Inside the head of a CIO.

Welcome to The Conversation, a monthly-ish musing on all things hiring fueled by conversations with the world's top talent leaders. We're chatting with the Chief Information Officer of ISS A/S — a facility management company with 350,000 employees globally — about the secret to building a great tech stack, and making the business case for AI. Oh, and our chief I/O psychologist talks the assessment renaissance, plus a free tool to chart your conversion rate. 

What's the secret to layering AI into your tech stack in a seamless way? 

Well, I would never advocate for technology. Technologies always evolve, right? So if you’re advocating for technology alone, you’re starting in the wrong spot. Instead, make the case for what the experience you want to deliver is. Because people base their expectations on experiences, not on technology. When a new advancement happens in the consumer world that creates better experiences, there is a very quick expectation that the same advancement will be available within the workspace. We’re seeing AI really emerge out there in the consumer world, providing great experiences and raising those expectations. I don’t think people are going to sit through the systems that they have in years past for much longer. The world of people technology is just at the onset of solid disruption that's really needed. 

So what is the experience you want to deliver? What's the business case for AI?

That’s simple. If HR teams are spending a lot of time doing things that can be automated, you can easily make a business case just from that. If you automate the work, your people can do better things — things they were always better off doing. I don’t think many recruiters got into the business with the dream of scheduling interviews every day. If you take away the work they don’t like, and give them the work that they actually want to accomplish, they won’t just do the work. They’ll do a better job, too. 

So in the end, the recruiters are happier, the company gets more efficient, and that drives you to make even better decisions going forward. That’s the business case.

Read the full 5 questions Q&A with Alice Fournier : here.

The assessment renaissance (assesmentsance?) is in full bloom, and it's hard to even remember why they went away in the first place. Oh, that's right — nobody liked doing them. When they routinely took 20+ tedious minutes to complete on top of separate plug-ins and passwords, can you really blame them? So while this recent resurgence for assessments has been driven by a need to create signal with candidates early in the process, the secret sauce in their viability is really in the delivery method:

Visual. Conversational. And short. Paradox Chief I/O Psychologist Heather Myers, Ph.D. details the science behind increasing assessment conversion.

The fastest way to get from Point A to Point B is a straight line — and yet, frontline hiring processes tend to have an alarming amount of detours, pitfalls, and roadblocks. The rockier the road, the fewer amount of people that will reach the end of it. Here's the truth: You probably don't have a candidate flow problem. You have a conversion problem, and might be losing upwards of 95% of your applicant pool along the long, winding path you've paved for them. Our data says it's possible to convert over 70% of frontline applicants into hires. How does your process stack up?

Get the free tool.

High annual turnover rates in frontline industries often feels like an inevitability. A settled science, water is wet kind of thing. And while our belief is that's usually true (and also not the measuring stick for success, anyways) we've actually seen some organizations defy the odds. Captain D's a fast casual seafood franchise with over 500 locations, leveraged a personality assessment to hire better-fit candidates, reducing their annual turnover by 75% and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. 

Captain D's VP of HR Sean MacMillan delivers the deets in a candid conversation with the National Restaurant Association .

Watch the clip.