May 11, 2018 at 9:53 am
jay-h - Friday, May 11, 2018 9:22 AMExactly how would an avatar provide useful information? If it's simple fact/history questions, these are answered by a resume. The avatar is not you, it cannot predict what answers you would give to questions. It certainly cannot answer coding questions (in which case it would be giving its own answers, not yours).As an interviewer what useful information would you learn from an avatar (other than what the person could provide in writing)?? Nothing
I'd argue that the interaction and potentially random nature of how an interviewer asks questions could be more efficient than trying to read a resume or CV, and certainly can suit others. If you hire someone and read lots of resumes, you'll quickly realize that you miss things in resumes because it's a tedious, monotonous process.
Not that this wouldn't miss things either, but it ma work better for a portion of interviewers or candidates.
May 11, 2018 at 9:55 am
This avatar thing seems like an attempt by recruiters to reduce the tedium and workload of having to interview scores of run-of-the-mill candidates for entry level jobs. But rather than an avatar, they could simply send the applicant an online survey asking questions like:
- Do you have a 4 year degree?
- Do you have any experience with SQL Server?
- Are you available to work Monday - Friday 8am - 5pm?
- In the comment box below, please summarize why you would be a good fit for Company X.
- Click on the link below to read a FAQ about what it's like working for Company X.
So, an interactive avatar adds what to the process?
When I change jobs, it involves about a dozen phone interviews and maybe a half dozen in person interviews tops, and when my team is interviewing for a new member, we interview maybe a dozen candidates (pre-screened by HR) before making a decision. This is not something worth automating. The outcome of the interview hinges around the conversation.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 11, 2018 at 10:48 am
Eric M Russell - Friday, May 11, 2018 9:55 AMSo, an interactive avatar adds what to the process?
Agreed. And if the interviewer asks unanticipated questions: "would you be willing to relocate to Burlington VT?" the avatar could hardly answer for you.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
May 14, 2018 at 8:16 am
I don't understand the avatar part, unless there are two avatars, one on each end of the process, making the process totally automated. But if I'm between jobs, I wouldn't trust an avatar to speak on my behalf. Why, so I can sleep in? In a way, avatars would homogenize the candidate pool, making it harder for stand-out candidates to leverage their best attributes.
There are some job search websites like Indeed where you can post a stock resume and also complete a questionnaire of common followup HR inquiries, both of which the candidate can forward to a specific company or made public to any company searching for candidates in a specific industry. Also, Indeed will index employer profiles and candidate profiles, providing a report of best matches. That can provide a starting point for a shortened list of candidates for which you want to interview in person.
Honestly, a lot of these new fangled AI / IoT / Social Media products and services, stuff that gets touted in trade publications or the media as "innovative", are just gimmicky attempts at attracting investors. It's not leveraging the technology in a practical way that attracts customers and generates revenue. For example, if your organization can create customer service avatar and eliminate an entire call center in process, then that's useful. Not happy for the customer service reps, but at least it's a major cost cutting initiative from the perspective or the organization's bottom line. But automating your candidate interview process with an avatar just makes life a little easier for a handful of HR staff.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 14, 2018 at 9:55 am
Eric M Russell - Monday, May 14, 2018 8:16 AMI don't understand the avatar part, unless there are two avatars, one on each end of the process, making the process totally automated. But if I'm between jobs, I wouldn't trust an avatar to speak on my behalf. Why, so I can sleep in? In a way, avatars would homogenize the candidate pool, making it harder for stand-out candidates to leverage their best attributes.There are some job search websites like Indeed where you can post a stock resume and also complete a questionnaire of common followup HR inquiries, both of which the candidate can forward to a specific company or made public to any company searching for candidates in a specific industry. Also, Indeed will index employer profiles and candidate profiles, providing a report of best matches. That can provide a starting point for a shortened list of candidates for which you want to interview in person.
Honestly, a lot of these new fangled AI / IoT / Social Media products and services, stuff that gets touted in trade publications or the media as "innovative", are just gimmicky attempts at attracting investors. It's not leveraging the technology in a practical way that attracts customers and generates revenue. For example, if your organization can create customer service avatar and eliminate an entire call center in process, then that's useful. Not happy for the customer service reps, but at least it's a major cost cutting initiative from the perspective or the organization's bottom line. But automating your candidate interview process with an avatar just makes life a little easier for a handful of HR staff.
All jitters aside - the avatar concept is already in place. After all - your resume or CV, the initial questionnaire that many of the company sites have, your background/credit/social media check would answer the same data currently being envisioned: the only difference is in HOW that info is conveyed. I do believe the concept is mostly aspirational, where it might be able to answer things outside of the data already available through current channels (which would require smarts not currently available to the average end-user. Of course - if someone were ever able to pull off an avatar that is smart enough to hold their own during an interview, I would LOVE to try it out.
Still even today I could see value on the avatar concept if it were there to gather the data that a prospect would want to know about an employer. Essentially making this a 2-way street instead of the highly asymmetric mechanism we currently have.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
May 14, 2018 at 11:04 am
I won't be interviewing any avatars. My personal opinion is that they'd be even worse than phone interviews. You know the ones I'm talking about... the ones where you ask a question and the interviewee is hemming and hawing and stalling while they look it up on Google.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 14, 2018 at 11:40 am
Jeff Moden - Monday, May 14, 2018 11:04 AMI won't be interviewing any avatars. My personal opinion is that they'd be even worse than phone interviews. You know the ones I'm talking about... the ones where you ask a question and the interviewee is hemming and hawing and stalling while they look it up on Google.
It would be funny to watch an avatar hem and haw for a few seconds while it crawls MSDN in the background looking for an answer to the question: "How do you get the current date and time in SQL Server?" or any other question the intervewer can throw at it.
Hell, if the avatar can give you all the right answers, then forget about the human candidate, and just hire the avatar. I mean, a smart enough avatar can just do the job right? 🙂
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 14, 2018 at 11:55 am
Avatars aren't useful for in-depth work, and I hope they aren't. If they are, they should get the job.
These aren't because of laziness, but the idea is amplification. Can you do 1000 phone screens? Maybe, but would you want to when most of them ask similar questions? They're not the same, and I do see a case where avatars can respond to a variety of things that the person might ask, and aren't easily digested from a resume. Dress code, hours, on call, travel, types of broad work, previous likes dislikes at a company, why a gap in history, etc. I think this because as I interact with some of these avatars in chat areas, they're way easier to get things from than scanning a dense set of web pages. They are like a search, but a search that's personalized for me data.
They are good for phone screens, but not coding skills, and certainly not soft skills. I think this would be great. If I had a set of 20 questions I could ask to decide if I wanted to proceed with a more in depth call. This removes the need for me, as an interviewer, to waste time on some simple things that should be covered up front. Sure, could I make a FAQ? Yes. Would I, as an initial screener want to read one from every user? no. Because maybe 9 or 12 of my 20 questions would be the same as others, but I'd have some different ones from other companies. I could read down my list of things and the avatar could answer, or say I don't know. I'd have my own judgment here. Did I get enough positive responses? Maybe. If you don't program your avatar to cover enough to keep me interested, I'm out. Go to the next person.
Certainly the avatar would make this process go quicker than calling each person and letting their human brain catch up, not be in a loud place, bad cell, trying to context switch or reschedule. Saves me time.
I think many of you that think negatively about this are looking for a perfect avatar to replicate the human. I'm not. I'm looking for a way to get quick, customized information out of the situation and make a decision.
May 14, 2018 at 1:09 pm
Someone in our DBA team created a ChatBot, or more specifically a SlackBot channel. It can respond to common queries like "dba, what is the status of serverA?". My understanding is that an Avatar is the audio-visual human-like front end for the "AI" Bot which actually does all the work.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
May 14, 2018 at 2:51 pm
Are there good statistics about how people actually get jobs nowadays? In the previous 5 decades, the researched published in What Color Is Your Parachute? suggested that this approach addresses a very tiny segment of the job market.
May 14, 2018 at 8:50 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Monday, May 14, 2018 11:55 AMAvatars aren't useful for in-depth work, and I hope they aren't. If they are, they should get the job.These aren't because of laziness, but the idea is amplification. Can you do 1000 phone screens? Maybe, but would you want to when most of them ask similar questions? They're not the same, and I do see a case where avatars can respond to a variety of things that the person might ask, and aren't easily digested from a resume. Dress code, hours, on call, travel, types of broad work, previous likes dislikes at a company, why a gap in history, etc. I think this because as I interact with some of these avatars in chat areas, they're way easier to get things from than scanning a dense set of web pages. They are like a search, but a search that's personalized for me data.
They are good for phone screens, but not coding skills, and certainly not soft skills. I think this would be great. If I had a set of 20 questions I could ask to decide if I wanted to proceed with a more in depth call. This removes the need for me, as an interviewer, to waste time on some simple things that should be covered up front. Sure, could I make a FAQ? Yes. Would I, as an initial screener want to read one from every user? no. Because maybe 9 or 12 of my 20 questions would be the same as others, but I'd have some different ones from other companies. I could read down my list of things and the avatar could answer, or say I don't know. I'd have my own judgment here. Did I get enough positive responses? Maybe. If you don't program your avatar to cover enough to keep me interested, I'm out. Go to the next person.
Certainly the avatar would make this process go quicker than calling each person and letting their human brain catch up, not be in a loud place, bad cell, trying to context switch or reschedule. Saves me time.
I think many of you that think negatively about this are looking for a perfect avatar to replicate the human. I'm not. I'm looking for a way to get quick, customized information out of the situation and make a decision.
If I had to screen 1000 people for a job, a timed online or in-person test would seem to be the easier thing to do. Of course, the first question would be "How do you get the current date and time in T-SQL?" 😀
And, no... I'm not looking for a perfect avatar. To be honest, I'm not looking for an avatar at all. A well written FAQ page on a website would do just fine on the employer side. I just don't see the need to waste clock cycles on giving life to the offspring of Max Headroom.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 14, 2018 at 9:17 pm
Jeff Moden - Monday, May 14, 2018 8:50 PMSteve Jones - SSC Editor - Monday, May 14, 2018 11:55 AMAvatars aren't useful for in-depth work, and I hope they aren't. If they are, they should get the job.These aren't because of laziness, but the idea is amplification. Can you do 1000 phone screens? Maybe, but would you want to when most of them ask similar questions? They're not the same, and I do see a case where avatars can respond to a variety of things that the person might ask, and aren't easily digested from a resume. Dress code, hours, on call, travel, types of broad work, previous likes dislikes at a company, why a gap in history, etc. I think this because as I interact with some of these avatars in chat areas, they're way easier to get things from than scanning a dense set of web pages. They are like a search, but a search that's personalized for me data.
They are good for phone screens, but not coding skills, and certainly not soft skills. I think this would be great. If I had a set of 20 questions I could ask to decide if I wanted to proceed with a more in depth call. This removes the need for me, as an interviewer, to waste time on some simple things that should be covered up front. Sure, could I make a FAQ? Yes. Would I, as an initial screener want to read one from every user? no. Because maybe 9 or 12 of my 20 questions would be the same as others, but I'd have some different ones from other companies. I could read down my list of things and the avatar could answer, or say I don't know. I'd have my own judgment here. Did I get enough positive responses? Maybe. If you don't program your avatar to cover enough to keep me interested, I'm out. Go to the next person.
Certainly the avatar would make this process go quicker than calling each person and letting their human brain catch up, not be in a loud place, bad cell, trying to context switch or reschedule. Saves me time.
I think many of you that think negatively about this are looking for a perfect avatar to replicate the human. I'm not. I'm looking for a way to get quick, customized information out of the situation and make a decision.
If I had to screen 1000 people for a job, a timed online or in-person test would seem to be the easier thing to do. Of course, the first question would be "How do you get the current date and time in T-SQL?" 😀
And, no... I'm not looking for a perfect avatar. To be honest, I'm not looking for an avatar at all. A well written FAQ page on a website would do just fine on the employer side. I just don't see the need to waste clock cycles on giving life to the offspring of Max Headroom.
I'd just want an avatar that could return the unsolicited phone call I received from a spoofed number.
May 15, 2018 at 3:48 am
It's not you interviewing 1000 people, it's the candidate that applies for 1000 jobs. However, for initial screens, I've certainly had to call, or have had HR call 30 or 40 people to try and get 5-6 that were worth interviewing. Multiply this by the number of positions that might be open and the number of resumes. Having some quick initial screening might mean less HR people, which I can only think of as a good move.
Now if we had legal avatars that could reduce the number of lawyers...
May 15, 2018 at 6:58 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 3:48 AMIt's not you interviewing 1000 people, it's the candidate that applies for 1000 jobs. However, for initial screens, I've certainly had to call, or have had HR call 30 or 40 people to try and get 5-6 that were worth interviewing. Multiply this by the number of positions that might be open and the number of resumes. Having some quick initial screening might mean less HR people, which I can only think of as a good move.Now if we had legal avatars that could reduce the number of lawyers...
Reminds me of the old joke... What's brown and black and looks good on a lawyer? A Doberman. 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
May 15, 2018 at 7:32 am
This reminds me of a news article I read the other day.
https://www.theonion.com/dazed-jeff-bezos-realizes-he-spent-entire-conversation-1822418205
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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