they can answer, and then try to get the conversation back where we went again. I think where the problem is just you have a limited amount of time. Usually, if you have a bang-on schedule, like a meeting, you cannot do this, so again it comes back to the same thing: how much time do you have, and how much time have you prepared for it, which is then just a limiting factor?

TIM: About maybe is like just other evaluation techniques, so there's skills tests. IQ tests personality tests take-home projects, and other things that aren't necessarily in favor of extroverts, and so maybe having a blend of different evaluation techniques might give you a more holistic view of a candidate

CHRIS: I'm not sure if I'm cherry-picking now. I like this idea, but I also have people who wouldn't want that because then they're going to say, You just straight away, it's gonna. Oh, you look just for a certain type as discriminating. Yeah, I don't know; I like this idea. I haven't tried it, so I have always toyed with it, but yes, it's an interesting one, but it comes back if you have to. If the introvert comes into a team interview and is just so nervous they cannot get anything out and cannot perform, you are, even if you have, I don't know, double the IQ as the other person, but the other person is liked by the team, you're against the wall again. What do you do here? Because you already said it: 80 percent of the data people make a gut feeling, and we just collected only data points. If you make decisions only on data, I think it's probably not the smartest choice. I don't think your IQ test is going to solve the problem, unfortunately.

TIM: Chris It's been an interesting conversation today. I have one final question for you, and that is if you could ask our next guest one question, what question would that be?

CHRIS: That's a tough one. I think I would stick with our introvert-extrovert question and how do you make how do you get the right information out of your introverts and make them liked by the team?

TIM: That's a great question. I will level that at our next guest and see what they say, and I'm looking forward to hearing their answer. Chris It's been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. It's been wide-ranging, and we've covered a lot of different topics, and I'm sure our audience has enjoyed your insights. So thank you so much for sharing them with us.

CHRIS: Perfect! Thanks for having me.