Worked at a company with the same, except the bios were on the internet, not intranet. One of the directors listed watches/horology as one of his hobbies and had a copy of a hodinkee book on his desk. Quite the WIS one would think.Originally Posted by AlphaOmega
At the coffee machine one day I made small talk and mentioned that I saw he was into watches - I was wearing my blnr. He proceeded to tell me his Planet Ocean was the greatest dive watch ever made, Rolex are for posers and lost their way as a tool watch company many years ago.
Imagine I had watches on my CV and he was interviewing me. Charming. "You and your Rolex can F off" I imagine.
A little narrow minded when they may be professionally brilliant and were just trying to give a sample of who they are as a person.
I always think it is important as an employer to care and show an interest in your staff's life even if it doesn't effect their role performance.
This thread had shown there is no right answer, so surely keep an open mind?
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And in any case it is a candidate's market and there is a war for top talent. Some of the opinions demonstrated on this thread back up why AI is being used to screen and target candidates based on skills and experience, relevancy and intent data instead of letting human bias mess it up. If someone is screened out at initial stages because they are into watches then that's not a destination employer I'd say.
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Indeed - I'd take the view that if you were willing to write me off dispite industry leading skills and experience, then I was not likely to stick about long in that company ethos anyway.
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I tend to agree with getting the machines involved. After applying for 63 jobs I had long ago realised that I must have something wrong with me other than the fact that I was "a stranger in a foreign land". I went off to seek some professional help with my CV, and was told that it was my address. The area was seen as troublesome. Hopefully an address database wouldn't be programmed into the machine.
Sometimes I think that the employee could do with feeding the potential employer's details into a machine. I think that I have only turned down 3 jobs in my life. One was with a major white goods manufacturer. I decided that what they expected you to do (service-side) in a day was optimistic, so decided at the interview that I wouldn't take it if offered, but didn't mention this to the interviewer. Sod's Law decreed that he was to ring me that evening to offer me the job. When I declined his kind offer, very politely and without giving him any reasons, he burst into a furious rage. Another guy was interviewing me for a post, then decided that my skills were more suited to another post (setting up his IT). He moaned like a drain about his current staff, and seemed such a chancer that I closed my notebook halfway through the interview. He got the hint after about 15 minutes. The last one was a job in the higher rate tax band, something I have never had, with a LR Discovery as company car. I think that I had got the interview on the strength of the most glowing of references from a former employer. They asked me if I had seen it. I hadn't, so they handed it over so that I could have a read. The bloke in the reference sounded better than God. I told them at the end of the interview that I didn't feel the job was right for me. I would have never lived up to my own reputation!
Horology is mentioned as one of my interests and I was offered my current job straight after the interview before I even left the building. I had the interview followed by a site tour, then back to the office where I was offered the job there and then.
The topic was briefly mentioned within the interview though I got the job because I had the relevant experience and skill set, my own personal hobbies and interests were way down the scale of importance.
I doubt anyone is currently using the sort of AI that doesn't just formalise human bias at this point and even if they were, the training sets would just rediscover them. Knowledge engineering to achieve 'The View From Nowhere' is hard.
Personally, when I'm interviewing, I see the hobbies and everything else as an opportunity for someone to best let me know who they are and how good their soft skills are. Hard skills are easy to pin down and pretty standard, soft skills that make a good working team better than the sum of its parts are both rarer, harder to identify and often context specific. I've also found it's a great way to weed out bullshitters.
Does exist and I run the UK and Ireland operations of a company that is doing this from a candidate profiling and targeting/campaigning basis. Thing about real AI is it reinforces the importance of true human intelligence. It just takes the boring bits or the bits that intentional or unintentional bias can mess up.
Happy to discuss offline lest this thread becomes a geek fest! :)
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It would be great to get into the detail as AI seems to attract a lot of negativity on account of the prospective job losses.
I fear we would quite quickly get into non-G&D areas so it's probably a BP thread though.
Yeah or create a thread on it in G&D. Every industrial revolution (and we are entering the AI revolution) ends up with more net jobs being created, those jobs being very different from what went before (just like there aren't many Spinny Jenny operators or Coal Miners left). True AI allows humans to do more of what Human intelligence is unique at (insight, mentoring, coaching, leadership and so on) and let AI make decisions based on data and removing all biases. So logically more jobs will be created overall, with some being lost in areas that see more and more automation.
Done.
I confess that I'm curious. I'm personally of the opinion that it is literally impossible to avoid bias and I'm not entirely sure what to make of 'true human intelligence', but I doubt I'm up to speed.
One man's narrow-minded is another man's focused.
In any case perhaps it's as well I'm no longer in a position to make employment decisions. When I was, I would routinely receive 4-figures of applications for some posts. I've no doubt some good candidates went in the bin because they thought they'd be clever and use 10 different coloured texts, 8 fonts, 9 pitches and some clipart, for example...
But probably not, I probably dodged a bullet and didn't employ someone who - say - enjoyed sniffing little girls' bicycle seats in his spare time...
Hobbies are sometimes something to discuss in an interview, but generally if an employee has time for them, they're not being worked hard enough.
Even if it was a joke, a comment like that would have successfully removed me from the process on the spot.
I can only imagine the look of horror on a non wis interviewers face when they ask “what’s the most you’ve spent on a watch” and you reply “£6000”. This would obviously make you an idiot and unemployable
Quite.
In the Sotadic Zone, apparently.
"Are you a member of any Clubs or Societies" I put TR Register.
Inerviewer had a TR6 like mine ! We talked at length about Cars...... passed interview and on to next stage.
The employment professionals I've spoken to, plus interviewers, have stated not to put something in the interests section unless it relates to the role you're applying for. You don't state you play rugby league because you like groping other men, you state rugby league because the job you're applying for is a sales role where you'll be required to meet targets. Rugby league would suggest a determination to win, and such an attribute would fit such a sales role. In other words, if you state an interest, you should be able to explain how it relates to the role.
OK, thank you everyone, I shall not include any reference to what we all consider an interesting past time - watches.
As some have mentioned it can be perceived as too specific etc, I think it’ll be a good idea to leave off my interest in number plates too!
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I don't know who you are, who you work for or if you own your own business. However, some of your comments suggest that you probably have a high staff turnover and I wouldn't work for or with you if you displayed behaviours suggested by your comments. Are you seriously suggesting that you believe people should be worked so hard that they have no time to have a life?
When I'm interviewing I read all of the CVs put in front of me and I don't mind if people include personal interests but they must be brief and the last thing on the page. If someone appears very nervous but otherwise promising I might go to their interests to allow them to talk about something that they are familiar with to calm their nerves. Interviews can be nerve wracking experiences and not everyone copes with them in the same way. A little empathy and humanity goes a long way.
Not this time. This time there is a fundamental difference to all previous industrial revolutions: New cost effective industries, techniques, and opportunities all require fewer humans than ever before.
There are no newly created niches for human employment en masse. There are not enough new jobs to replace those lose to AI and automation.
Consider: What new businesses require lots of human intervention? The key economic trend is to eliminate human involvement as far as possible on the basis that humans are expensive and unreliable. Innovation is currently limiting mass human employment potential, not creating new opportunities for the bulk of people.
These are all niches. Can everyone become one of these things? If so, who will they be mentoring, coaching or leading?
Can you think of any new, large scale niches that could or would employ people en masse? If you can think of something that might do this, would it in fact not be more profitable or more likely to succeed if it introduced automation/AI to eliminate as many humans as possible?
AI techniques are already in many cases demonstrated to have their own biases, often based upon implicitly or unwittingly biassed learning datasets or 'impure' algorithms.
At the end of the day, any system of choosing will have biases, whether they be intentional or otherwise. There is no magic that makes AI immune to bias. It's just a new way to impose bias, albeit probably different biases compared to those that went before.
Logically not so, I'd say. As I observe, previous experience does not inform us as to what seems likely to happen this time.
As you say, areas that see more and more automation will lose jobs. This is an increasing number of areas, even including creative or advisory skillsets. So the key question is: What new areas that do not inherently involve automation are there to replace these lost jobs I'd say none (or at least not enough on a large scale).
As I say, any new successful niches or opportunities will tend, from the very first moment, to be largely automated. They would not and could not be successful (or potentially successful) if they needed large numbers of people.
Anything new which could in theory employ the people made redundant by their jobs being automated would not be able to take off if it did choose to employ people rather than use AI/automation because its cost base would be too high since it would have to employ lots of people!
New industrial/business opportunities and niches seem to more and more rely on eliminating the chance of human employment as far as possible in order to be economically/commercially successful.
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