Back in mid-May, just after Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I posted a story wherein I profiled professional services company HireVue and interviewed its IO psychology program manager in Dr. Colin Willis about getting more neurodivergent people in the workforce. My piece ran shortly after the conclusion of Autism Acceptance Month in April.
Earlier this month, I sat down with HireVue executives Anthony Reynolds and Patrick Morrissey over videoconference to discuss the company’s more recent work in light of October being National Disability Employment Awareness Month. At a high level, the duo reiterated many of the sentiments Dr, Willis shared with me in the spring; of particular note is the idea that disabled people, of all ilks, have mostly untapped yet desirable skillsets that would prove invaluable to many businesses if given the opportunity. My conversation with both Reynolds, who’s HireVue’s chief executive, and Morrissey, the chief customer officer, coincided with the company’s announcement of its all-new “human potential intelligence” initiative. In addition, HireVue introduced its new Find My Fit app, which it said in its press release is meant to “bridges the gap between candidates and opportunities, empowering job seekers to discover roles that align with their skills, interests, and untapped human potential,” while adding “the heart of the [Find My Fit application] lies in precision job matching, ensuring that candidates are not merely directed to open positions, but to roles that are genuinely aligned with their unique skills and potential.” This approach in design, HireVue stated, “not only broadens candidates’ horizons but also elevates their overall job-seeking experience.”
“What we’ve witnessed over the last 6-to-12 months is a change in the macro environment, where we’ve seen a couple of things happening. Number one is this problem of companies not having enough candidates to fill jobs; in the US, there’s roughly two openings for every person that’s looking for a job. This problem continues to persist, and we continue to see it from around the globe, whether you’re in Europe or in Asia,” Reynolds said of the job market. “Second, we have seen continual feedback from the surveys we’ve done that the candidate is being mistreated. They’re being mistreated because the fundamental problem is organizations continue to use resumes, which we believe are kind of a ‘rearview mirror’ way of looking at a candidate, as well as inaccurate job descriptions to fill their positions. The one who suffers is the candidate. Fundamentally, the essence of hiring is broken because of this. We’re on a mission to fix that and connecting talent opportunities.”
It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to glean the grander implications here. Any job-seeker could get shortchanged by a hiring manager during the interview process, but the reality is a disabled person—like, say, someone who identifies as neurodivergent—are far more likely to be disproportionately affected by bias stemming from so many of the conventional hiring practices which Reynolds’ team feels are antiquated.
Reynolds explained the crux of the problem with the aforementioned “rearview mirror” modalities like resumes is, especially for someone with disabilities, it doesn’t give employers the fullest sense of a candidate’s capabilities. Worse still, a resume doesn’t give a candidate ample room to shine since their skills may not necessarily translate to a bulleted list on a piece of paper or PDF document. By the same token, it can be difficult for a neurodivergent person, for example, to scour a job board and make sense of the hundreds, if not thousands, of available openings because reading umpteenth numbers of webpages is inaccessible.
“We’re trying to rethink the art of the possible: both for the company across all different roles, but also for candidates regardless of where they fall in terms of age, experience, and where they live,” Reynolds said.
Morrissey told me HireVue’s “human potential intelligence” category isn’t designed to target a particular group of people or industry. Rather, he said it’s fairly diversified in that it’s for new grads fresh out of college, people looking for summer internships, hourly workers, and more. “There is a particular cohort of candidates that we focus on,” Morrissey said. “One of the things we like to pride ourselves on is we provide a science and an assessment to help any entity across any myriad of jobs.”
As to the disability community, Morrissey said a large part of the problem with the lack of employment for them is the (arguably ableist and ignorant) notion that a person’s disability “somehow prohibits you from doing something as opposed to really unlocking what your potential is and what you’re great at.” He didn’t mince words, telling me the whole idea of hiring someone based on a so-called eye test is “crap,” while adding the inconsideration of pondering the potential in a person “really [is] the definition of bias.” What HireVue is trying to accomplish, then, is “resetting the frame of the conversation” by taking a holistic view in which they assess candidates on their skillsets and what they could bring to an organization. “I think that’s just a fundamental awareness [and] a fundamentally different way to start the conversation,” Morrissey said. “It’s not about ability or disability; it’s about how we treat each human uniquely and use science and data and AI to unlock what they might be capable of. Then make it easy for them to figure out where they want to spend their time and where they want to bring their talents in a way that benefits them and benefits the organization.”
Reynolds said HireVue’s customer advisory board is “very excited” by the approach the company is taking to make hiring practices more empathetic and equitable. One of the biggest pieces of feedback heard most often, he said, was human resource teams are constantly trying to create better solutions for candidates like a disabled person. The aforementioned Find My Fit app was conceived snd developed as a way to tackle that issue. Reynolds called the software a “core anchor” of the company’s initiatives, saying it essentially acts as a questionnaire that asks a person about their personality, interests, and preferred work styles. After sussing out the information provided, the app will proceed to recommend a few open roles to the person; this methodology, Reynolds said, alleviates the friction of meandering through countless webpages and job listings by making the hunting process much more accessible and streamlined. Another benefit, Reynolds noted, is the assessment also helps people discover new things about themselves.
“We’ve taken the idea of experience and started with the candidate [and] what they are interested in, and then facilitate the right kind of conversation, whether they go into the interview or not,” Reynolds said. “Hopefully we extend and accelerate that process and make it much more guided.”
Morrissey echoed his colleague’s sentiments, telling me customers are saying they needed the tools HireVue is building yesterday. This speaks to the “urgency” inherent in trying to find one’s future in the job market. Everyone is trying to keep up with the old guard of hiring practices with CVs and the like, so there’s a strong sense of needing to go from 0 to 60 to get ahead in the world. HireVue’s approach intentionally asks people to slow down and smell the roses as it were. They use a science-based method to help one succeed in the here and now based on where a person presently stands in life. “That’s the reality—it doesn’t matter what you’re hiring,” Morrissey said. “If you’re hiring retail attendants or bankers or security professionals, you need some way to really understand who these people are [and] what they’re capable of. We can meet any organization wherever they are in the [employment] journey.”
When asked about the future, both Reynolds and Morrissey expressed optimism. Both said HireVue has a real opportunity to be the one who helps people unlock their potential and find their place in the workforce. They’re both ardent supporters of the approach the company has developed, because they both believe HireVue’s methodologies help candidates and businesses alike so as to be successful as possible.
“Aspirationally, we think there’s a revolution going on broadly that talent, acquisition, and talent management are merging together, but also we’re getting out of the ‘where you came from’ [mindset] and into unlocking potential,” Morrissey said. “That’s the whole idea around human potential intelligence: we can treat each person and each human uniquely [and] we can really use and unlock [potentials] based on assessments and science and data. We can unlock what’s possible in terms of their potential what they might do and move them there more quickly. The intelligence means we continue to get smarter and smarter every single day, and we do that in a way that benefits the candidate, which is critical, and by definition is going to benefit the organization.”
Reynolds concurred.
“Yes, we change the lives by getting them that job. That’s the starting point,” he said of HireVue’s ethos around revolutionizing hiring processes. “We’re also creating a blueprint to help them develop their careers, so that once they’re in a company or an organizing station, they can also aspire to the jobs that are going to take them forward [into] that next job. We’re helping them move within a company based on their potential, not based on the backward-looking resume that the industry has been so accustomed to evaluating. That’s what’s new and different. It starts with helping them find that job, but then creating a blueprint for the future and how they navigate throughout their career.”
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