Just One More Thing

When your data is misaligned, incomplete, or irrelevant, your questions lead you in circles. When you measure the right things, your questions get smarter, your decisions get clearer, and your outcomes get better. 

In this episode, Lucy Lynch sits down with Bobby Banerjee, founder of The Hapi Test, to explore how recruitment can be transformed when we stop relying on gut feel and start measuring what actually matters: behaviour. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Right, so welcome to our podcast. Today we're continuing our focus on how people solve real business problems in creative, non-obvious ways, especially when those people problems have been accepted as just how things work. And I'm Lucy Lynch, Chief of Staff at Omnia Digital, where we spend a lot of time thinking about how people, process, and technology actually intersect and not just how they look on paper. And today, my guest is the founder of the Happy Test, which I absolutely love, and is a behavioural and situational judgment assessment designed for the recruitment industry, which is really interesting because obviously I've spent years working in recruitment. And from a continuous learning journey, I've been working with Code Institute doing their boot camp in data analytics, which is where I met my lovely guest today, Bobby. And so what I find interesting about this story is that it didn't start with technology, it started with questioning about where, what were we, were we measuring the right things at all when hiring people? So let's start there, Bobby. Please do a little introduction about yourself and then we can go from there.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Yeah, uh, I'm Bobby Ballerjee. I've been a trainer, coach, and recruiter for the for the recruitment industry for about 14 years, um, or 13 years, I think it is. Um, so I've yeah, I seem to have gotten myself involved in a few different things. So, like I say, I'm a trainer and coach and and run a mini brand of my business called Elevate Learning, which is to get recruiters better again. God, that almost sounded a little bit um, you know, kind of yeah, let's not go down that road, go on, go down that route. Um I've I yeah, so as you quite rightly pointed out, I've also I've also created that happy test, which is a situational judgment test to align people on behaviors and not biases. It's one of the biggest, it's one of my biggest bugbears in recruitment generally, that I think that we do a lot of a lot of bias-based hiring. And so getting down to the to the bare facts about it. And um, yeah, I also created something called the Recruitment Curry Club, which um is a talking, it's is essentially a talking therapies group for people in and around the industry to have chats with people informally without selling anything to anyone at any time, but get people uh you know, get people talking, get people building relationships again, because I think that's very much in the zeitgeist, probably after, you know, post-pandemic, where people have realized that getting out and about and meeting people in real life are is really important. And then, yeah, my little my my new little project is uh something called Milo, which is going to be an AI first training platform. So, yeah, there's there's a lot happening, but yeah, I'm I'm really excited to be on and love would love to answer any questions that you have, Lucy.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Fantastic. I mean, God, what a kind of like starting point. We've got curry, we've got AI, we've got um all sorts of things. And obviously, I um when we think about you know, bias and everything. So before the happy test existed, what problem in the recruitment industry really bothered you, you know, really kind of like you know, like we were talking earlier, weren't we, about poking the bear? Like, what was it that you felt something that wasn't solved properly?

SPEAKER_03 3:36

Yeah, so I um so I used to work for a rather large recruitment agency, a global one called S3. Um, and they've got, you know, so my job, um, so I was a I was a recruiter to start off with, so I started building my building my kind of career from from trainee all the way through to manager, but then I realized that I was getting getting more excited when the people underneath me made placements rather than myself, which is a whip, which is kind of a weird place to be in. So um, so we you know so I became a I became a trainer and coach for the UK and Ireland, then ended up going into well, started off in Birmingham, Bristol, then became the UK and Ireland, then became Europe, and then I was getting married, and my wife was like, Well, she was my fiancee at the time, um, and she was she was like, Oh, so you're 20 20 uh days a month away from me, how are we gonna book this wedding? Um, so so yeah, so that that was my kind of journey. And what I noticed when I was when I was training these people is I and I've you know now you know, touch wood, I've been a I've trained the best part of three and a half, four thousand recruiters from from Absolute Basics, let alone the people that I've trained in other circumstances. But I noticed that there were some behaviors that made people good and some behavior some behaviors that I noticed that made people not as successful. And uh recruitment uh in all different markets can feel like a bit of a numbers game at times, you know, whether it's in digital, whether it's and and what so what I wanted to do, and in recruitment itself, recruiters are very good at hiring for other people. They're not very good at hiring for themselves. So, what I wanted to do is codify what those particular boundaries are, what those particular behaviors are, and and essentially productize what those are into a set of questions that people can then look at, be able to create analysis, and more importantly, benchmark against their own behaviors. So that was the that was the problem that I wanted to solve, and that's why it's that's why the happy test exists.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Amazing, amazing. And so what assumptions, so if we think about recruitment, and quite rightly you're saying about you know, hiring internally is always much harder than hiring externally for a client, right? And and maybe it's that old adage that it's easier to help someone else than it is to help yourself, like listening to your own advice, you know, is a really hard thing to do. But I'm really great at helping other people like like you have come from a training and you know, kind of mentoring background as well. And so it's like years of helping other people land their first role or do this. And when I was not working, you know, last year, I was like, oh god, I really need to take my own advice, you know, in these things, because otherwise you can literally, you know, sort of drive yourself crazy. And what assumptions about hiring did you have to challenge in order to sort of see behaviour rather than credentials as the missing piece?

SPEAKER_03 6:29

Yeah, I think well, behavior, but behaviors have always been the challenge. And what I noticed again, we we I get I guess I had a sample set of several thousand, which is a which is a nice place to be in, but also a terrifying place to be in because you realize then that how much churn has happened. And so the problem was that we saw and and the recruitment industry itself has a particular problem with churn or or or staff retention at at two or three different points. And so what I wanted to do is kind of look at at least one of those aspects and go, why does this happen? Why it happens is because people either have been sold a particular role or environment that is completely different from when they interviewed to when they came on site, yeah. Or they have, you know, they've done so much to try and they've performed so much to try and get the role that they wanted or thought that they wanted, that they almost not burn out, but they forget that that was you know what they have to do, and and because that performance is so difficult to maintain and upkeep. And so it's not a but I guess it is a burnout, but not a burnout if you get what I mean. But it's you know, they try and you know, it it it's like you're performing a one-man show all day, every day for and you can only do that for a certain amount of time before you go, I don't want to do this. Um, so so I noticed that those two particular traits were happening. So it's like, well, actually, how can we how can we create something that that looks at this that again that B word seems to come out, but the behavior of people that perform well and it seems quite natural for them, rather than it feeling forced or or you know, kind of seeing where they're at. And so you could create mini assessments to see where people are at. You know, like you say, we're on a course together, and those summative assessments that we're doing are a good gauge to see what we're what we're doing. And you know, I used to do IT recruitment, so whether it's technical tests don't really really do that, but competency assessment is really important to to helping that process. And so what we want to do is almost create a mini competency or or or a conversation starter around competency before they're hired or even during the hiring process, because then that becomes a really exciting prospect.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

I mean, you you you've had it, I'm sure you've had it yourself, or you either you've conducted qualification screening or interviews where you've just gone through the mill, you've run me through your CV and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Imagine a scenario where you go, actually, I noticed that you answered these particular questions like this, and you answered these particular questions like this. Talk me through your strategy around that. Describe how you go about that. What is, you know, you know, talk me through how you said that this is what would you would be your strategy around this. And those are the things that I wanted to really try and get into because I think again, interviews become very formulaic, and actually you can reduce a few layers of an interview process by just asking the right questions.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah, and I think, you know, being in the data sort of digital space, you know, one of the things that I've learned in like the last sort of 10 years is about learning to ask better questions, right? And I think you know, we see this a lot um with businesses at Omnia is that businesses of like solving for the wrong signal because it's familiar, and that that whole thing, you you kind of like you know, the what is it, the theory, Einstein's theory, the theory of insanity, you carry on doing the same thing, you keep getting the same results, right? And it's like, oh well, right, we need to just stop right there and then like pause and have a think about what we're doing. So I guess in a in a nutshell, if I can say this, that the happy test is learning to ask better questions, right?

SPEAKER_03 10:01

Yeah, and so the idea is learning to ask better questions, but also being able to create you know, kind of industry-specific scenarios, and I think that's really important because there's lots of testing, there's lots of behavioral testing out there to try and look at generalities, but some of those generalities don't necessarily kind of work in particular circumstances, and so you know, and and again, it's it's definitions of particular behavior. So, like a sales-driven behavior, there's lots of different types of sales as an example. There's, you know, there's the kind of who's going to knock on doors, or who's the person that will formulate ideas, opinions, and be able to help you with that. Well, how does someone do things through thought leadership or whatever that looks like? There's loads of different aspects to sales, but for some reason just saying, oh, this person is good at sales, that's not it. It's more a case of defining what those things look like and how does that fit in. And I think that's really important. And again, in in any industry that you're working in, it's not necessarily just looking at a behavioral competency, you know, like like I say, coding in Python or coding it, you know, or what we're doing at the moment. It's more a case of how do they do it when, you know, because you want people that have solved problems when times have been tough.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

You know, so you want to understand what those times have been and how they've come through those and what their decision-making process is when times are tough. Because, you know, if any if anyone's had it easy in any walk of life, it's very easy to spot because they can't explain their journey or whatever that looks like, or even even brilliant people who because it comes so innately to them, they're not able to explain how well they do things, which is why you don't see the very, very best footballers or the very, very best sports people in coaching because they're not able to codify or be able to explain what they do because it because it's an innate genius. So it's little things like that to help codify and productize the the kind of the you know, almost like create the code to see how people perform.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Okay, all right. I really like that, Bobby. Thank you for that. And I think, you know, when we talk about you know creativity, um, and that's also you know one of the themes for today, is that we're talking about you know, finding a seeing a problem and then finding a creative solution. And I think when I, you know, I was teaching at university, you know, working with data science AI cohorts, I was always hoping at the coding. All right, let's talk about you know critical thinking skills, let's talk about uh creativity, our resilience, our curiosity, right? And so this is a quote, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

I've got a quote on curiosity. Oh, go on, tell me because I because weirdly I'm a cat person as well, but that's a whole other thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Me too.

SPEAKER_03 12:40

Love so so whenever you've had your cat come through on our on a course, I'd be the first one to say show us. Um, but um, but what I've you know, what I've noticed that curiosity can kill cats, but it creates creative champions, and that is really important because I think that there is a lot of um, I think we don't understand how much our curiosity and asking that extra question again. I don't know how many of your viewers are old enough to to look to remember is was it Detective Columbo?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Oh god, yeah, yeah, played by Colombo.

SPEAKER_03 13:10

Yeah, and when he had just that one more question, that was one more question.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Yeah, just he's just about to leave, right? Yeah, like just one more.

SPEAKER_03 13:17

Yeah, and you're always waiting for that every single episode. And yeah, and but the thing is, you know, that one more question is really important, and being able to ask that extra question can really help define, you know, whether it's a scope of work or whether it's a you know, whether it's a a recruitment, you know, kind of a recruitment job specification or anything in this life. If you just ask that one more question to under to get that clarity, and there's no such thing as a terrible question that makes you look like an idiot. Yeah, in fact, one of the best recruiters I've ever seen, she was a she was a um um she she was a um an incredible biller, worked three days a week, but she would speak to her, speak to her, she was based in Dublin, she would speak to her clients, and you know, I'm not I'm not gonna use it, but she's she would say, speak to me like I'm an effing five-year-old, tell me in the most basic terms what this job is, how it needs to operate, and what the right person needs to look like. You know, explaining things to people like it's a five, like they're a five-year-old is great. Because for two reasons. Number one, if you're if you're trying to garner some idea about this person, you know, from stakeholder management, if someone can explain things to non-technical stakeholders or or technical stakeholders in very different ways, yeah, they could it's a really good summative assessment of how good this person is.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Exactly. So knowing your audience, right? And we talk about that a lot, exactly. And definitely, you know, when I was teaching, you know, previously, it was definitely about know your audience, know who that dashboard is going to hit. And now we're on the other side building those dashboards. And I've always built myself as the best non-technical stakeholder anyone will ever meet. So show me your dashboard, and if it makes sense to me, then you've got a really good chance of being able to tell that story to more technical people, right? And that's why I'm finding this course in equal measures like wildly frustrating, but you know, captivating in a different way because I'm I'm having to utilize different resources and different parts of my brain and and and just keep asking those questions, like what would I want to see on that dashboard? Like, what questions would I be asking, you know, of that data, you know, in a really simplistic way? So when we're talking about design then, um, one sort of challenge with any assessment tool is about balancing that scientific sort of credibility with real-world adoption. So we were talking about your sample, light list, etc. So, how do you how did you design something rigorous rigorous rigorous enough to be trusted, but simple enough because we're just talking about the five-year-olds, that hiring teams could actually use it?

SPEAKER_03 15:56

So, what I need so what I needed to do is kind of look at it from those two from two different lenses. I needed to look at this as I'm not a user experience or UX UI expert in any way, shape, or form. In fact, I'm a failed computer scientist that tried to code in Java, Perl, Haskell, you know, C 25 years ago and failed my course and ended up doing an economics degree. Um But what I noticed was I wanted to, you know, what you want to do is make something simple enough that people can understand what's going on, but not over you know, but not overly simple that you almost want an assessment to be a bit of a barrier to entry. Of course you do. So if they can't, if they can't do some of the simple kind of user experience related stuff, and and even the even the pre-test screen is you know essentially looking so from a learning development perspective, I've been in learning and development for you know bet 11, 12 years um on and off in different industries. So I think like we spoke off air, I um I used to train people that hadn't quite done so well in life. So if they hadn't done A levels or GCSEs um and they hadn't done PTEX or GNVQs, they did something called the NOCN diploma, um, which is a level, an entry level three or a level one qualification in basic maths, English, and IT. And the people that I had on my roster um were people like people on the anti-terrorism watch list, people who'd been to youth offending institutes, people who were, you know, I had one particular particular young lady who, you know, such an unreal story that she'd, you know, that she'd come across from from I think uh Senegal or the Gambia where she had been a victim of uh genital mutilation, and she was trying, you know what I mean? It's like, well, you know, if these people have had such traumatic events in their lives, trying to get them to do something is really difficult.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

You've got to have your brain in the right place, open enough to be able to take the information out.

SPEAKER_03 17:50

So everything that you do is around these situations. Like I've had all these unique events that have helped shaped shape what I would want to achieve. So I want to make it easy enough for people to understand. And look, I've had my challenges because I've then gone, you know, maybe overly wordy on some questions and and a lot of the feedback and getting people getting you know, people that you know, like and trust to give it some feedback, yeah. But also having a growth mindset to be willing to accept the feedback is really important. Um, but also not accepting the feedback because you know, some people say that oh, this question, you know, it could be, you know, ideally we'd like your test to be shorter. I was like, well, it's a 10 to 15 minute test, yeah. But you know, I and I've I've now done all the metrics around when they started and when they finished the test to to build all that. So I need to now create a dashboard for all this. That's an aside. Um but but you know, but my competitors are all hour and a half, two hour long assessments. So if you're struggling with a 15-minute thing, and hey, you know, from an from an from a D and I perspective, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that I probably need to consider around that, you know, how do I use different different methods of taking the test? And this is uh something that I'm looking to build out, but you've got to take all that feedback on board or not on board, and you've just got to be really, really good. Uh and the problem is it's just me, so I don't have anyone to bounce those ideas off. So that's always a challenge.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

But um, but yeah, no, it's using your best judgment to kind of go.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

Yeah, and the problem is everyone's best judgment can also feel a little bit like you you're divining in the wind and going, hmm, how does it look today? But yeah, trying to get so so what I've been able to do is get people from the British Psychological Society or people who are product experts. So my sister-in-law, as it just so happens, used to be one of the one of a product engineer for um for for Lloyd's Banking Group. And so I've just taken her, you know, I've just I've gone through gone through her experience and gone, right, actually, how do I make this better? And it's you know, I think leaning on people that can help is really important, and people who have the expertise is really important. And I think again, you know, think about our world of recruitment that we're talking about. People don't lean on the fact that they are expert enough because they don't show any credibility, which is one of my biggest bugbears, or can't demonstrate that credibility. But if you were to speak to a recruitment consultant and you were one yourself, how many how many candidates would you speak to on a on a weekly basis, Lucy?

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Oh god, um like over a hundred?

SPEAKER_03 20:16

Right? So if I so if I took your so if I took that and went, how many years we or how many years were you in recruitment for?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

I would say I was like five. Well, I mean, no, God, so I'm still doing recruitment in my last role. So I'd say for like the last eight years.

SPEAKER_03 20:34

So essentially, it's so I'll I'll use five because I can do that maths. Um so it's 52 weeks a year, or well, let's say 48, that's 240 weeks of 100 people that you speak to. So you'd already speak to 20 ish 24,000 people in that industry. Obviously, with lots of over with lots of overlap, let's call it 15,000 people. You're getting, and and if you thought about what you're doing now, thinking about it from what you're doing now to what you were doing before, how many data points did you did you collect? You're getting how many salaries or daily rates there were on, how many projects, how many companies, how many managers they'd worked for, how many, you know, uh, how many kind of how many cats they had? How many cats they had, how many data. Yeah, how many how many technical skills they had, what did they want to do? What were they not doing? All of this data is it is what recruiters don't demonstrate that they do enough. Because if you thought about that, and if you th if you thought of every single candle, you know, candle qualification or screening form that you now put into put into an Excel spreadsheet, yeah, yeah, how much data will that, you know, how what dashboards will that create? You know, what you know, how how much is that? It would be amazing, but we don't talk about these things enough because actually we're not very good at explaining we we go if you know recruiters go too far into the sales part and not enough into the explaining how they can offer insight and analysis. And like I say, I have a I have a particular acronym that I like to use of of Diva, which is which is data.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

insight and value add and if you can if you can have that data insight value add approach to whatever it is you're you're doing which which whoever your listenership is they'll be able to you know that it'll break down more conversations and if you're curious curious enough to know to feed that diva as it were you're then going to get loads of insight and analysis that's going to really help you and I think also to kind of just add on to that I think I always prided myself you know as being a very good recruiter because I was I was very much relationship driven and it was always about that consulting part of it and always about you know what what's the problem what's the hiring manager's needs you know what's the bigger picture here you know okay we've got this requirement but actually let me like let's talk about what happened three months ago like to get to this stage and what let's do some forward thinking of what what we're gonna do next and where's that person going to sit in the role in in this in this department in a year's time because if I'm gonna find you the right person then I'm I'm gonna want to know this because I want to give them a really good overview of what they could expect from wanting to work with that's that's that's it that's if you that's if you operate that way and I think what what it's good to understand and where I where I tried to make it as as kind of equality based or equity based was the fact that I know that people not everyone works in that way and people have built really good businesses in a bunch of different ways and I think you know whether it's in digital whether it's in dentistry whether it's in recruitment whether it's what you know IT whatever it looks like people but you know people have very different ways of doing things.

SPEAKER_03 23:40

And so what I wanted to lean on with the test is go, well actually I want to cater for those differences. So what I so so what I was thinking was do I make this a test with a standardized result? Or what I then ended up doing was going well actually do I get the person to take you know the the hiring manager to take the test to see what how they would approach things in those circumstances and then use that as a benchmark against these people because then funny enough you can then that you know then it kind of goes off what how you would do not necessarily who you are and and so it allows you to to to hire basic on behavior I guess behavioral biases rather than rather than kind of oh they went to the same university as me. Oh you know and and and obviously you know there's lots of protected characteristics out there and we've spoken about so many of them but you know that that shouldn't affect your ability to do the job it should be how you perform in an environment that should affect your ability to do the job. And so what I've done is go how do I find people that perform like me not not who are like me who perform like me so then it doesn't matter who they are where they're from what particular you know what particular background university they went to and totally whether they whether that bias yeah whether they're gay straight Asian white whatever that looks like it doesn't really matter it's more a case of how do they perform like me yeah and therefore you can create that and go well actually I can now replicate my the the the right behaviors in each bit each part of my business by those behavioral barriers rather than just or those behavioral biases rather than just um rather than just looking at biases in in total.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Yeah no I really like that and I think you know from uh just like thinking from Omnia's perspective like I guess we always talk about if we think about you know a company or a customer we'll always think about the people first and then it's process then it's the technology right and so it's it's the same it's the same same but different right it's like you know the double edged of the coin the flip side of the coin is that you know when we're working with customers then we want to we want to build those relationships but we want to ask those I'll ask that Colombo question as well that that that one that's that's also going to differentiate well as it happens this test that we've all we we I and I didn't even think about this but again this is where getting feedback from lots of different people is important.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

We created it created a different use case around in the world of kind of client led recruitment so like um kind of managed services or or recruitment process outsourcing if that's what you know some people do. What what someone said to me was look why why do you get the clients to take the test and see how they would like someone to perform and if you have a delivery function underneath get your delivery function to take the test and see who most aligns with this.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:21

And so funny enough you know we've we've tested that with with companies like the Bank of England and like it's I find it hilarious that I can say stuff like this. Which then has has led to better recruiter client relations because then they can there's a layer of empathy there. And I think you know authenticity empathy and understanding are the are the currency of today especially in this AI driven world that we're living in. So little things like that that can help drive those particular empathic behaviors really important.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Amazing Bobby that's really good and I think um I'm just gonna ask um just have a little question here and I wanted to sort of like just think about just for a second about your approach to problem solving because I know I've seen you in the classroom as it were online when we're faced with really complex like technical issues and like you see my face for most of that I'm literally going what the heck is they talking about but how do you personally like think through it what's your process for when you've got a like a business challenge and and it's really complex like do you start with the data like the lived experience experimentation or sort of conversation I I think I start like anyone else does panicking first and foremost.

SPEAKER_03 27:39

So yeah like I you know I'm really fortunate that I think I have a good puzzle brain. I love you know all my all my apps on my phone are essentially puzzle games. Okay but but what I've noticed is when it yeah I guess it matters more and and I think this is probably a you know kind of more pointed message it matters more when there's money on it. I think that's the old sky bet mentality. So so I actually get a lot of analysis paralysis and I think a lot you know so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna pretend like if it's a simple problem I can feel like I can solve it. When I feel like it's complex for me and and like you say you know what what might be simple for me might be complex for you what might be complex for you know what might be simple for you might be really complex for me. So like you know if I for example I if I had to buy I don't know a paddle racket I would I would obsess over it for hours and try and yeah totally right whereas whereas if it's a simple mathematical or what I think is a simple mathematical problem I can do it like that. So so so it's so like I say I think I think what you've got to work out is what is what is your strength and what is your weakness. So if it's mathematical I can pretty much sort it or I can I can you know look at I and I have a process for sorting that through through through kind of just trial and error. However if it is something like a business problem I think what I try and do is is so again I'm I'm a coach so I have to kind of live what I bring you know kind of live what I what I do what I say to other people. So I have to do almost a stro a SWOT analysis of it. So look at all the strengths of of you know of of you know dare I say it's almost like a and again for depending on how old your listeners are it's a bit like a do you remember that Ross did a from friends did a um did a kind of pros and cons list about about about staying with with Rachel. Oh with Rachel yes I do which obviously which obviously blew up in his face. However if you do a pros and cons list of whatever it is that you're looking to do and then go well actually which again which of these pros am I am I okay with or you know really happy with which of these pros do I not am I not bothered about and same with the cons which because I think again we look at cons as a negative but actually which of these can I be doing away with yeah and that's the same in a business right as well in date data governance right and we talk about you know when we're talking about scoring metrics we're talking about benchmarks and like what does good look like you know and when we think about you know what can we when we trust the data like for but comparisons but comparison's the thief of joy so what does good look like isn't the question it's what does good look like in this business. In this in in this business because because what does good look like it almost gets you down that rabbit hole of you know again we we we curse social media because it portrays a a life that people possibly don't either uh you know people aspire to but you know but it but it also doesn't exist you know I'm happy you know I'd I'd definitely be putting out all my best bits like our trip to Italy but I don't go actually it's a Tuesday I feel like shit and I'm gonna put that out there right so so so you don't want to you don't want to compare yourself to others what you want to do is look at well what does what does good look like in the space how what what are the strengths that we have as a business and then how did how does that process help our strengths or get you know or or alleviate weakness there's a lot of stuff and again this is probably a slightly off tangent topic but there's a lot of stuff that gets talked about with AI but I I again I liken it to to using Mr. Muscle if you remember do you remember do you remember the slogan for Mr. Muscle at all?

SPEAKER_00 31:08

No.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

It loves the jobs you hate.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 31:11

So if you look at AI and or any any particular process and goes which which processes do I hate doing in mine I'm not very good at admin I'm I'm a very good ideas person I'm not very good at execution. So what I'm using AI to do at the moment is how does it help execute everything that I need to do or what parts of the processes execute. So so look at your strengths and your weaknesses as a person as a team as a and then be able to go right actually what can I get rid of or what can I do more of because I don't know about you but why would I be doing something that I really hate doing because I'm not very good at it whereas I could be I could be offloading that to the to whichever part of the world or you're certainly hiring people that have those particular skills so basically going you know with my I guess you know leaning it back to the happy test going what skills do I want to see someone be able to do in those scenarios not just what I would do in those scenarios so what would I want someone and then benchmark against those. So then you could kind of see who those who those you know people that add value to your business are.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Yeah no absolutely and so um because I think we've sort of covered about ai automation analytics and where do you think businesses are still um I guess solving people problems poorly because they're not focusing on that on that behavior part.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

Yes they're still hiring about people like that they think they want or or that are like them if we're going back to the buyers thing again yeah so so so really we're at a really interesting juncture aren't we with this you know kind of we know we now know that ai is going to become an important part of everything we do.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:49

However what we've what a lot of people have done and this is from sentiment that I've kind of created you know kind of understood through speaking to lots of different people is that people either think oh you know AI is not going to replace us and have a staunch kind of staunch staunch kind of approach there or they have this or they have this approach that AI is going to take absolutely everything away from everyone and so we have this weird black and white view it's very polarized. Whereas what people haven't realized is how do we get there's a lot of gray area here where we can go well actually what is it that we can get AI to do to augment or to improve what we do and remove like I say remove all that's all that's weakness or enhance strength. And so if you can put it into those particular perspectives then that's that's where I see that's where I see people failing. When you when to to to directly then come to your question about where do people potentially get that wrong it's more a case of looking at it going well actually if I'm looking to hire what particular traits do I need to be looking to hire for and really going into that because I um I I do a lot I'm such a nerd Lucy I I look at things like the ONS statistics around things like you know kind of job data how how jobs are being filled but more importantly you know things like I don't know whether you knew this but but the average job spec or job description that companies have is somewhere between five and seven years old. Oh wow and so now if you think if you know because people just go oh software developer now you know it's I'm looking for a C sharp software developer brilliant that should really cover the cover everything but what's you know you and I both know that the world has massively changed in specifically in these last five years. Yeah absolutely right so you look at you know post you know post um you know post pandemic God is weird it's weird thinking that was only five years ago right yeah I know absolutely still feels like it was yesterday but it's also you know you look at it and go things have drastically changed since then what has what has come in what hasn't come in so look at your job job that you're looking at now and almost do a um so there's have you heard of the Eisenhower matrix?

SPEAKER_00 34:55

No.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

So you you probably will have done because it it's it's a matrix that is based on importance and urgency.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 35:02

Oh okay yes yes yes yes yeah yeah but it was coined by Dwight Eisenhower before it when he was an army general who then obviously became um became uh president of the US and what he was able to do is go well what you know if you think about it from from from a skills perspective like what skills are needed right now yeah what skills are needed in the future what skills would be really nice to have now or what skills can we almost do away with because this one is and if you think about it it's like deal with that now delegate you know think about that delegate that and dot that you know if then if you so if you look at every single job spec that you go oh actually these ain't needed right get rid of them and so so it can be a really easy exercise that lots of people can do around how do they you know how do they look at the skills they need and go these are absolutely necessary these two you know and look at quadrants two three and four and go well what do we need to put in those yeah and I think you know when you there's always like alarm bells like I work with like you know women in data as well and you think about you know applying for jobs as a woman for talking about bias as well I think that's also when you see a really lengthy job description as well that's going on for pages and pages you just think are you joking like well again there's a there's really interesting stats around that is that women will apply for a job and and and hopefully please don't cancel me for saying this um but but women will only apply for a job when they feel like they they meet 80 or 90 percent of what they see. Absolutely and whereas where whereas guys whereas guys will or men will will look at a job description go 50% I could do that. Yeah right there's it's it's a weird I and I and I and I appreciate that's vastly general but that's gener that that's what the date that's what the data has shown absolutely and and so if if you and but the thing is any perm job in in all honesty if you know 80 or 90% of any perm job then you will leave within 18 months to two years. Whereas if you if you know that you could grow within that company you can see how it looks after you how you know what what skills you can now learn by being in that company that's where longevity happens but I think people are missing that because they feel like they need to have absolutely everything and companies make this mistake as well that they feel like every people need to have 90% of everything on the job description as opposed to going well actually as long as they have 80% of what's in that quadrant one that we were talking about maybe have 10 10 that they you know in those quadrants two and three and if they have anything in quadrant four that's great but it's not it's it's a it's a it's a luxury. Yeah absolutely if you can if you can structure your jobs around that and then you can create training pathways you can create your employee value proposition because lots of people worry worried about you create customer value proposition but actually what does their employee value proposition this is the stuff that I have to work with companies around creating competency frameworks and employee value propositions and all these weird and wonderful things as a as a as a byproduct of what I do but it's just trying to you know I think if you I if people have set their own expectations about what the job re what a job what a what a company really needs and sets you know expectations what you can do and what you can't do and be really firm with those things yeah you will go far.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah and I think I think that's also maybe like our last question just to kind of mull over is about when we think about you know always talk about jobs for the future we talk about skills for the future but also I also think about you know companies like you know businesses what might they look like because I'm I'm always interested in that kind of like blade runner type film kind of like you know kind of like montage of what will the future look like and I'm just wondering if you've got any thoughts about what a business might look like.

SPEAKER_03 38:46

Yeah so um I've got a I've got funny enough I've we didn't even talk about this but I've um yeah I've I've actually got a working example of this where there's a okay uh so there's a I'm I'm working with a particular person who is doing a full IT transformation project for a financial services company what they're doing is essentially removing the CTO and CIO replacing that function with a C almost having on top of that a C A Io like a chief AI officer but looking at the IT function so so what it will be is that there's going to be a a net loss of I think actually there's gonna be a net bet net gain of about 50 people but what they're going to do the the problem is what they're going to do is look at each function and go in our IT infrastructure what do we need to do to in integrate ai into that what do we need to do to integrate AI into our software functions what do we need to do to integrate it into our you know site reliability into our um kind of you know problem man IT problem management and change management and so those so people might actually lose their jobs but they'll be hiring more people so if you can so if you could whoever you are whether you're a job search or whatever that looks like if you can look at how does ai integrate into your role that's going to that's going to stand you in good stead. And you know there's a lot of debate around whether I I've forgotten the lady's name who's the CEO of NVIDIA um but what what she was able to say was you know your job might not get taken by AI or it might to some degree but it but it what it what it would is by take it'll be it would be taken by a thing or people that can use AI better than you. So lots of there's lots of whether it's spin I don't know and I'm not going to get into that but you know people are saying there's going to be lots of jobs lost but there's also going to be an increase of by about 10 to 15% of jobs that are going to be created because of that. So it's so that's the I guess what the what the challenge we've now got is is what does an entry level job look like. So where I really fear most for is graduates where I look at it and go well they need to be able to show or universities or or whatever that needs to look like wherever they're getting trained needs to be able to show what the benefit is of having someone young in in the industry is because Gen Z, Gen Alpha Gen Alpha and I know you've got kids yourself have very you know important strengths that we can't deny but also have some weaknesses again you know I I I use the I use the recruitment analogy of again if you look at someone under 18 or or someone under 20 how many phone calls on their actual mobile have they made not many. And the only people that it has been is to parents to grandparents and and and oh you know do you want to speak to your grandparents no right and I and I totally get that but we haven't thought actually you know if you you know if especially in recruitment as you know that the the whole thing around just get on the phone and speak to as many people as possible. But they haven't you know sometimes we also we also might need to educate people on how to because we've been the architect you know people our generations have been the architects of making making us move away from the phone and if you think about it in in in an economic context when we first started using our phones it was about how many minutes we used how many texts we used now it's all about data. If you think about your e contract or your O2 contract whatever it is other other networks are available um you know we've made a significant push away from you know making phone calls. Yeah the duration yeah right whatsapp you know we make lots more on whatsapp than we do velocity and the variability yeah exactly exactly so we've got to think about those those Vs as as of of the data that we're doing and using it and and use that accordingly but unfortunately we get a bit short sighted in thinking that particular program ways of working have worked in the past that they've got to work in the future so you so so it's it's it's having an appreciation of it all. Yeah so I think that's that's a really great great sort of wrap up and I think what I appreciate about about our conversation is about it's gonna be for the future it's gonna be all about like this uh ability to be able to be comfortable being uncomfortable definitely right and being out uh being to have this open mind open mindedness to be able to look look look left look right look above and look you know this whole sort of 360 uh from what yeah so from what lots of people are seeing it's going to get uncomfortable for over the next five and ten five to ten years whilst we make these shifts in how this looks to operate it's a little bit like and again these these things happen every 20 25 years look at the dot com kind of boom and how it's going to get rid of people whatever that looked like look at the early stages of robots and how that was going to get rid of people I mean yes it got rid of people in certain jobs but it actually created lots more jobs in others so if you can look at if you know if if if you're a parent whatever it is looking you know looking to to help your kids in the future go what is going to be happening in the world in 2020 2030 and be able to be able to help them on that journey because that's what's or or yourselves or whatever that looks like because you've got to future proof yourself that's why we're on the course that we're on right because we're thinking about actually how do we use what is what is coming in to be able to help us in in navigate that environment you know that growth mindset will go a long way for a lot of people yeah amazing Bobby well that was really wonderful to spend the time with you and um I really appreciate I appreciate your energy and your kind of like real passion for doing all things so thank you Bobby and I will stop the recording right there.