Talent & Hiring

Automated screening tools are now widely used to shortlist job applicants, and their vendors often present procedural transparency as a guarantee of fairness. This article examines that claim. We analyse 46 hiring systems used by mid-sized employers, combining audits of published decision rules with interviews of recruiters and applicants. We find that making a procedure visible does not prevent unequal outcomes when the data used to train or tune the tool reflect earlier patterns of exclusion. Applicants also read transparency differently from designers: many treated detailed scoring explana…

Skills-based talent analytics promises to replace job titles and degrees with direct evidence of what people can do, yet organisations struggle to decide which skills data deserve trust. This article proposes a compact taxonomy for skills inference and evaluates it against supervisor-rated performance. We combine self-reported skills, assessment results and signals drawn from project and learning records for 3,400 employees in five companies, and we compare three inference approaches of increasing complexity. A simple model built on a well-defined taxonomy matched the predictive value of more…

Small and medium enterprises employ most of the world's workers, yet research on onboarding focuses largely on large corporations with dedicated human resource teams. This study explores how smaller firms welcome new employees and what difference their practices make. We interviewed owners and managers in 41 firms and surveyed 530 recent hires about their first ninety days. Most firms relied on informal methods, including shadowing, conversations with the owner and learning by doing. Where these were supported by a simple checklist, a named buddy and a clear conversation about expectatio…