Modern Hire is one of the most promising technology solution providers in the recruiting industry. Led by experienced and pragmatic executives they continue to defy assumptions through a mix of smart acquisitions and product offerings that push the envelope.

RNN was fortunate enough to catch up with Modern Hire, and learn a bit about their latest release - Automated Interview Creator (AIC).

The goal, as described by Moderne Hire's Chief Science Officer and I/O psychologist, Mike Hudy, is to automate what is typically a task that is often both time-consuming as well as ineffectual (at best - at worst it's a legal headache): interview questions.

Well trained and resourced recruiting and HR teams know how to structure interviews, where to focus, and where to avoid venturing. That's their job. That said, many hiring teams outside of a companies people organization struggle with interviews. And, while interview trainings are a standard goal of any recruitment team, the reality is that those are a band-aid at best. There's a utopian* ideal where every new hire goes through interview training, responds rapidly with feedback on their interview, and where recruiters have the bandwidth to sit down and generate questions for each role and interview team.

*Utopia, by the way, was coined by Sir Thomas Moore in the 16th century to describe a society that contains nearly perfect qualities for its members. Its literal translation from classic Greek is "no such place".

How to Eat an Elephant

We can't fix bad interviewing all at once. Heck, we can't, period. It's going to happen. It just is. That said, as with any important endeavor, it's worth trying to improve where you can. And it's generally worth trying to fix sections. Eat the elephant one bite at a time, as it were.

Modern Hire's gone there - they found a slice, and dug in. In this case, it's the interview question generation slice. As Hudy describes it, they deployed "science-based interview technology, with a goal of providing hiring and recruiting teams with recommendations for optimal interview questions to identify best-fit candidates quickly and confidently". They've tracked the tool with beta clients, and report an accuracy level nearly 50% higher than other available products.

AIC offers a robust library of the most pertinent interview questions across multiple industries most job contexts. The goal is faster, more precise, less-biased interviews. Its intelligent search continuously improves results over time, further enhancing the accuracy and relevancy of the structured interviews it powers.

Bias

When we spoke with Hudy, one of our main concerns was bias. While AI and automation have huge promise for recruiting process efficiencies, the fact remains that an AI is only as free from bias as the humans who created it. There are numerous examples at this point where well-meaning technology providers have unwittingly created AI that exhibits disturbingly biases. So we pressed him on this. According to Hudy, they took this possibility to heart from the beginning of the development process. Their QA involved looking for bias. And, their ongoing monitoring has "multiple triggers established to raise red flags if the questions seem to be encouraging a homogenous culture. It's a work in progress, of course, as it has to be, but it's part of how we're staying ahead of any issues."
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Potential

As practitioners we know the pain of this part of the process - and we also know how often it's skipped. It's clearly a spot that needs attention - not sexy, but critical, and time consuming. We're interested where Modern Hire takes this, and the data they'll produce. Our gut is that it's a smart, and neat, product offering that will save recruiting teams time and - potentially - improve hiring quality.

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