Josh Millet, CEO and co-founder of Criteria Corp chats about AI in HR and how it’s leading to a complete technological transformation in this HRTech interview:
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Hi Josh, take us through your journey in tech so far and your role and time at Criteria Corp?
I took a circuitous and non-linear route to tech entrepreneurship. I spent much of my twenties doing a PH.D. in medieval French history, with a plan to teach history. At the end of grad school, I got into working with some startups and co-founded an educational technology company. When we were acquired, I became involved with hiring at the acquirer, and pretty quickly formed a view that there had to be a better way to hire more effecitvely.My experiences there led me to start Criteria as a way to help companies improve their hiring through a science-based, data-driven approach.
What about today’s state of AI within HRTech and hiring processes most interests you?
What excites me most about the AI wave is its potential to accelerate a shift that’s already well underway. It’s helping the market move from an older hiring process reliant on weak signals like educational pedigree and years of experience to a more objective, data-driven and science-based process based on people’s demonstrated potential to perform well in a role. AI dramatically expands the universe of ways in which we can gather objective, science-backed talent signals.
On the other hand, it also has the potential to dramatically scale and amplify existing bad habits companies have when hiring people. Done responsibly, ethically and rooted in science, AI in hiring can be a great advance. Done poorly, it can be worse than what we have, which is a little scary. One thing that gives me great pause is that much of the AI in hiring so far relies heavily on resumes as inputs, and an overreliance on resumes is part of the reason traditional hiring doesn’t work very well.
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On the more optimistic side, though, well constructed AI systems, grounded in research-backed and science-based practices, have the potential to drive huge improvements in terms of accuracy and fairness in hiring, and to dramatically improve human decision-making.
What should modern HR teams keep foremost in mind as they deploy enhanced AI powered HRTech to enable their hiring and retention processes?
The ethical and responsible implementation of AI-powered tools is paramount in any business function, but perhaps none more so than HR. HR teams stand to reap significant benefits from AI-powered tools – improving time-to-hire, ensuring more consistent and unbiased evaluation of candidates in initial interviews, monitoring and reporting on employee data and performance, and more. However, if HR teams don’t ground their AI strategy in ethical and responsible implementation, the impact could be the exact opposite – introducing more biases into interviews, unknowingly discriminating against prospective and current employees and hurting overall recruitment and retention.
HR teams have to prioritize people over rapid technological transformation. Require AI-powered technology vendors to provide proof of accuracy, documented bias audits, and clear job-related validity before adopting a new technology or platform into your technology stack. If you’re not involved in the initial conversations with these vendors, it’s critical to speak up to those who are, ask them to request this information and be ready to articulate why it’s important to the success of the business.
As always, prior to any system rollout, prepare your HR and people leaders accordingly. They should know how to use the technology, interpret the outputs appropriately and address any anomalies. This ensures an HR team reaps the benefits of AI long term while still putting people first.
On the other hand, as AI becomes more mainstream to hiring workflows, what tips do you have for today’s job seekers and candidates?
Demand radical transparency from prospective employers regarding their use of AI in the recruiting process as well as talent management and employee performance evaluations. They should be able to speak to how and why their AI systems are being used and how team members are assessed fairly. If they aren’t able to articulate this to you or follow up with the information, it may be a red flag.
If you’re using AI-powered tech to help inform high stakes decisions like who to hire, it’s also very fair to ask HR vendors to provide a basic, comprehensible description of how the tech works. If they can’t do that in plain English or if they obfuscate based on the need to keep their proprietary tech in a black box, you should be worried.
Employers today are increasingly looking for talent with AI skills, even outside of traditional tech roles. Initiating a conversation about the organization’s use of AI also creates an opportunity for a candidate to demonstrate their AI skills and familiarity with how it’s influencing today’s workplace.
How do you feel AI and HRTech will evolve to influence the entire hiring and employee management / employee retention ecoscape in the near future?
We’ll see AI move very quickly from synthesizing information and making passive recommendations to owning actions like scheduling interviews, personalizing candidate outreach, summarizing pipelines and flagging issues before a human ever gets involved. It’s important as we see this shift that HR leaders are still diligent in monitoring these technologies and ensuring candidates and team members are still having a fair experience.
On the candidate side, AI skills will become table stakes rather than a nice differentiator. Become familiar with the ins-and-outs of AI in your industry, regardless of whether you’re currently seeking a new opportunity.
Five takeaways you’d leave everyone in HRtech with before we wrap up?
There are a lot of anxieties and unknowns about the application of AI-powered technologies in the workplace today, but there are also a lot of benefits specific to the HR function. Face the uncertainties head-on by doing research, asking questions and having open conversations with your organization’s leaders.
Don’t let the “fear of missing out” force you to make a quick decision about AI implementation that lacks strategic thought or careful evaluation.
AI will continue to rapidly evolve, so it’s critical to maintain human oversight in perpetuity. Monitor any AI-powered technology closely, check in regularly with your people leaders for feedback and stay in touch with your vendors’ customer support teams to understand platform changes or updates.
AI can give your HR team a significant competitive edge, but a winning strategy is ultimately one with a human-first approach. Proactively communicate with candidates and employees about the use of AI in HR processes, and avoid leaving decision-making to the technology alone. Humans should, in our view, always be the ones with ultimate decision-making authority when it comes to high stakes talent decisions.
The best AI will combine the benefits of decades of research in organizational psychology with AI technologies to ensure best practices are followed. Making sure AI is helping to enable science-backed practices, rather than scaling existing practices that are flawed or deeply biased, should yield great results for organizations.
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Josh is a nationally recognized career and hiring expert with over 20 years of experience. He founded Criteria, an SaaS-based pre-employment and employee testing service that reduces turnover and improves hiring outcomes for employers and job candidates, and currently serves as its CEO. He has co-authored testing-related articles published in the Journal of Educational Computing and the American Psychological Society Observer. Josh holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and a Mellon Fellow.
Criteria Corp is a talent assessment SaaS provider and leader in skills-based hiring and talent management solutions.