Category / Future of Work

by Nicolle

Interview with a chatbot part 2

These past weeks I’ve been deep into the #HRTech world, tweeting frequently into the void, trying to learn more about increasingly opaque data used in smart HR platforms. Throughout the process I’m documenting the variety of hiring technology on the market, from smart platforms to machine learning for automated resume screening to virtual assistants. Along the way I’ve stumbled on loads of chatbots trying to claim a place for themselves in the hiring process. I’ve got a bit of a crush on chatbot technology so I’ve been trying them out. Two weeks ago I pined for Mya but settled on an interview using TalkPush. Today I found Paradox.ai and gave it a go.

Once again, the intro starts easily enough:

Then I was immediately asked contact details. Mind you, I’m just browsing here, not actually ready to apply. I don’t know if it’s me or what but I’m a bit irritated each time I’m asked for contact details right away (side note: I signed away my LinkedIn data for Wade&Wendy access only to be told post-data exchange that I’m on a waitlist, so maybe I’m just tired of having to give up data to engage). But this is all pretend anyway, so I gave them my phone number and then we moved on to my interests.

I thought here that we might talk about what positions are available but the onus was put on me to define what I want. I actually wasn’t sure what to answer. I like that it’s framed that way but wonder how other job seekers perform when asked this question. Admittedly it caught me off guard and I wasn’t sure what to write. I had to think about it which then sent me down a mini-spiral wondering if they evaluated me on how long it took for me to answer.

Moving along:

This is where it got interesting. They’ll find my profile (and I wonder if they’ll find my other social profiles) for me, so I don’t have to submit anything.

I think there was a hiccup when I shared my non-existent most recent role as the interview ended abruptly. I can’t tell if it’s because a. it’s a bot. b. I’m not a fit. or c. this wasn’t an interview.

Then onto the questions from me. The Q&A started a bit rocky but got better:

So throughout this whole process I wondered: how do you know the difference between a bot that helps you explore job opportunities and one that evaluates you? I misunderstood this bot from the beginning.

I went into it thinking the bot was helping me explore options at the company. But it quickly moves into interview territory by asking my experience level. Then it forces me to automatically apply to the position(s?) we discussed as they pull my LinkedIn profile. What if I hadn’t updated my LinkedIn?

Also, what if I’ve already provided my real name and contact, but wasn’t prepared to discuss my experience, what do I do? If I abandon the convo, and return, how does that affect my evaluation? Am I more desirable because I’m returning? Or am I penalized because I couldn’t answer the prior questions?

I’m so curious what happens on the backend when a recruiter receives the data.

While this experience is certainly efficient it’s hard to get a feel for company culture during these interactions. I was generally curious about the companies that they partner with but didn’t get traction there. Asking about the workplace and getting a canned response about “best talent” and “superstars” doesn’t offer much. If Olivia instead shared a video from the team, or a blog post about a day in the life of a marketer at Paradox, or even a personalized message from the founder that wasn’t full of “superstar” startup speak, it’d instantly provide more value. It’d at least add a personal touch.

Interacting with bots has me wondering how we define candidate engagement within the context of chatbots. Olivia engaged with me but she wasn’t engaging (though she was definitely better than previous bots I’ve engaged with). When the novelty of interacting with recruiting bots wears off (it’s still so very new), I wonder how candidates will view the experience.  If there’s a war for talent, how do you expect someone to chose your company if you can’t show off goods? Do bots play a role in wooing candidates? Or are they just there to expedite the hiring process for HR?

And if candidates are expected to show their soft skills, how do employers expect to identify them when the majority of HR tech aims to take humans out of the selection process?

by Nicolle

Ok, McKinsey’s Future of Work podcast is actually pretty good

I’ll admit that listening to consultants talk doesn’t strike me as good podcast content. My podcast list is overflowing with no shortage of new recommendations. Anything I add has to compete with mighty fine podcasts like 2 Dope Queens, On the Media, Note to Self, The Read, Reply All, and Teaching and Learning in HigherEd. So I was torn when I learned that McKinsey puts out a Future of Work podcast. Grant it, this is my favorite professional subject. But there’s so much fluff in future of work circles and not enough meat. Fun fact: being a futurist doesn’t mean you have to be right. You just need research chops, a regular content production schedule, a brand with the phrase “future of work”, and an audience who will listen. It’s not rocket science.

So I was skeptical. But the McKinsey Global Institute puts in the hard work that you’d expect for a top global consulting firm. Their reports on the future of work are insightful and meaty. Their podcast is no different. I was pleasantly surprised. And by pleasantly surprised I mean I was taking loads of notes and couldn’t stop listening. It’s not terribly entertaining and feels a bit like watching CSPAN. But the podcast brings their valuable research on the future of work to life. It also broadens their research (hopefully) to audiences beyond MBA students and upper management. Anyone who is curious about how their career is going to shift should give it a shot. It pairs well with public transit rides.

I listened to their most recent episode, How Will Automation Affect Jobs, Skills, and Wages?, and could have quoted the whole damn podcast. I held back. Here are some of my favorite meaty bits.

On lifelong learning from Susan Lund, a partner McKinsey Global Institute:

It’s something that has been a bit of a mantra in the educational field. Everyone is going to have to be a student for life and embark on lifelong learning. The fact is right now it’s still mainly a slogan. Even within jobs and companies there’s not lifelong training. In fact what we see in corporate training data at least in the United States, is that companies are spending less. As we know right now people expect that they get their education in the early 20s or late 20s and then they’re done. They’re going to go off and work for 40, 50 years. And that model of getting education up front and working for many decades, without ever going through formal or informal training again is clearly not going to be the reality for the next generation.

Honestly I could quote so much from this podcast. Instead of the common “robots are going to take our jobs” narrative, they dive deeper into the subject, discussing how occupations will shift and what that means for workers. I’ll just quote this entire response on acquiring new skills, again from Susan Lund:

“We categorized 800 occupations into 58 categories. This is our shorthand way of showing how work might shift between them. For instance there’s a whole classification around customer interaction jobs. And that includes cashiers, call service representatives, etc. By grouping occupations into these categories we can start talking about which ones are growing and which ones are declining. So that number of somewhere between 75 million and 375 million people [around the world] may need to switch occupational category, means that they’re in a set of occupations that are actually shrinking in number. Some of those people are going to have shift to one of the growing occupational categories.

This is a big shift. It’s different from saying I’m one type of specialty nurse and now I need to be a different type. That would be a shift within an occupational category. Here, the changes we are talking about are very significant. It’s about somebody who may have been working in trucking or manufacturing learning to do something entirely different. Possibly a job in construction or healthcare or other types of things. This will require more than simply applying for that job. It will require some level of formal training to learn the new skills to become qualified to get that new job. This will be the defining challenge of our generation, is creating the programs and tools and opportunities for someone who is mid-career with a mortgage, with children who can’t afford to go back to school for two years to get an associates degree or four years to get a bachelors, but helping that person get the bare minimum of skills they need to get their foot in the door in an entirely different occupation and start off on a career ladder in an entirely new direction.”

You have to teach people how to become lifelong learners. You have to change the old mindset. You have to teach them how to make occupational shifts. You have to prepare them with practical advice and skills.

This is why I founded FutureMe School. We have to reinvent old career narratives and train people to adapt to multiple occupational changes over a lifetime. Which is exactly what we’re doing at FutureMe School.

Stay tuned.

by Nicolle

Using Google Chrome makes you a better employee?!

Just need to park a few nuggets somewhere until I can write a full post about this topic. I’m currently researching the use of new talent signals, data scraping, and machine learning in the hiring process. These excerpts come from the Journal of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, in an article titled, New Talent Signals: Shiny New Objects or a Brave New World?

On the use of big data in the workplace: 

So long as organizations have robust criteria, their ability to identify novel signals will increase, even if those signals are unusual or counterintuitive. As an example of an unlikely talent signal, Evolv, an HR data analytics company, found that applicants who use Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome as their web browsers are likely to stay in their jobs longer and perform better than those who use Internet Explorer or Safari (Pinsker, 2015). Knowing which browser candidates used to submit their online applications may prove to be a weak but useful talent signal. Evolv hypothesizes that the correlations among browser usage, performance, and employment longevity reflect the initiative required to download a nonnative browser (Pinsker, 2015).

On using social media to evaluate candidates: 

“People’s online reputations are no more “real” than their analogue reputations; the same individual differences are manifested in virtual and physical environments, albeit in seemingly different ways. It is therefore naïve to expect online profiles to be more genuine than resumés, although they may offer a much wider set of behavioral samples. Indeed, recent studies suggest that when machine-learning algorithms are used to mine social media data, they tend to outperform human inferences of personality in accuracy because they can process a much bigger range of behavioral signals. That said, social media is as deceptive as any other form of communication; employers and recruiters are right to regard it as a rich source of information about candidates’ talent—if they can get past the noise and make accurate inferences.”

On the use of video interviews for voice profiling:

“Moreover, through the addition of innovations, such as text analytics (see below) and algorithmic reading of voice-generated emotions, a wider universe of talent signals can be sampled. In the case of voice mining, candidates’ speech patterns are compared with an “attractive” exemplar, derived from the voice patterns of high performing employees. Undesirable candidate voices are eliminated from the context, and those who fit move to the next round. More recent developments use similar video technology to administer scenario-based questions, image-based tests, and work-sample tests. Work samples are increasingly common, automated, and sophisticated. For example, Hirevue.com, a leading provider of digital interview technologies, employs coding challenges to screen software engineers for their software writing ability. Likewise, Uber uses similar tools to test and evaluate potential drivers exclusively via their smartphones (see www.uber.com).”

On new technologies barreling ahead without theoretical backing

“The datification of talent is upon us, and the prospect of new technologies is exciting. The digital revolution is just beginning to appear in practice, and research lags our understanding of these technologies. We therefore suggest four caveats regarding this revolution. First, the new tools have not yet demonstrated validity comparable with old school methods, they tend to disregard theory, and they pay little attention to the constructs being assessed. This issue is important but possibly irrelevant, because big data enthusiasts, assessment purveyors, and HR practitioners are piling into this space in any event.”

I’ve said it before but the candidate process is about to get far more opaque.

by Nicolle

Where has the conversation gone?

The Boston Globe reports on how technology creates employee isolation which in turn causes work place interaction to suffer. From remote work to employees plugging into earbuds to escape open office noise (and annoying coworkers), employees are less engaged with each other at work. Fewer workplace interactions between employers result in less creativity, less productivity, and less motivation.

The solution? Design interactive spaces and create opportunities for employees to engage. One solution offered up by Humanyze, was to create a mobile coffee cart to stimulate impromptu conversations between different teams. The coffee station was strategically places between departments who worked on projects together to improve spontaneous conversation.

“If you create an environment where random people bump into each other, then every so often pretty amazing things will happen, and even more frequently, good things will happen,” said Ben Waber, chief executive of Humanyze, which analyzes workplace interactions and has seen its business quadruple in the past year. “It’s building those levels of trust so the right stuff can happen more frequently.”

This article is so timely. It’s no wonder organizations are starting to think strategically about conversation and interaction design. The decline in workplace conversation has been happening for years now. Chances are, you’ve had one of these things happen already today:

You texted or did emails during a meeting

You put in headphones to avoid a conversation with someone

You put in headphones to avoid the noise in an open office space

You emailed someone who sits near you instead of talking to them

You continued an email chain that could have been solved by picking up the phone and discussing it

You didn’t pick up the phone when someone called

You avoid a difficult conversation, instead opting to email it

You pulled out your phone during a lunch with coworkers

All of the above are conversation avoidance behaviors.

Here’s the truth: I did all of those things in my last workplace. And I watched my coworkers do similar things. None of these actions are wrong. In fact, they’re all social norms in the workplace. In my last workplace I saw opportunities for conversations – spontaneous or productive – decline on the regular. Management was constantly on their phones during meetings (despite insisting on a “no laptops during meetings” policy), including during interviews with potential employees. One of the deans was notorious for being on his phone during meetings unless it was his turn to talk at people (yes, at, not with), when he’d use his brute manners to command absolute attention for his turn. The leader of our department consistently emailed difficult news rather than having conversations in person. Everyone was so busy. Few people had time to give you their full attention for a conversation. Many people outright avoided it. I took part in conversation avoidance too. Because here’s the thing: this was normal.

I’m fascinated by the evolving social norms around communication in the workplace. I’m nearly done reading Sherry Turkle’s, Reclaiming Conversation, which is a must-read book for anyone who’s noticed how our communication habits are changing. Her book dives into the decline in conversation between people in the workplace and the impact that it has on organizations. But she goes beyond just the effect on the workplace. She examines family relationships, dating, and friendships too. She puts a spotlight on the digital communication tools we use and how it changes our relationships, often not for the better. The themes that Turkle covers in her book – less conversation between people, obsession with our phones, less connection at work between colleagues – are all familiar themes. What makes this book so perspective-shifting is the in-depth examination of the impact digital communication is having in our everyday lives. She combines ethnographic observations and hundreds of interviews with students, professionals, and families, to share perspectives that should challenge our apathy towards the negative effects of digital technology.

The book has certainly challenged my apathy. It’s also helped me better understand the experiences I have with job seekers. The job search is a persuasive act, one that requires communication and conversational skills. The interview and negotiation process are conversations. Informational interviews are conversations with (ideally) interesting people. Yet so many job seekers struggle when I tell them they can’t negotiate over email. In coaching sessions I’ve seen blank faces when I have explained how to conduct informational interviews. So many job seekers lack confidence in themselves to know what to say or how to sound interesting. They seem uncomfortable with the idea of starting conversations with strangers. Students panic at phone interviews. Now, none of these things have ever been pleasant. Job seekers have never enjoyed them. But in my conversations with job seekers so much coaching revolves around how to have conversations with people. My networking workshops have evolved now to teach people how to have a conversation: how to enter them, what to say, how to be engaging, and how to exit. It seems so basic and yet every time I do it I get loads of positive feedback. The emphasis isn’t at all on career – it’s on conversation.

The future of work belongs to those with communication skills: the soft skills that allow you to work across teams, engage with people from different backgrounds, and adapt to new situations. These skills are hard to develop if your every day communication takes place on text and email. These skills require a comfort with conversation and the ability to process unstructured, verbal communication. In her book, Turkle shares anecdotes from young professionals who struggle to have conversations because they’re unscripted. They prefer to have time to think about the answer and write a correct response. Open-ended conversations are too risky.

My copy of her book is filled with dog-eared pages. I’m talking about it so much to friends that they’re eyes start glazing over, probably in the self-awareness that they’d like to pull out their phone and check their notifications. Or maybe it’s from boredom with the subject. Or maybe it’s because we’re all little uncomfortable when someone points out the truth about phone overuse and the decline of quality conversations. But none of us talk candidly about the impacts of it. I was at a dinner recently with friends who I hadn’t been together with in ages. The conversation was lacking. I couldn’t figure out if it was a product of not being in each others lives on the regular or the decline of conversational skills due to phones. And then two friends pulled out their phones to retreat, possibly because they were bored (indeed the conversation was boring). I wish I could assign Turkle’s book to all my friends so they were at least aware of how our conversations are interrupted, changed, and impacted by phones. Now when I’m socializing with friends this book is all I can think about.

If you’re new to Turkle’s work or interested in how the role of digital technology affects the workplace and family watch her talk below.

by Nicolle

So about that graduate program you’re thinking about doing

Nearly 30% of professionals believe their skills will be redundant in the next 1-2 years, if they aren’t already, with another 38% stating they believe their skills will be outdated within the next 4-5 years. – LinkedIn Economic Graph

Has anyone told the students who are putting down 10K for graduate certificates or taking on $90k in debt to pursue uncertain career paths that are at risk for AI disruption? Who’s working to make sure that these programs – especially those outside of elite schools – prepare students for emerging jobs?

Who is responsible for that discussion? Admissions? Career services? Deans?

by Nicolle

AI for the doctor’s office

SmartExam acts as a virtual physician’s assistant – an automated medical resident, if you will – that enables primary care providers to deliver efficient remote care while cutting costs and improving outcomes… The intelligent software dynamically interviews patients, using answers to garner more information and support providers in the care delivery process… SmartExam lets providers achieve as much, or more, in a two-minute virtual patient visit as the 20 minutes of provider time needed for an office visit, the company said… “It allows clinicians to operate at the tops of their licenses,” said Constantini. “They can focus on what they do best — diagnosis and treatment.” – Bright.MD raises another $8M for “virtual physician’s assistant” SmartExam

I wonder if current medical students are taught how to integrate AI software into their training.

by Nicolle

Light listening: Algorithmic surveillance

We’re so used to hearing about algorithms now that most people don’t spend much time thinking much about them. They operate in the background invisibly shaping our decisions as we go about our day. Most of us are quite clueless about how we’re manipulated by this technology.

This 22 minutes talk from techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci is the antidote to that ignorance. As the Dr Tufecki explains, these algorithms do more than make ads follow us around. They power Facebook’s dark ads that are used to manipulate voters and form the foundation for surveillance authoritarianism. Worse yet, it’s hard to know exactly how these algorithms operate and how we’re being affected.

Here’s a snippet from her talk:

Now, we started from someplace seemingly innocuous — online adds following us around — and we’ve landed someplace else. As a public and as citizens, we no longer know if we’re seeing the same information or what anybody else is seeing, and without a common basis of information, little by little, public debate is becoming impossible, and we’re just at the beginning stages of this. These algorithms can quite easily infer things like your people’s ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and genders, just from Facebook likes. These algorithms can identify protesters even if their faces are partially concealed. These algorithms may be able to detect people’s sexual orientation just from their dating profile pictures.

Now, these are probabilistic guesses, so they’re not going to be 100 percent right, but I don’t see the powerful resisting the temptation to use these technologies just because there are some false positives, which will of course create a whole other layer of problems. Imagine what a state can do with the immense amount of data it has on its citizens. China is already using face detection technology to identify and arrest people. And here’s the tragedy: we’re building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads. And this won’t be Orwell’s authoritarianism. This isn’t “1984.” Now, if authoritarianism is using overt fear to terrorize us, we’ll all be scared, but we’ll know it, we’ll hate it and we’ll resist it. But if the people in power are using these algorithms to quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us, to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels, to deploy persuasion architectures at scale and to manipulate individuals one by one using their personal, individual weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and if they’re doing it at scale through our private screens so that we don’t even know what our fellow citizens and neighbors are seeing, that authoritarianism will envelop us like a spider’s web and we may not even know we’re in it.

This 22 minutes will bring you up to speed on how algorithms are shaping our lives and what it means for the future.

 

 

 

While the talk above focuses a lot on Facebook, Dr Tufekci points out Amazon too is leading the way in algorithmic surveillance, especially with its release of Echo Look.

 

If this subject interests you check out the book, Weapons of Math Destruction. It’s a deeper dive into how algorithms shape our lives. And it’s a quick read.

by Nicolle

The other side of the future of work: Amazon’s CamperForce

Field of Vision – CamperForce

File this one under I had no clue. There’s a subculture of our workforce that lives in RVs, getting hired seasonally by Amazon to work in their fulfillment centers. Amazon recruits seasonal workers at RV shows. For $12/hr, seasonal employees package Amazon goods to be shipped to the ever-growing masses.

This shouldn’t be considered future of work as it’s been happening for years. . If the jobpocolypse that so many experts predict comes to fruition we’ll see even more temporary hiring to fill in the low-level jobs that still need a human touch. It’s cheap. And there are plenty of people who need the work. As Barb notes this in the video, “We’re there to make the money. We’re not learning anything, we’re not there to start a career. They can count on us. Because they know we need the money.”

And on that note, again from Barb: “The American dream is changing.”

Indeed it is. And it’s wildly depressing after seeing this video.

The hidden fulfillment center footage was filmed by Jessica Bruder, who is the author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Seems like a must-read anyone studying the future of work.

by Nicolle

Are you prepared to diversify your career?

“More and more independent thinkers are realizing that when being an employee is the equivalent to putting all your money into one stock – a better strategy is to diversify your portfolio. So you’re seeing a lot more people looking to diversify their career.” What jobs will be around in 20 years?

I like the concept of diversifying careers. It’s the first time I’ve read it like this. I usually refer to this idea as a tactic – collect skills. But the idea of diversifying your career makes it more strategic. To succeed in the future, people need to think beyond one industry, one set of skills, a single professional domain of expertise.

I’ve been stuck on the idea that the word career is terribly outdated. The definition of career is,

an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.

Yet we’re seeing more people take on different occupations throughout their life. And with automation and the drastic changes coming for the workforce, there’s less guarantee for long-term opportunities and progress.

We need a new way of talking about careers that gets people thinking about upskilling, continuous learning, adaptation, growth-mindset, creative solutions, etc. The term career is rooted in the idea of stability and the idea that you’ll be rewarded just by showing up and doing your job. And that’s pretty much the opposite of the future of work:

Professor Richard Susskind, author of The Future of the Professions and Tomorrow’s Lawyers, echoes this distinction. “What you’re going to see for a lot of jobs is a churn of different tasks,” he explains. “So a lawyer today doesn’t develop systems that offer advice, but the lawyer of 2025 will. They’ll still be called lawyers but they’ll be doing different things.”

I’m building a school that teaches these concepts but I cringe when I pitch the idea because I have to use the term career, a term rooted in old-school thinking. So to get people thinking about new career expectations, I’m trying out new terms: career portfolios, portable careers, fluid careers, mobile careers. Then again, sometimes I just wrap it in clickbait: robot-proof careers.

by Nicolle

Would you take a job that pays you in Ethereum?

AmaZix is the leading provider of community management services for crypto projects. We specialise in helping projects running on the Ethereum blockchain, especially those building up to their ICOs… We pay our staff in Ethereum which can be easily sold for USD or the currency of your choice on a variety of exchanges and we can support you in this.

I originally clicked on this post because the job title was so unique. AmaZix is looking for a Professional Telegram Moderator, a title that might be a bit too clever for its own good (but hey it got me to click!). But the requirements are just as interesting as the title:

  • A fluent level of English (if you are also fluent in Russian or Chinese it will be a plus)
  • Be willing to dedicate at least 20 hours per week to the task (working hours are negotiable, full-time is ideal)
  • Have good social skills, being ready to deal sometimes with complicated users posing nasty questions or FUDing 
  • Be ready to invoice AmaZix for your services
  • Be comfortable being paid in Ethereum
  • Be organized and ready to bring your skills into a decentralized organization with members from many different countries

Paying in Ethereum is a sure fire way to ensure the people you attract are invested in the future of digital currencies and have the knowledge to do the job well.

This is a remote job, working on digital currencies and being paid in digital currencies, across cultures. The future of work continues to fascinate me.