Adapting Selection Systems After the Robots Take Over

I am not sure that any HR futurist can tell us how many jobs will be displaced by automation over the next 5, 10, or 20 years. The answer is clearly more than zero. The latest example of this can be read here. The theme of the article is, “Really, a formula can make predictions better than a person’s intuition?” In psychology (well, industrial psychology), we have only known this since the mid-1950s (see this book), so I can see why the idea is just catching on.

Any kind of judgment that is made based on accumulating data will ALWAYS be more accurate over time when done by a machine than a person. This is because the machine is not biased by what has happened most recently, how impacted it is by the decision, how attractive the others who are involved are, etc. While this type of analysis is somewhat difficult for people to do consistently well, it is simple math for a computer. There is really no reason, besides stroking someone’s ego, to have humans do it.

As computers continue to remove the computational portions of jobs, such as analyzing trends, making buying decisions, they will impact HR in the following ways:

• Fewer customer facing jobs to manage, but more IT related ones.

• Many of the remaining jobs will require less cognitive ability and more interpersonal skills. This is because these employees could potentially spend more time meeting specific customer needs and being the interface between end users and the algorithms.

• The key predictors of job success would potentially become conscientiousness, agreeableness, and customer service orientation rather than problem solving ability.

• Developing a validating a different set of pre-employment tests.

• Recruiters will need to source people with very specific skills (cognitive ability for programmers and willingness to get along with others for many other jobs).

The challenge to industrial psychology continues to be developing more valid measures of personality. Tests of cognitive ability predict job performance about twice as well as those of “soft” skills, even in those that already have a high personality component (such as customer service). This also means developing better measures of performance (e.g., how interpersonal skills impact business outcomes).

Or, maybe the robots will do it for us.

Ways That We Punish, Rather Than Coach, Poor Performers

During the 4th of July holiday, I was binge watching an Australian cooking competition show with my family. It was pretty mindless and entertaining stuff. The gist of each episode was that contestants competed in a theme-based challenge. One was selected as the best for the day. Two others were deemed the poorest performers and then they competed to stay on the show. What I found most interesting was that they task they were given to avoid elimination (getting fired) was harder (by design) than the original one.

Of course, there is not necessarily a straight line to be drawn between entertainment shows and the work place. But this did get me thinking about how we develop poor performers. While it seems intuitive that resources spent on improving their performance would have a significant return-on-investment, data show that high performers generally benefit more from training than low ones do.

HR needs to consider how to develop all levels of talent. With the current low unemployment rates, companies are losing some of their control over their talent levels, especially now there is more job hopping. There are a few considerations in developing low performers:

• Are you rewarding progress until the person is capable of delivering results? The key here is that improving performance requires changes in behavior. If they are reinforced, the new behaviors are more likely to be learned. Telling people “try harder” or dangling a future carrot are not good strategies for improving performance.

• Are they sufficiently skilled in the tasks you expecting them to do? Before concluding that the person is not going to be a good employee, be sure that they have the basic skills/experience to perform the job. You should not expect someone to be a pastry chef if s/he does not know how to make a cake. This is where valid pre-employment testing programs are valuable.

• Are there other areas of the business that appeal more to their interests? I have a client that staffs its own call center. They have higher than average turnover in the call center, but somewhat lower in the company overall, because after people spend 6 months there they can bid for any other open position in the company for which they are qualified. Allowing easy lateral transfers helps you keep good employees who may just be in jobs they do not find engaging.

Low unemployment rates mean that new talent is going to be more expensive. It may indicate a good return-on-investment in developing under-performing talent than usual. However, getting people in the right place and having alternate reward strategies are essential to getting the most out of their development.

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