 This episode of the podcast is supported by Audible. You can download and listen to the world's best storytelling. I use it all the time to and from work. You can listen to audiobooks, original series and more on their free app to get your free 30 day subscription, which includes a free book. Click on the link in our show notes and enjoy. Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had an awesome conversation with Robert Neury who is co-founder of Arctic Shores. Arctic Shores is a super cool tech firm that use gamification to help us hire better people more efficiently, more effectively, all of that cool stuff. It's great and we use a lot of psychometrics in our interview processes and I think this is a really cool way to do it. So we go into that, how it works and we delve into HR, HR tech and hope you enjoy the podcast. Hey, it's Lewis, welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Cool, I'm alive. Robert, thank you very much for coming in but braving the corona virus. Our pleasure, Lewis. We've got to stay calm in these times. So you were just on the corona, you were saying that to your office people can work from home or not? Yes, we had to make the call. It's hard as a CEO when you have to balance the needs of the business and the well-being of your staff and we thought very carefully, had a long discussion with the senior management team about what was the best way to approach this and actually as a software company we're set up to work from home, we have a good work from home policy so it's just become an extended work from home policy but we just didn't want staff worrying about whether it was the right thing for them to come in or whether they felt obliged to because the company hadn't made it clear and so the sensible thing was just to say, look, work from home. If you need to come in, come in but assume that you don't need to. That's awesome. So when you set the company up, it was always so I guess all your systems are probably web-based and people can just pick up their laptops and log in from anywhere. Yes, I mean it was the interesting thing of setting up a company so I have a co-founder, Safe, who's wonderful and based up in Manchester which is where our head office is and home for me is London and so I said, right, okay, well we'll set up the R&D and the head office in Manchester and then London will be the sort of sales and delivery arm but it meant having two offices right from the beginning that I just set up and the thinking behind the company was, well, we'll be working in separate locations, traveling a lot in between so let's just make remote working super easy. Yeah, yeah, awesome. Has that been hard to manage initially? It was and continues to be actually particularly as the company grows thinking about, we started to get a little bit of a separate culture in Manchester, culture in London and we didn't want that to be the case. We wanted one Arctic shores culture so you have to work much harder on the communication. I mean, I miss the fact that I can't just lean over a desk and say to Safe, what do you think about this issue or I'm a little bit concerned about this or I'm thinking about this pitch, you know, what's your take on it and I actually actively have to find time and look in his diary as to when that's possible. You miss out on the ad hoc piece. But actually if you work at it with the communication channels that we have now with Slack and Slack's just been brilliant for us. That's been a big success story. And just using lots of videos that we always insist that we're having internal meetings if you switch the video on so we can see people. What video do you use? Well, Zoom and then occasionally Hangouts. Are you using Hangouts? I like Hangouts. Yeah, yeah, no, it works really well actually. How do you do the actual FaceTime, not FaceTime, Apple FaceTime, but going to see your team? Do you have to actively? Yes, so the two of us have to think that every two weeks it's safe we'll try and come down to London, I'll go up to Manchester just to make sure and that we're seeing people but also we're growing quite fast and so there's just new members of staff joining. I just didn't want it to be a long time before they got to meet one of the founders of the business. But definitely, how did it all come about? It came about because Safe and I got together actually in a cafe nearer after I left. London or Manchester? Oh, is it? Yes, in London. And I just had a leaving due from my previous company and had sold it and it was time to sort of think about what next to do and Safe came along to it and I said to Safe, look, I'd really like to work with you and he'd been the CTO of the previous business, you know, would you like to start the business? You'd work together, innit? We'd work together and he said, yes I would, if you've got any ideas and I said, well, I really like this sort of concept of gamification and bringing in the world of sort of engagement, a little bit of data analytics and making things fun rather than just serious within the workplace that would improve engagement and take up, maybe we could sort of explore that area and he said, brilliant, I'm interested gamer and he's very much on the techie side. So that was sort of exploring that space and when we were to use the metaphorical term playing around in the sandpit of ideas around gamification, a friend rang up and said that his daughter had just been applied for all the leading graduate recruiters in the sort of marketing FMCG space in the UK and despite having phenomenal educational qualifications was being rejected at the aptitude test stage which is the first bit after the application for every single one and she just didn't like the format of them and underperformed every time that test. This is online? Just an online, it's numerical reasoning, some of it was logical reasoning and she just didn't like the format of it and once you see something you don't like and makes you feel fearful, the psychology around that is present it again and I'm gonna feel uncomfortable and fearful again and it turned out that all graduate recruiters were taking the same approach. Interesting, so it was both graduate recruiters internally at companies and also recruitment agencies? Not so much recruitment agencies actually, it was the internal, the volume of recruitment, absolutely, absolutely, all those big organisations, thousands of applicants and the only way that they could find of narrowing down who they would bring forward to an assessment centre was either what they called at the time which I really loathe the term killer, killer questions but three, they should be qualifying questions but they called them killer questions and then get him to do some numerical logical reasoning test which suited some people, particularly if you practised and actually put other people off. Yeah, it's also, I mean the academics aren't particularly a good guide of how successful you're gonna be in work either. They aren't and that's the challenge for recruiters on this or volume recruiters on this is we look at just at a degree level and then you've got challenges level is a 2-1 from Huddersfield equivalent to a 2-1 from Exeter, to a 2-1 from Liverpool, how do you make any kind of judgement on that? And then if you move back to A-levels you've got an advantage over the private school system versus the state school system and so there are challenges to it. Yeah and also you can have people, frankly, that develop over time. You might not work hard at school or maybe you've been in an environment where your friends don't want a card and you get sucked into that kind of scenario but then you start to flourish later on. Yes. I don't appreciate you have thousands of applicants for these big companies but it's not a very good selection process. You know, they've got to have 3As, they've got to AC the psychometrics. Yes. It's tough. It is tough and where is the identification of potential in that? So the bit that you highlight there is for the late developer or even somebody who's got potential that just hasn't had the opportunity to have that realised or demonstrated in any way and many, many cases of that. And so that's why we felt that there must be a better way of identifying whether somebody has the capability and potential to be successful in an organisation that rose above and in addition to just their cognitive ability which may or may not have been displayed up until that point through the education system. And so how did you get from that to developing it and creating a business? So the, well the idea was, right, how could we, if we like the format of gamification and get people engaged in it and we like this concept of if somebody's engaged then you get an authentic response. And just to clear this, gamification is you're playing a game. You are using, so good point on that listeners. So there are two elements. The definition of gamification is the use of game-like techniques in a workplace environment. Now the game-like techniques could be a game which by definition then has points, it has levels. It requires a degree of practice and skill acquisition that then means you can progress on that. But it doesn't have to be just that it could just be I want to make it engaging. I want to use game-like graphics to make it less boring and more attractive. And we've learned actually, so we started very much purely down the gamification route introducing points. Okay, the proper gaming. And having, the challenge was always you couldn't just make it purely, well you couldn't make it gaming because the people were applying for a serious thing, a job, really important to them. So we found very quickly it was demeaning to bring in an entertainment aspect to it. So what, they thought it wasn't serious enough for the scenario that they were in. I mean, there was definitely an age difference there. So school leavers, graduates were generally happier than anybody older than that. But there was that strong difference. And also the points just didn't make any sense. And we had to be very careful in getting that balance right between making it engaging and avoiding any of the game-like activities that brought in skill or reaction time. Because then you're measuring somebody's response time rather than their decision-making, which is ultimately what we're interested in is their decision-making approach rather than are they any good at reacting or, and they also can build up a skill. So we didn't want serious gamers to have an advantage for somebody who never or wasn't interested in normal video games. Yeah, interesting. So you arrived at, so was that the first iteration? So the first iteration was, we used something like a sort of avatar version. It was you had to go, you were in a sort of avatar forest and you had to go and catch fireflies. So we had to keep it very simple and generic. The graphics, I think, were amazing and looked wonderful. But it, we, and we had a story behind it and you could collect points, but it became quite clear as we talked to more and more people in the market that they wanted, if we kept that level of graphics and points, they would use it for marketing purposes rather than selection. Really? And if we wanted to use it for selection. Why is that? They thought that it would, because the graphics were so strong, that it would be, in their minds then, it became an attraction tool rather than a serious selection tool. And even though we had serious science behind it and a very, very deep neuroscience and psychometric science behind the tasks that we created, the packaging of it were encouraging people or having people think about it in a way that was not the way that we wanted it to be used, which is actually in the recruitment process rather than an attraction piece come to us. We're using gamification in our process and come to our sites and then the serious stuff will start. No, no, we are the serious stuff. I think the opposite. I think how cool, I mean, because also it says something about someone's mindset as a candidate, you know, wow, this is really cool and they dive themselves into it rather than, I mean, if you're hiring a senior leader and they say, well, actually, this is a little bit graduate recruitment style. Yes. And they're not open to it. Again, that's something about their mindset, their approach and their outlook. So, Lewis, you're right around that and that is an interesting piece around this. And we're starting to see some organizations now use our platform within a development scenario where they're going through a digital transformation. We've got a couple of clients, particularly in Germany, for example, which the manufacturing base there had been slow to adapt to this rapid change in digitalization. And you can just see with the recent rise, subsequent decline, but see recent rise of Tesla's stock price. And if suddenly Tesla was more valuable than the Volkswagen Group, which is crazy. And so you see now companies going, well, how do we digitize? How do we get that mindset right out? And you're right, we found in a lot of cases that the HR team would love what we were doing because they talked candidates all the time. They think, wow, this is really innovative and this presents a more innovative brand image. And then it would go to the senior leadership team who'd go, games, we can't introduce games into the workplace or into the recruitment. In their mind, they were thinking of World Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, or they just weren't, they weren't thinking of Angry Birds or Candy Crush or things that people were doing all the time. I mean, just in the tube ride here, I mean, I just saw at least half of people on their phone doing some sort of activity, which is a game-like activity, which is a puzzle or a card game. Some were watching videos, but that's what people do a lot of now and just the senior leadership team just didn't have their minds open to it. Some do, because I mean, you know, I always say this, but a recruitment's like speed dating. You know, you meet someone for an hour and you're deciding whether to spend most of your life with them. It took me five years to prepare for my wife at the lease, whereas I have to make a quick decision and I see these people more often. So I think ultimately the more information about someone, the better. And I think these games are great because you're getting stuff that you wouldn't normally get from, let's say, a standard interview in inverted commerce where most people are just saying, tell me about your background. How did you leave this job? What are your motivations? You know, like really classic questions that you can just prepare for. There's a quote which sits on the internet that's been attributed to Playtoe. I've not been able to track this down, but the quote goes, you can learn more about somebody in an hour of play than you can in a year of conversation. Love that. And I love the concept of that, which is I want for me to really understand this sort of speed-dating approach. I want to do something with you and see how we might work together, see how you might approach things. And if that's in line with the needs of that job and the culture of that organisation, I could spend days and hours in conversation with you and you provide your own filter then in terms of the, particularly in a recruitment scenario, a high-stakes scenario. I will tell you what you wanted to hear from me in order to get the job. Whereas if you're being asked to do a task in the way that the Arctic Shores Assessment works, we're picking up lots of subconscious decision-making shifts that means that we do learn something about you at that intrinsic level that you couldn't detect from just a conversational approach. I completely agree. I mean, actually, work experience and scenarios like that is a much better predictor of whether someone's going to be able to perform one in a job or not. The other thing is, when I go to the gym or I play football, you find out an awful lot about someone. You've got no idea what they do for work, no idea. But I could probably describe that person so well. You know, they're like what they're like, how resilient they are, all of those types of things. It's really interesting. It is, and I think that's a great example of how observing somebody when they're doing things, and particularly if you put them under pressure a bit too. So that's the other element around this, is how do you crank up the pressure a bit to see does that performance still maintain there, or actually do we see a decline in performance? Do we see a reaction to that saying, actually, this is too fast for me or too complex? And that is something that if you actually think of a gamification and a game-based assessment as more of a behavior-based assessment, because ultimately, the game element here is to try and get you engaged. So you're not thinking about your being assessed, and then the rest is monitoring your behaviors. Then that is the scenario that you're seeing in a sport scenario, exactly that. You're engaged in it, you're thinking about scoring the goal or whatever it might be, and then everybody else is observing the way that you go about that. And then you say about it. It's like the interesting thing is observing how someone behaves when they're down 1-0, or their teammate has made a mistake, and you see some people just absolutely berating their teammate. Others are like, come on, guys, let's crack on. Let's go back. They fight to the last minute and stuff. I think it's really interesting. It is, and that's where I think companies are now realizing we need to take a different approach to the recruitment. And there's lots of things about the CV or to use the American term, the resume is dead. You've got to be careful about statements like that, because actually the work experience is still really important as a reference point. And it's more a case of, well, how do we actually go above the information that somebody's just presenting to us, or go underneath the information that somebody's presenting to us, and get that deeper understanding that will then guide an interview in a way that really starts to explore based on information that you've got about that person, rather than just, okay, I have to interview based on what I see and what I hear. Yeah, no, definitely. But I mean the resume or CV, it means definitely useful. It's ultimately a tool for someone to get an interview. Yes. Because I mean there are certain technical skills that someone looks for for a job. But then the recruitment industry definitely needs to be more multifaceted with psychometrics, people interviewing in better ways. It can be improved a lot. People are doing it, but there's still an awful lot of companies, they just, they get the CV and they have a chat about the profile, they get this feeling. I really like that person. It's still the main feedback I get from clients or candidates. Can I always say, how did the interview go or how do you feel it went? Something like that. And it's always the first thing is about people. I really felt like I got on well with that person from both sides. And once you have that good feeling, everything else almost gets, like it's just to validate the decision that they've already made. When is it useful to use psychometrics then? Because if you're using it at the end, you're just validating the decision. Or you're like, don't worry about the psychometrics, it's fine, we know this person, it's the right person for the job. Choose at the beginning. I mean, when's like the optimal point? It's a great question. And as somebody, I suppose, who comes from looking at the data that we collect from our assessment, the moment you start thinking about recruitment as being a data-led decision-making process with a human wrapper around it, then the question is more about how early on in the process should I get the data that I then use multiple times to help me get a better understanding of this person. So a lot of people ask me of where should I put psychometrics? And the obvious answer for me is right at the beginning, but don't then, which a lot of companies make the mistake of, is I'll use it at the beginning and then I'll have the interview and I'll do the interview in the same way. No, you've got this data, leverage it. So if you've learned something about somebody at the beginning of the process, then use the data again for the interview and make the interview. So I think using it early, helping then think about how you're gonna use that data to frame the interview and then use the chemistry piece, which is important because ultimately it's a cultural fit, to help make the decision between candidates that you think both of whom you could employ and then ultimately it'll be a bit more down to, well, do I think that person understands me and therefore the team around me. And so the output from your psychometrics, do you then give advice to people on what questions that they can ask or areas to probe? Yeah, so it's one of the things that we're bringing out now as an interview guide to it. And one of the problems around, I think psychometrics is people who've used them in the past is that they're not quite sure as to whether this is a sort of astrology type of approach and sort of star signs that they're giving me because I don't know how to read this now. Yeah, they're quite hard to read of them. Exactly, and everything potentially looks good at that point. And so you have this problem that particularly within the recruitment sector or the recruitment industry, which is, well, this is my value as a recruiter is that I understand something. I bring some extra insight that psychometrics can't do. And they see psychometrics as a threat rather than actually you could do your job better and give more value. And we've seen some really good examples of that with the two or three, and it's usually more sort of boutique recruitment agencies that have used our psychometric assessment and thought about how they can leverage their own knowledge and expertise on top of the data. I like that candidate that we've given them. Yeah, that's really interesting. It's important to do. We've been using it more and more. And you're finding now, because we incorporate it as part of our search process and more and more people now are taking up, but how they use it is really interesting. And you can see sometimes if they value it or how much they value it or whether their own gut feeling trumps anything else that might come on down. Yes, and I think one of the things that perhaps the psychometric industry hasn't necessarily helped itself with is that training. One hand is language. So sometimes you see the language of a psychometric system is I'm not really sure I understand this and or if I do understand it, is that because it's based on my prior knowledge or assumptions around that that is relevant or not relevant. And then secondly, it's been a little bit of a money-making side for the psychometric industry of, well, I'll charge you several thousand pounds to get qualified for this. Oh yeah, they love that. Do I need several thousand pounds? Or as you would just be helpful if you use simple language and gave me a simple, easy to read guide of how to interpret it rather than charging me lots of money? Yeah, I got sold into that. I won't mention which company, but they all do that. It's crazy. And I think that has to be changed and if we're really gonna democratise the use of psychometrics, which has benefits not just for you, the recruiter, but for the individual too. Absolutely. Just learning more. I mean, I wish I'd done a psychometric assessment and had some feedback from that early on in my career. So I would know what type of thing that I would be best suited to. The other big thing is how accurate are they? Well, yeah, there's a margin and error, of course, with any scientific tool. The interesting thing I think about psychometrics is that we're measuring something, personality, which is part of the human brain and neuroscience is making great strides on that. But we still don't understand everything about how the brain works and what's driving the decisions that we make in personality at the end of the day is the expression of the chemical electrical activity that's going on in your brain. And there's so much diversity within the human species that trying to find a measurement tool that is precise and accurate for everyone on there is going to be something that we haven't achieved yet. But what we do have around that is something that's a much better measurement of it. So it's not perfect. We'll be some way off before it ever gets to a really high degree of accuracy on this. But it is accurate enough to be better and significantly better than asking somebody to make a decision based on what they see or hear. Interesting. Most people feel like that no one can be better than their gut. The other interesting thing, I don't know if there's a great bit by Yorah Harari. He's written a couple. The interesting one is Home of Data is Human Gods and he's putting forward, he probably read it, but no one can know me better than I know myself. But it feels like actually maybe these technologies will ultimately know me better than I know myself. They will and that is what I think is really interesting too because I often get asked, one of the things that we measure in our assessment is resilience. So if I ask you this, how resilient are you? You're going to do two things around this. One, you're going to say, oh, well, why is Robert asking me this? And if it's applying for a job, of course I'm going to say I'm going to resilient. I'm going to tell him how many marathons I've run and I can give it. And I don't know whether that is true or not first or secondly. You may say, well, I'm the most resilient of my not very resilient friends. Right. And so in your mind, you are super resilient because your comparison group is self-selected. And you may have chosen them because you are more resilient than this rather lazy group of friends. I didn't wish to in any way challenge your friends on this. But this is the scenario that we could have on that. So you're self-awareness and say, well, I, and we do get this. I don't think this report really is true because I see myself as this or that. And the point about it of any psychometric assessment, particularly in this behavior-based, is that we're comparing you to thousands of other people who have taken this assessment. And actually, when you get a proper distribution of the population, you then start to find out really where you are, as opposed to where you have assumed you are. Where you want to be. Where you want to be, that's right. Interesting. So you can use this for self-development as well. Yes, really useful for that. And that comes back to one of the key mission statements for Arctic Shores around this, was we didn't just want to help companies make better decisions, but we wanted to help the individuals who are applying to companies make better career choices. And we found it incredible that thousands and thousands of young people were going through a recruitment process and getting little to no feedback on their personal strengths and whether the organization they had applied to was really best suited to them. Yeah, unfortunately, little or no feedback is a trend that carries on through your career. It does, it does. How have you, because you mentioned kind of AI or algorithms or how have you, you might define it, how have you implemented that into the technology? So it's a big debate in the psychometric world at the moment because the marketing spin that has come out of the US is, you know, AI is good. Machine learning is clever. And we've started to see more cases coming out saying that, well, AI is certainly clever and can make improvements, but it can also take a step backwards as Amazon found when, you know, if you're training an algorithm or a computer program on data that is in itself flawed or has a degree of bias in that data set, then you're all you're gonna do is amplify. Yeah, wasn't there something trained on Twitter that became racist, sexist and homophobic in about two minutes? It was Microsoft. Yes, yes. They came out with an AI chatbot that was just gonna learn from the way that people interacted with it very quickly. Yes, it learned from some of the darker sides. Don't train any AI on any human conversation. Well, it just shows you that that's right, that any algorithm is based on the information that's given to it. And so there's much more discussion now around the ethical use of AI. And as a philosophy graduate, I'm thrilled to see that my philosophy now, my philosophy degree has some relevance to the world that I'm in. So I understand the concept of ethics and how you approach things that will have an impact, particularly on human activities like recruitment in the workplace. So the use now of AI has as much better European unions putting out guidelines around that. The challenge I think for the world of HR and particularly of recruitment is that you've just been getting your mind around this explosion of technology in HR tech and what an API is and how do you pull various different technologies together to make recruitment better? And now suddenly you have to become an AI statistical expert so that when companies are saying, oh, we've got an algorithm now that is going to help you find the best candidates, how do you interrogate whether that statement is true or not? And or even whether elements of that statement are true and other elements need further proving and understanding. We just haven't asked HR to ever have that training or that understanding before now. Interesting. And is it AI or is it algorithms? So that's a really important distinction and great question because most companies that claim to use artificial intelligence really just have an algorithm which is just a formula. Right, okay. So the real definition of artificial intelligence is whether that computer program can respond back and take the information it's given and alter then its interaction with whatever the input it's being given. As opposed to here's just some information and I'm just going to process that more efficiently and faster for you. And unfortunately, the marketing spin around artificial intelligence is that efficiency piece when in fact the true definition, if you start looking at what IBM was doing with its deep blue program and then Google DeepMind was doing around Asian Game Go and trying to see then how with humans is that I get an input and now I have to process that but I have to judge what the other or the next input might be from an external source. Now you've got proper intelligence being applied over and above just the data activity that's going on. Yeah, yeah. I think with the Google Mind coming from Ron, didn't they find that DeepMind with a human performed better than just with DeepMind? Yes, absolutely and I listened to a very good talk by Gary Kasparov who was the chess player that sat against IBM's big blue computer and he said now in the typical chess, electronic chess game or program that you can get on the internet, you just give an average chess player the support from a computer chess game and they will perform at a grand master level. So you're absolutely right that the benefit really, and that was his point around this, is that we shouldn't necessarily look at artificial intelligence as a threat, rather it's a capability and how do we embrace it in the right way rather than just either blindly follow it or be fearful of it? So with HR then just kind of circling back to recruitment, there's so many things out there. I mean, like so many, so much HR tech I guess is the boss word. What could they do to filter through it or learn about it to then implement into their recruitment process? Yes, and it is scary. I mean, I think for the average HR manager or the CHRO they're being bombarded by new ideas, new companies, I mean, I saw some stat that show that I think investment into the HR tech space by venture capital and private equity in the last three years has trumped any other area of investment in workplace software. Because it's just been seen as last area to be really automated. I mean, there's been a lot that's gone into cybersecurity. So for HR now they're being bombarded with all these different solutions. And I think that probably a couple of things are the best way to address that. One is to talk to other people and other peers within the HR community of how they've done that. And others is that there are really good bloggers and podcasters who give insights on steps and tips on the way to address it. And I do think it's very important to go out and learn and research around this before then having to make a decision. But ultimately, I think the call around this will be what's your backbone that you want to have underlying your recruitment and maybe L and D. And then look at a slightly overused term, but I think the concept is right of an ecosystem of well, what's best to breed that we lock into or connect into that backbone. Which will make it much easier then to then think about how do I build up an overall picture. But it has to be seen, you need to have an HR tech strategy. In the same way that you'll have a workforce planning strategy. And I don't think HR have ever thought about the technology piece in that way. Also leadership and management probably haven't either. Yes. But also, I mean, but to that point, what you're seeing now is that HR is being rebranded to people. So you're having like, rather than CHROs, directors of people, people directors. You know, in the conversations around putting people at the heart of the organizations because ultimately a company's just made up of people. And it seems like it's, you know, it's moving that way. Yes. And hopefully over time there'll be more budget for this stuff. Although it sounds like the cost is going down anyway. Yes. Because you can, you know, these things, I guess that the price is going down and all of those things. But it's getting your head around it. It's just kind of maybe this growth mindset, I guess of, you know, the classic HR person of 10 years ago, it looks very different now and will look again different in 10 years. It will. And I think you're quite right where HR came from was more an administrative. Personal. Exactly, exactly. You know, it was a sort of legal protection, payroll, kind of thing, whereas now it's much more strategic, which is right. Yes, yeah. And an interesting, there's change from CHRO to CPO. Yeah. And then I think the other big trend we're seeing around that is people analytics then. Yes. And there's concept now of the data shouldn't just, the eight people department, office, however you want to describe it, shouldn't just be an area that's looking at development around that, but actually a source of really good data on the performance of the business and that can be used to help in the planning of the business as well. Definitely. As you see more go on the board and on the leadership teams. And I'm seeing that quite a lot now. You have the people director or CHRO, at least on the leadership team if and on the board. Yes. And then, you know, then they start to be listened to more and it becomes like more of the heart, which is really interesting. It is. And very exciting, I think. Yeah. So it's for too long companies saying, oh, people are the greatest asset that we've got. And yet it's been lip service, really, because it's not been the department that's had the greatest investment. No. And quite a tough job to do as well. I mean, people director, you're having to reall, but, you know, if you're it, but I mean, all sorts of things, but very, very interesting if you get it right, I think. How can you measure success with these things now? And great, another great question and really important for any kind of investment in HR tech, which is, you know, what's the return on investment? It's a value this is going to give us. And there are often too many big projects that go in where there isn't enough thought up front of saying, well, what is going to be our measurement? So it might be time to hire, it might be cost to hire. I mean, I've often challenged quite a few, particularly in the early career graduate recruitment space, is what is your cost to hire? And in many cases, they will either give an estimate or they'll say, will I spend this much on marketing? And I'll go, yes, but if you actually went to your marketing department and said to them, what's the cost of acquisition for a client? That is a metric that they are measured on a weekly, let alone monthly basis of are we spending our advertising budget in the most effective way? And it seems strange that we haven't applied some of those metrics on the HR people and department. I don't know why. It's certainly with graduate recruitment, it's probably easier. I mean, certain jobs take longer to hire than others, but I mean, it's easy to measure. It is, it is. And there should just be some guidelines and standards on the data. And some of it could just be data capture on this so we've still come across organizations, particularly in North America, where they initially get thousands of people to apply and they actually have teams of people reviewing resumes, CVs, before then deciding who will come in. So you've actually got a person and they don't, when they look at the cost of hire, they say, oh, well, we spend this much on advertising and this much on the cost of organizing event. But what about all these people that have sat there, just staring at bits of paper, which actually in her... Could be a little bit biased as well, maybe. Absolutely. A little AI in there, what algorithm, pick out the keywords and... Oh, I just, I mean, I just, you're exactly right. Whether that is even a, you want a minimum qualification on there. Yeah, you could just specify that. Because you have lots of people that have just looking at keywords in there and of course that bit again you into that challenge of educational bias and socioeconomic status bias. The thing I find and that we measure, which I think is really the hidden cost in recruitment is candidate retention. Yes. Because you can spend money upfront for sure, advertising, recruitment agencies, time, but they're real hidden costs of retention, right? Because if you make a bad hire, you've spent all of this time training, emotional and energy hiring. Yes. And then obviously when someone leaves, you have to make some redundant or whatever it might be. Again, that emotional thing of having to do that, rehire. So I think I'd like to see more people measure on candidate retention. Yes. And I think that can definitely be improved with these types of techniques. And a really important metric. I mean, you look at some parts of organizations. So there's increasing, now you have contact centers that will, and many of them are now being insured rather than off-shored. And the standard in that industry is between 35 and 40% attrition a year. Really? Yes. Wow. And they accept it as a, this is the industry norm. And if they do a little bit better, they're doing a bit better, but with no other role in an organization, would we accept that level of attrition? And when you look at it, why do we have that? It is because the recruitment process around this is very much, well, can somebody read instructions and respond then to a caller and then what they've been told and they just follow a script on a computer screen. Rather than, is this person suited to being in a room where there are lots of other people on the headsets? It's quite intense. And going through this repetitive work scenario day in, day out. And there are some people that are suited to that and are happy to do that. And it suits, but they're not recruiting on that basis. It's just, and you see so many people just go, well, I'll just go to a contact center for six months, I'll earn some money and then I'll go traveling afterwards. And then these companies are just going through this huge cost of energy and training people and just accepting that they're gonna lose them after six months. You think, well, what an inefficient, business activity. It's a tough one. They're probably just designed to the fact that it's just a job that someone might do for six months during uni or after uni or... And not just not thinking about it as, well, let's find the people where this is suited to or the type of the personality traits that they're quite happy to come in day in, day out. Some progression maybe you could get up to. I mean, yeah. So many things if you looked at it. So I think you're right. People do look at a, I do see on a retention stat that quite often companies will have, but it's not done per department or it's not put in as a cost of, well, if we improved it in this department, how much would that improve? Yeah, what I'd really love to see is firms giving candidates the space to find out about them. Yes. Because it's all, so much of it's one sided. The questioning, the psychometrics, all of these things, which is great. But ultimately as an individual, you want to join a great group of people. Shouldn't really matter what the brand name is per se, right? Because you can learn a lot so much from a great manager. You're really happy and a nice team. Yes. Just giving people the space or even more information. It would be great to receive the psychometrics of the guy or girl you might be working with. Yes. You know, just a little bit of like kind of give and take. You know, open honest, transparent, that kind of stuff, I'd love to see that. It would, I'm with you on that one. And interestingly, one of my team who's head of our global accounts has added this little step into our own recruitment process where we're down to the last couple of candidates and they will actually invite them to come and join a team social after work just so that they can get to talk to a few people, a few of the general team. And the feedback we've got from that's been really positive and just they said, wow, it was the first time where before I was got to that sort of actual job offer stage, I felt I could get to know and they felt much more positively about the recruitment process. It's just what it should be. It is. So what I might do, I'm gonna share my Arctic shores psychometrics with whoever comes to join us next. And I think it's so powerful. Yeah. It's like, this is me. Yeah. This is what I'm like. Yes. This is what I'm like under stress. In all these kind of things. Yes. It's a powerful way to lead. It is. It is. And it comes back to the general point that you've been making around this, which is how do we, in this world of automation, how do we still keep the human touch element at the forefront of how this should be conducted? Because it's very easy to get so entranced by the automation and the efficiencies that we forget at the end of the day. This is not a candidate number. This is a real person. Yeah. Who's got real needs and wants and personality that we should be respectful. Definitely. Definitely. What a beautiful place to end. Oh, brilliant. Thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it. Likewise to us. And I look forward to using it. Brilliant. It's been great. Thank you very much. Hey, folks. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.