With the advent of blockchain, virtual reality and progress in neuroscience, in the future you might not even have to go to an interview.
Things could get very interesting. Here’s how it could play out:
Decentralized Job Selection
Your qualifications for the job will be assessed by a decentralized system that is rated by everyone you have worked with in the past.
All of the colleagues you have ever worked with participate in a global rating system to assess your skills. When you are hired everybody that is connected to you that played some role in your selection will be rewarded a small bounty. This is already being done by startups like Hirematch.
This will use huge data sets, possibly through a blockchain tech, that can measure a wide range of competencies : speed of your work, how much time you spend focused on one task, your growth rate in the job, capacity to overcome a learning curve, communication/presentation skills (based on facial/video recognition), and work style.
This will make LinkedIn’s “endorsements” section look like child’s play.
The traditional resume won’t play a big role anymore. Rather, the entire history of everything you’ve written online will be analyzed for core competencies like emotional intelligence by a Watson-like configuration. Watson can already detect personality traits through written text.
Predictive analytics products like Attuned | Predictive HR Analytics will become the norm — tools that use large data sets to predict employee and team behavior. Data science is the new religion.
On the Job Simulations and Interviews using Virtual Reality
You will participate in cyber-simulations of on-the-job scenarios in the comfort of your home.
Today over 50% of job interview techniques fail to accurately predict on the job performance — companies might as well pull names from a hat. According to a former HR VP from Google, one of the largest reasons for this comes down to unstructured interview techniques and not enough time spent objectively assessing the candidate (and vice versa).
People don’t really know what it’s like to work at that company and companies don’t really know if the candidate will be able to do the job based on a round of interviews.
Enter VR: As a job seeker you’ll throw on your Oculus Rift and will be able to actually go to your “first day of work.” You’ll meet people, go through a training, and do the work you’d do as a real employe. It will look and feel like you’re really in the office.
It would be like a paid virtual internship.
The simulation could last a couple of hours over a 1–2 week period and your performance can be measured. You’ll know if you enjoy the work and employers can assess your participation in the VR world compared to their current employees.
In fact, all of the job interviews could be conducted like this. Why bother going to meet people face to face?
Motivational Assessment via Brain Scan
Mental toughness, grit, and motivation for the job will be assessed via fMRi and TMS brain scans.
For example, people will be given certain tasks to complete while measuring brain activity. They interviewers will be able to understand at what point stress starts to negatively impact this persons performance — which might depend on the strength of the candidates amygdala. This might determine the team they are hired into or the level of position that best suits them.
A candidate being considered for a high-level leadership role will require a large amount of patience and thus interviewers will focus on the strength of the prefrontal cortex.
Scientists have found that machines can detect our decisions 7 seconds before we think them.
“Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done” John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.
Brain scans could thus be used in parallel with virtual reality to more accurately predict how you would react in a given on-the-job situation. Not to mention, this will further enable disabled individuals to participate in the labor force (Matthew Naglewas the first disabled person to use a brain-computer interface to restore communication ability).
The entire screening process for candidate selection will be transformed — companies will no longer be sifting through resumes.
Instead, they’ll be looking at brain scans.
The introduction and mixture of the above technologies would not only make it smoother for candidates, but in some ways more interactive and engaging. It will also become more objective and save companies time and money.
The interview process will be more reliable. The risk of skew results because of cranky interviewers with low blood sugar and emotional decisions will cease to be an issue. Results won’t fall prey to unstructured techniques and unfair human biases that emerge. The entire candidate experience will be seamless and likely conducted from one’s own living room.
This is assuming that you even go to an interview at all.
What if we had surrogate personalities via a brain-computer interface that had access to all of the above data and functioned like us? Then job seekers would never have to go to an interview again and simply show up on the first day of work.
Some of these technologies already exist but still a bit away from practical use. Once we see a few more iterations, theoretically possible to develop for the recruitment industry.
It’s simply a matter of when —oh, and the huge ethical implications of adopting them at a mass scale.
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