A new piece of voice testing technology could be incorporated into online recruitment methods that would analyse the process through which prospective job candidates tackle a task, not just the results they achieve.
BrainGauge has been developed by Australia’s top information and communications research institution, National ICT Australia (NICTA), and analyses the nuances in people’s voice signal patterns.
As part of a recruitment process, it would analyse how work overloading influences people’s voices, and the recognised effect that when people are feeling under pressure they lose some control over their voice muscles, which shows in their speech.
Chief researched, Bo Yin, said that the technology would be able to asses the maximum amount of work a candidate can handle using specific skills, and help select the people who not only achieve good results but also go about it in a reasonable way. He said that it could have a beneficial effect on lowering staff attrition.
“Talent managers told us that it is often very difficult to test for competencies such as service quality and retention, due to the limitations of the conventional aptitude assessments,” said Yin. “Traditional aptitude assessments usually look at the end result that candidates have arrived at but don’t necessarily test the processes by which they got to them.”
BrainGauge is currently undergoing testing at a number of Fortune 500 companies and at a major Australia call centre.
However Geoff Newman, recruitment expert from flat fee recruitment company Recruitment Genius, warns about using solutions such as this in isolation.
“Not only must this research be rigorous and demonstrate statistically valid results, it must never be used exclusively without other formal recruitment processes. Rather this could be a useful tool to complement interviews, personality, attitude, observational and other competency based tests. It will be very interesting to see if this solution works across different cultures and accents.
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