Best Blogs Of March

Our Best Blogs of March post includes stories using a product development process to create a hiring process, interviewing via AI and the technology behind smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo. That’s a lot of great stuff to read while waiting for the tulips in your garden to bloom!

Using product development to create a hiring process

Despite the best laid plans, every hiring process has its blind spots. A process might skew toward hiring older people or it might do a bad job at finding candidates that are a good cultural fit.

Tech industry insider Dan Pupius has devised a unique approach to eliminating blind spots from a hiring process; by using a product development process to create one. As head of engineering for Medium, Pupius looked to create a talent acquisition process that could incorporate new information, improve over time and that didn’t rely on any one single individual.

The process Pupius and his colleagues developed was so effective, Medium published the details behind it online and suggested that other companies adopt it. At its most basic, the process involves the creation of two products: a hiring process and a team of employees.

Read the whole story here.

AI interviewer

Using machine learning algorithms to make hiring decisions isn’t cutting-edge, revolutionary technology. But using AI to actually interview candidates? That’s taking a very, very progressive approach to hiring.

South Korean company Midas IT recently released an enterprise solution that allows companies to take this state-of-the-art approach to interviewing. The company’s inAIR solution uses an AI program called MIGHTY to essentially interview candidates.

In the interview process developed by Midas IT, MIGHTY asks interview questions and administers “games” for applicants to play. The interviewee must be at a computer with a webcam and microphone.

During the interview, MIGHTY uses facial recognition and speech analysis technology to determine if a candidate is being truthful in their responses. The AI program also scans the 68 facial muscles in each applicant’s face to assess their emotion and expressions.

Games administered by MIGHTY are designed to identify the best department for an applicant. Based on 450 academic neurology studies, the games attempt to determine each applicant’s temperament and aptitude by mapping their prefrontal cortex.

Read the whole story here.

Alexa and others use an inverse approach

When people started freaking out after hearing Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa laugh, the company put out a statement to reassure users that nothing is wrong with their device, adding that changes were made server-side to address the issue.

The entire episode highlighted one crucial, basic fact about digital assistants like Alexa – the technology behind them is almost entirely cloud-based. The systems located in a smart speaker like the Amazon Echo are mostly there to listen for key activation phrases, like “Alexa…” or “Ok, Google…”

Once a digital assistant has been activated, all of the work it does takes place on a remote server. This is the opposite from most other technology we use. For instance, an iPhone does all of its computing work on the device itself, unless you activate Siri.

Read the whole story here.