HR Happy Hour 501 – Expanding and Promoting Neurodiversity in the Workplace

HR Happy Hour Episode 501 – Expanding and Promoting Neurodiversity in the Workplace

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Amanda Hahn, VP of Product Marketing

Sponsored by: HireVue

This week, we spoke with Amanda Hahn about neurodiversity in the workplace.

– HireVue’s mission to democratize hiring and creating partnerships to create a fairer, more inclusive and diverse global workforce

– How Integrate Autism Employment Advisors helps to identify, recruit, and retain qualified professionals on the autism spectrum

– HireVue Builder, a Human Resource Executive Top HR Product 2021 award winner, a first-of-its-kind solution in interview automation

Thank you Amanda, for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:25
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show with Steve and Trish. Today’s special episode is sponsored by our friends at HireVue. We’re going to talk a little bit about neurodiversity in the workplace and the role of technology to help organizations be more inclusive and create more opportunity for people as well. But before we get to that, Trish, I have a question for you.

Trish 0:47
Right, I am ready.

Steve 0:48
Just as we record this, we’re coming off the HR Tech conference out in Las Vegas. Where you meet a lot of interesting people and have good conversations with many people. So here’s my question, Trish, who is the most interesting person you’ve ever met and talked with?

Trish 1:05
Oh, my goodness. Okay, most interesting? That’s a tough one.

Trish 1:09
Okay.

Steve 1:11
Anybody can do it, come on.

Trish 1:12
I have to I have to just go with like, always the first thing that pops in my mind and it was Colin Powell. I was very young, I was in my 20s, and there was a library where I worked in a part of St. Louis called Clayton. It was kind of a “businessy” high rise kind of area. And there was a library and his new book was coming out and so I waited in line for like, hours to go get his book. And I thought I was just gonna, like, get the book and pass on by kind of like waving at him. No, he was taking time with every single person and so I did get to talk to him. I mean, it was maybe a minute, but what I remember the most isn’t even so much what he said it was, he is the largest man I think I’ve seen in my life. Like he shook my hand, and I mean, his hands were like baseball gloves, like he is just big, but he makes you feel so safe. So I just remember feeling like incredibly safe that he was you know, helping to lead our military back then.

Steve 2:12
Alright, that’s cool and phenomenally interesting.

Trish 2:14
Yeah. How about you?

Steve 2:17
So I kind of thought as we just came out of HR Tech, I think for me if you want to go that route, probably some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met have been some of the keynote speakers we’ve brought in over the years at HR Tech. So we just had Abby Wambach out at HR Tech and I probably spent a half hour with her just hanging out and chatting. And she was incredibly interesting. I even asked her about penalty kick strategy and she told me that if the soccer game is tied and you get to the end of the game and it’s going to penalty kicks. So each team gets five players they nominate to be the the kickers right and then right can go on after that. But you have to start with five at least. She said the most important person, you put your very best penalty taker at position number three. That’s what she told me. I never knew that like, yeah, so she always wants three, you put your second best at one and like someone else at five, but you take your very best kicker of penalty kicks, and you make the number three, so she always kicked number three. So she was super interesting. And then the other one I’d say is a few years ago, we had Mike Rowe of dirty jobs, fame, right HR tech. And I actually spent probably three hours with that guy, because we had dinner and drinks like the night before HR tech because he just wanted to hang out with us. And he was really, really cool. And really, really interesting. So I say it’s a tie for me between those two about that.

Trish 3:34
Those are both good, and I remember when Mike Rowe came, he was very impressive.

Steve 3:40
Pretty cool. Good stuff. Well, when our guest comes on, we will have to ask her who her top person now she’s had some time to think about it.

Trish 3:48
She has, now she’s gonna panic.

Steve 3:51
Let me introduce her. We are very excited to welcome our special guest, Amanda Hahn. She’s the VP of Product Marketing at HireVue and someone we’ve known for a long time in the space and I think our first time on the show. Her lifelong passion for recruiting has led her from boutique recruiting agencies to corporate recruiting leadership roles at firms like Aramark and Razorfish to marketing roles at Taleo, shout out Taleo, and now HireVue as the VP of Product Marketing. At HireVue Amanda drives go to market strategy for higher views award winning transformative solutions. Amanda, welcome to the show. How are you?

Amanda Hahn 4:26
Thanks guys, I”m doing well today. It’s so good to be with you both today.

Steve 4:30
It’s great, you too. So, Amanda, you want to weigh in interesting person, any kind of encounter with interesting types in your life.

Amanda Hahn 4:39
Interesting types. I mean, I have to go with you see, doing the having worked in Tech and putting on our own conferences like we’ve had a good, interesting group of people, as keynote speakers. You know what, our first years at HireVue at our conference, we actually had Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad.

Steve 5:00
Yeah, I think I was there that day.

Amanda Hahn 5:04
So he’s really, really interesting, really humble guy, but super creative. And there were a handful of us that got to spend some time with him after the show. Really cool guy.

Steve 5:18
Very, very cool. So all right, that’s great. So Amanda, great to see you. First of all, I want to just before we dive into kind of inclusion, and kind of creating opportunities for folks and what you guys are doing, everybody knows HireVue is kind of the creator of a new category in HR technology, which is like digital video interviewing, right? The thing didn’t really exist before there was HireVue. And so while you’re kind of synonymous with that, but there’s also a lot more of there. So, if you want to give us a minute or so 90 seconds, just maybe get give us kind of a real quick, higher view update what you guys are up to, besides what we’ve known you for, I don’t know, 15 years now, I can’t remember how long it’s been. It’s been a while.

Unknown Speaker 6:01
Yeah, yeah.

Amanda Hahn 6:02
So sure, happy to. So we, I mean, certainly there, you know, sort of creators in the space of video interviewing, which suddenly became, you know, there was a nice steady growth in the market, as long as I’ve been at HireVue around video, interviewing and incorporating it into hiring, the pandemic created this instant, you know, essential overnight, I would say for sure. So now virtual hiring is just the way that everybody does hiring right and it gets incorporated. But years before that, we started to sort of build on top of it, obviously, so launched our assessments product and got into the assessment space, a number of years after that, then added games to the portfolio. So now we’re really doing the combination of video and games together. Of course, we, you know, do technical hiring as well for our solution code view. So really can do the gamut of all kinds of positions that companies are hiring for, especially those, you know, current super critical technical hires that they’re making today.

Amanda Hahn 6:57
And then with the acquisition of AllyO, actually, just last year added, you know, sort of chat and texting capability, really that conversational AI layer on top of what we were already doing. So a lot of it’s really focused on that hiring experience. And, and it’s about making sure that we can provide a level of productivity to recruiting teams, automations for hiring managers, you know, and pulling it all together. We have integrations with, you know, some of the top ATF systems out there to make sure that all this automation is working for a company. And that’s all wrapped around this idea of making the process more equitable, more fair. You know, really, since the beginning, our vision has been to give candidates a voice and to democratize hiring. And so bringing all of those things together to make the process more fair, through all of these tools that we’ve added over the years. It’s just, you know, a way for us to continually improve the hiring process and make that process more equitable.

Trish 7:53
You know, what, thank you for sharing that, because it’s interesting, coming back from HR Tech, and then getting right into this conversation. One of the things I heard mentioned a couple times about different vendors who will remain nameless, is just in general, a lot of providers sort of designed for HR, or they designed for the HR team. And so it was interesting, I was making notes when you were talking about this, and you talked about hiring experience. A lot of times we even are thinking about the hiring experience for the recruiters, which I’m sure you do. That’s a component of it, of course. But what really intrigued me and why we wanted to do this particular podcast episode was because of the level of emphasis you put on making the candidates comfortable, and making them feel like they have the ability to be included. And that is so unique and different. We just don’t see that from everyone. So I just wanted to say that right up front. Thank you for doing that, and thank you for coming on to talk about neurodiversity and everything we’re going to cover today. So good.

Amanda Hahn 8:51
It really has been core to who we were since the beginning at HireVue. You know, we have always been about making sure that the candidate can demonstrate their talents and tell their stories. And we always knew that they were more than just bullets on a resume. So how do we really give the hiring teams and the recruiters for sure, hey, I was a recruiter. So I would never forget my people. But making sure that you know that the candidate can really demonstrate who they are, to that audience.

Steve 9:15
Yeah, Amanda, let’s talk a little bit more about one specific element which really is important to us. We’ve done, we’ve done a one of my favorite ever age HR Happy Hour shows on this topic like last year, which is trying to make access to opportunity, more available to folks who may be somewhere on the autism spectrum or neuro diverse candidates. I’d love for you to maybe kind of set that up a little bit about maybe about why that’s important and higher view. Maybe then we’ll get into some of the things that HireVue is doing to try to create the access to opportunities for your client organizations right to make access to these opportunities more readily available to folks, to the more neurodiverse community.

Amanda Hahn 10:05
Yeah, certainly. It’s really near and dear to my heart, we do a lot of work on at HireVue. It’s something that we’re working on three years now. Because, throw out the statistics that you might know here, the population of autistic people is certainly growing. I mean, and I think that it’s an area where when I hear things and statistics, I’ve been in the hiring space my whole career, and I hear things like the job interviewing process specifically is such a barrier for autistic candidates, it just immediately makes you want to do something about that, like, Come on, guys, I know we can do this better. So, you know, again, we’ve been focused on making hiring practices more fair and HireVue. This is really an area where we have to do better, where we really can make a difference to make the process more fair and through, you know, little wins, I think, with our partners, integrate autism advisors, we’ve actually been able to see like, results in real results, hard concrete results in changes that we’ve made, and different tweaks to the hiring process along the way. So, you know, we want to make sure that they that the interview process can actually be a way for autistic candidates to show their abilities just like a typical candidate, just like all other candidates can through our platform. And we want to make sure that and we’ve certainly heard this, and you can see this and some of the research that’s been done. I know you had Vanderbilt on before. Stony Brook University has done this kind of research before to actually say that a virtual interviewing experience, especially early on in the process, for an autistic candidate can really be a benefit for that candidate.

Amanda Hahn 11:48
And so you know, if candidates have things like sensory processing issues, where things like new experiences or new areas, lights or sounds can really affect them, and can affect the way that they interview for a job. Well, it’s much more comfortable for them to do at least that first round, really nerve wracking part of the process, maybe in the comfort of their own home. And so that can take a huge barrier away from the interviewing process for artistic candidates. But until companies understand the connections between what those candidates need, and how they can provide for those needs, there’s a lot of work that we can do. So those are the kinds of things that we’re trying to do, you know, just bringing more emphasis to those areas, we worked with our partners at integrate very, very early on. Our first objective was, hey, let’s just educate the market a little bit better. So we did these two documents. One was for the company to say, here are some tips for you, that will share with our customers and with the market, that you can do things that you can do in your HireVue experience and your general interviewing experience to make your process more autism friendly. And then we did a document for candidates too, because we thought it was really important, again, to speak to the candidates and say, here are some things that it’s really good for you to know going into the process, things like should you disclose, or should you not disclose, asking for additional time asking for additional support that a lot of companies are willing to support these days? It’s just candidates don’t necessarily ask for them.

Trish 13:17
You know what, thank you for sharing that. And specifically that last little bit you just shared, because that was going to be my question. We’ve had people on before who’ve sort of wavered on kind of the pros and cons of whether or not a candidate should disclose, and maybe how they know. And is it okay for a company to ask? So could you maybe talk a little bit more about that specifically, like in terms of you’re obviously giving advice to clients, customers, potential customers? What are you kind of steering them to in terms of disclosure?

Amanda Hahn 13:49
Yeah, it’s a great question Trish, honestly, we work really closely with Integrate because there are autism advisors. And they work with organizations both on sort of the advisement and the job placement site to the so they take job ready youth, college graduates, and they work with them to gain sort of job skills and interviewing skills, and then help place them with organizations either in internship type positions, or in full time roles. And then they work with those companies to help them be able to integrate that person into their organization to understand the needs of, say, a neurotypical and what kinds of things they need from a manager and how to better manage that person. We actually went through this process ourselves where we hired somebody from the integrate team, and she’s done fantastic, and she’s been promoted since she started with the company. And I have to say that the piece of feedback that we got from our managers as part of that training process, that was so sort of enlightening televises that it you know, the whole training they went through with Integrate, it just made them better managers, it made them clear communicators, and it gave them better managerial skills sort of in general.

Amanda Hahn 15:08
And so we’ve talked to Integrate a lot about this is about this topic of disclosure, and it’s a very personal one. So what I would say is that there really isn’t an edict either way from us or from any of our customers on whether a candidate should disclose it’s a very personal decision. However, if a candidate does choose to disclose, then they understand that there are, you know, potentially a host of resources that might be available to them. And that might be a benefit to them to disclose. It’s a really, really tough decisions, I have to say. So I’m actually a parent of an autistic child, and even thinking about my son’s only six today. But thinking about when he gets to be job ready and enters the work world, like what I want him to disclose that he has a disability and understanding the resources that that opens to him? Or do I want people to hire him because he’s a good candidate, not necessarily, because he’s a good artistic candidate. It’s tough. And that’s why it really is personal, but we’re trying to help companies understand and candidates understand sort of the advantages and disadvantages of both and be able to make an informed decision either way.

Trish 16:18
I just wanna say there’s such an evolution to have, by the time that he is job ready, I think things will be so far advanced, right? Hopefully, I feel more comfortable, right. But in the meantime, too. And Steve, I’m sorry, I just wanted one point to bring up. I think that when you talked about, you know, whether or not someone’s disclosing is very personal, and that the level of the number of people with autism is sort of on the rise, as people find out, they might not even know. So I think one of the great things about what you all are doing is when you build that into your technology to make anyone who has any sort of neurodiversity, more comfortable, in the interview more comfortable as an employee, you’re also capturing those people who might not even know they’re on the spectrum, because it is a spectrum, right? There’s different levels of, of ability to communicate in certain ways. And so there are probably I would imagine in every organization, people who are on the spectrum, but don’t even know it. So I think that’s also another reason why they might not even know to disclose.

Amanda Hahn 17:22
That’s right.

Steve 17:24
That’s right. Yeah, just two things real quick that that when you were discussing the ideas around disclosure, and how people feel a little bit differently about it, and that’s I’m misremembering, Trish, a couple months ago, well, not misremembering this, because we did the show, Trish and I did a show with a couple of athletes from the Special Olympics, special Olympians, right. And both on the spectrum, both neurodiverse with different challenges. And unless I’m not remembering, right, sure, I feel like one of the athletes was like Yes, I’ll disclose. And the other one wasn’t, right? I believe? But like the, the male athlete was like, Yeah, I just want to be like everybody else, I don’t want really to draw attention to my challenges, I just want you to treat me just like you treat anybody else. Whereas I think the other athlete was a little bit more like, hey, I want you to understand some of the things that I’m dealing with. But, you know, I also understand that I could be great asset to your organization, a great teammate, and a great leader, etc. So it just in that one conversation, it was completely we saw both sides from two people who are living this right. These folks were both probably in their early to mid 20s. Probably Amanda, these athletes, so they’re, they’re out there in that world right now. So yeah, definitely super interesting.

Steve 18:37
So, I think one of the things that we definitely want to talk about some more is, what are some of the ways a little bit more specifically that through the partnership HireVue has with Integrate Autism, employment advisors, as well as just your own organizations, development of more sophisticated tools for more equitable and fair and kind of repeatable hiring, what are some of the ways that the technologies that you guys are building can actually serve to benefit both organizations and opening up their candidate pool and creating a more accessible and more fair universe, as well as you know, provide a good resource for candidates as well, that they can have a good experience and really have their best opportunity to kind of to shine in the process?

Amanda Hahn 19:23
Yeah, and I could talk about this all day, in the ways that we’ve really worked and dug in on the subject. I mean, I think, you know, very specifically, again, for candidates with autism, what I think is already mentioned is just that the idea of virtual hiring or virtual interviewing in general is really beneficial to a lot of candidates who are either on the autism spectrum or just the neurodiverse population in general. And we again, didn’t even know that going in. But that was such a an important learning for us to sort of start on this journey to say we live in a population of people that could really benefit in addition to being able to showcase their skills, but showcase their skills in a more comfortable environment for them, that’s going to allow them to be their very best selves in an interview. If they can do it in a virtual environment, we’ve got to figure out a way like, what else can we do? And how else can we build on this. So like I said, early on, we did make sure that there was an education environment out there that candidates sort of had some information and employers had some information. And then we started to really dig in on both sides with Integrate as well into our product instead. Okay now, what can we do inside of our platform to start improving things, one of the new products that we had on the on the radar was our hierarchy Builder product, which just got launched earlier this year. And we knew we were going to be providing interview content to customers as a part of that product. And we thought this is a great opportunity, not only to look at the interviewing process, but the experience itself, and what happens inside of the interview.

Amanda Hahn 21:06
So as a part of that, we took a look at the content and the interview questions. So Builder provides structured interviewing content through job related suggestions, as well as custom question, interview questions, suggestions for companies. And we’ve vetted those questions in partnership with integrate to say, how do we make sure that these questions are neurodiverse, friendly, or friendly for the autistic community, taking things into consideration for an autistic person. If you say the word team and lead all in the same question, they’re gonna think that you’re assuming that you that they want to give you some sort of sports analogy as an answer. And that’s not necessarily what you were looking for. But the way that they interpret things literally might cause them to give you a very sports related answer when you didn’t necessarily look for that. So taking a lot of the dual meaning out of the language that was being used. Again, the benefit was we actually just created a better interviewing experience for everybody. We created questions that were better for the autism population. But we created questions that were kind of better for everybody, we actually understood that they’re better for candidates who English isn’t their native language. So English as second language candidates, the clear the questions were the students better they were all the way around.

Amanda Hahn 22:27
So that was a really cool benefit for us in in looking at and putting together Builder. And now again, I mentioned we had acquired AllyO, the end of last year about a year ago now. And that’s one of the other places we’d really like to start to do improvements is the conversational AI pieces of things, those conversations can tend to get really long, depending on what the process is that you’re supporting with a candidate, how do we make sure that the language being used in those conversations is pulling from language that’s also you know, neurodiverse, friendly, or autistic friendly, or it’s just really, really clear. And so we’re going to be starting that work with integrate as well to make sure that you know, that kind of conversational language is supportive of autistic candidates.

Steve 23:14
I wonder if like, you know, I don’t want you to thoroughly give like free advice to all your HR tech competitors out there, but you guys working in partnership with Integrate Autism, employment advisors? My sense from what you’re telling us and what we know, right? And Trish, what we’ve done on this topic over over the last couple of years, as well as that, boy, pretty much every tech provider would kind of benefit, maybe not from a full blown partnership, but at least bringing in some consulting bringing in some advisory or maybe having somebody in house right, who really is well versed right in some of the things that you’re talking about, like the sports analogy thing. I’ve never heard that and it makes perfect sense. But I’ve never heard anybody explain that and so if I was a guy, and I used to be a guy like this interest, you were to developing products for a big HR Tech company, I would have never thought of that. And I think one of the gaps we might have, Trish, you know, is we just don’t think about it this intentionally perhaps when we’re designing tools?

Trish 24:19
Yeah, I think you’re right, Steve, I think that’s part of it and it’s not that you’re trying to sort of prevent anyone from from being hired that has neurodiversity issues, but it’s something we need to be very proactive about doing. It was interesting, we’ve got a report coming out soon, actually, that you and I had done on just accessibility in the workplace and being more inclusive. And while the reports not out, we have some just kind of early results back that that showed that only 66% of organizations are actually thinking about this when they’re making those HR technology decisions about working with a provider that already has these sorts of features built in. And so well it doesn’t mean that the other percentage of people aren’t interested at all. It’s just it’s not even on the radar yet. So one thing, Amanda, that you said that I think is really important too, and I found this in, in a lot of a lot of other applications as well, but it’s relying on the people who actually work in your organization to find out do they have family members, and not just with autism, but with any kind of, you know, disability, whether that be physical or mental or whatever, right?

Trish 25:34
To the extent that you make it, a welcoming situation for people to disclose, you can learn from your own employees, too. So even if you’re someone who’s out there, and you’re in a corporate setting, right, and you don’t know, if your vendor partners do or don’t have some of these features and functionality, it’s like begin with yourself, right? Make it make it to where your own employees can feel free and welcome to come to you and share their stories about whether it’s themselves or their family members or friends. That’s at least a starting place. I think if you’re not really ready for that full blown partnership with with a more formal organization. Amanda, I don’t know I mean, is that something you do at HireVue as well, where you kind of know other employees who have different inputs based on their own or their family’s experiences?

Amanda Hahn 26:24
I will tell you that probably everybody that works with Integrate has some personal connection to a person with autism, because we get and we even say this is it, you know, I member of other organizations that I know other moms and parents of autistic children, and we’re sort of, you know, a huge force for good within the autistic community, especially when you get us together. There’s a ton of passion for, for our kids, and making sure that, you know, we’re advocating for better outcomes on their behalf. But I was like, you’re so right about just looking inside of your organization. First, I will put out there now, if any of our competition wants to call me or anybody in the HR space wants to call me about working with integrate, or any other person in this space, when it comes to this subject, there is no competition, the better that we make ourselves as an HR technology community in general, overall, the better the outcomes are for artistic candidates that are entering the job market in general. So I’ll give advice to anybody free, anybody listening can call me about that and I’m happy to introduce you to our folks at Integrate because I think they’re amazing.

Steve 27:32
Yeah, that’s well said, Amanda.

Amanda Hahn 27:35
And then even within your own employment committee, I think that’s so right and authenticity is really important to a lot of these different communities. I know just my experience with the autism community, authenticity is incredibly important. They, the community really believes in authentic representation. So making sure that if you’re vetting things, in your technology platforms, or you’re developing product, and you’re looking for input, it’s extremely important that you talk to autistic candidates, not necessarily people who know autism really well. And that’s where I would say, I’m happy to put you in touch with somebody who can help. I’m not the expert, my son is more of an expert, obviously, than I am. But really making sure that you’re touching base with the authentic community with the autism community. And having that authentic representation. Again, when we did the work that we did around Builder, or when we did the work that we did on those tips, documents, especially the tips document for the candidates, integrate had one of their students, a couple of them actually review the document, they wanted somebody with autism to review the documents, and we’ve learned somebody with autism to review the documents before they went out to say, Hey, this is it. Can you do this stuff? This is sound good to you? Does this sound like the kinds of is this the kind of advice you give your friend when you’re looking for a job? So it was really important, and I think that that authentic representation is really important in these communities?

Trish 28:56
That’s a great example, it’s like you anticipate my questions. I was going to say when I worked on the product side, but even now that, you know, as an analyst, there are many times as my kids have gotten more into the teenage years, but I’ve asked them, you know, Hey, can you look at those, Hey, can you review this? How does this come across to you? So I mean, I think if also, if a company’s not doing that already, again, whether you’re a vendor or a corporate, whatever, tap into those people that you know, have neurodiversity needs, and ask them now a six year old might be a little young still, but maybe not right? I mean, you just don’t know you don’t know until you ask. I would imagine you could ask your son to look at what you’re doing at HireVue. And he’d probably have an opinion, right? He would already understand, and if it’s easy enough for someone at six to start understanding what you’re trying to do to be inclusive. I think you’re on the right path.

Trish 29:52
Yeah, honestly.

Steve 29:53
The funny thing too, I mentioned that the show we did with the special Olympian athletes, Trish, and how some of the things Amanda said remind me of what they said. Another thing Amanda mentioned reminded me of the show we did with Tim Vogus from the Frist Center at Vanderbilt, which was this, when you make improvements to your process, whether it’s with technology, or whether it’s just with process or just the way you communicate when you do that, to try to support more neurodiverse candidates, hey, by the way, it’s just better overall. And he told us that very same thing. And then he almost gave us the exact same answer you gave us when we were talking about interviewing and different parts of the hiring process, as well. So it’s really consistent what we’re hearing on this and, and so just another reminder, for folks who are listening to this, that, hey, this is going to benefit your process overall, right? The sports analogies, I’m so guilty of it myself with these dumb sports analogies. And then, like, I think remember, Trish, we’re in Singapore, China, and like, I’m doing a presentation about that’s how you hit a home run or something like that. And like nobody in that audience knew what a home run was you know, and I’m like, a dope you know, talking about home runs. And it’s silly, but I think it’s also really something important to remember too.

Trish 31:03
Well, that goes back to intent, though your intent is good. But just because your intent is good, doesn’t mean that you’re hitting the mark, right? So you need that’s where sometimes we’re also too close to, whether it’s building a product and designing or whether it’s, you know, after a product is created, and then we’re trying to communicate that out to potential buyers. It’s like all along that entire process, too. We all have good intentions. We’re all coming to work and trying to think of ways that we can be successful at what we’re doing and be helpful to people. But yeah, sometimes we just miss the mark, because we only have our own lens.

Steve 31:36
Amanda, this has been an awesome conversation. Last thing for me, just real quick, I am part of the group who gets to weigh in on the Human Resource Executive HR Tech Conference Top HR products of the year. The HireVue Builder tool, which you referenced a couple of times in our conversation was a winner in 2021. This year, congratulations to everyone there at the team, maybe just give us maybe just give us a minute on Builder, and then kind of help folks direct them to where they can learn more about about Builder as well as HireVue in general.

Amanda Hahn 32:11
Fantastic, yes, I love talking about Builder. You know, it’s so funny, Builder is one of those products that for those of us that had been at HireVue for a while, we knew we needed to build it. It was just figuring out what’s the right solution? What are the right elements, but we knew that there needed to be this idea of where you can do structured interviewing better, providing the kinds of structure that we did, right out of the gate and HireVue, allowing candidates to all be asked the same questions, and then managers get to see the same questions. That was fantastic. And that was lightyears from, you know, conversations with humans, of course, that go off the rails all the time, in interviews, because you find a connection with somebody, and you end up talking about that connection, instead of really sticking to the script of the interview. And, the structured interview is such a key critical piece of being able to evaluate people fairly. So, that’s going to make the experience better for both hiring teams and for candidates.

Amanda Hahn 33:17
So again, we built a structure that’s based on ONet, which is the, you know, sort of Department of Labor’s 100 year old but very solid foundation of these are jobs. And these are elements that are related to jobs. And then our IO team at HireVue spent two years, mapping all of our competency content to all of those jobs in ONet. And so a company just has to type in a couple of keywords and start and start a job title, like a call center representative or warehouse manager, and up pops all the competencies that they need to evaluate on that person. And then we provide the question content as well. And then that all flows back over to the evaluation process, which is really the key making sure that everybody understands what good looks like. And everybody’s on the same page and evaluating those candidates. So we’ve already seen some really good results from our customers that have adopted since earlier this year, hirevue.com site, we’ve got a site specifically for Builder on there where you can find out more information, there’s some information there about just the top product when and we actually have a webinar that’s going to be coming up later on, just confirm this today, later this month was TSX. Our transportation customer, they’re going to be talking about how they use Builder to hire train conductors. It’s a really cool story. They did things like have to eliminate a degree requirement and then figure out once you eliminate that degree requirement, how you were going to still make sure that you’re hiring the right profile for the job. So it’s really cool story and they’re going to be so there’s more information on the website and the date for the webinar should be out later next week or later this week or early next week. Yeah, we would love to see everybody there.

Steve 35:03
Awesome, well this has been super fun Amanda, great to catch up. We talked a couple times over the summer because we did a couple demos of Builder as part of the Top Products process and that was super fun but great to see you. I love reading the bio, giving a shout out to Taleo. I’m pretty sure I was at the last Taleo world event.

Steve 35:27
All right, Amanda Hahn from HireVue, thanks for sharing. This is awesome. I’m super proud to share this story with our audience about what you guys are doing for your diverse community what you’re doing helping your customers kind of democratize hiring really that’s what it’s about and this is an important subject for us. Trish, we’ve done at least four shows on this topic, you know more than that and probably, so it’s important for us too. So, thanks again Amanda.

Amanda Hahn 35:53
Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart, and personally thank you for shining a light on really important topics really appreciate it and letting us talk about our work in that area.

Steve 36:02
All right, good stuff, Trish just you just reminded me like I need to get myself in gear now that HR Tech’s over and get my piece of that report written quick cuz I’m behind.

Trish 36:09
I know right. I will say this though, I think it’s one of those things where I sort of view that as like a false deadline you know, we put these deadlines on ourselves when we would like things to happen but really especially with a topic like neurodiversity, and accessibility and inclusion, I think you want to take your time you want to make sure that you’re getting it right and that you’re actually giving organizations recommendations they can put into play because that to me, that’s where we don’t want to just put a bunch of data out and then have the readers consume that and not know well now what do I do with it, right? So, that’s really what we’re working on right now and I hope that you know in combination with all of these shows that we’re doing on different kinds of you know, both mental and physical disabilities and and the way that you actually support anyone who has any one of these it’ll make better workplaces and for me that’s kind of the you know, I don’t have someone in my family that has autism for example, but it’s very important to me because I have other other types of neurodiversity issues in our family and friends of family so it is very personal and I think everyone can probably point to someone that they know that would benefit from having companies be more thoughtful about making it so inclusive for everyone to come in and really just make your company more successful.

Steve 37:26
Yeah, we didn’t get into that whole subject of how this benefits the employer, right? To be more open to neurodiversity candidates, that’s a whole ‘nother show. We’ll probably do another one but I will wrap there. For Amanda Hahn from HireVue, go to hirevue.com, we’ll put the link in the show notes as well. For Trish McFarlane, my name is Steve Boese. Thank you so much for listening to the HR Happy Hour Show. Catch all the show archives at HRHappyHour.net. Subscribe, tell a friend, give us a review if you liked the show. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai