How To Make Work Meaningful (Again)

Here are our keynotes from Dr Boris Altemeyer’s talk at the Bath Digital Festival

Although AI and machine learning are popular buzzwords I don’t think it’s a fad. They are really revolutionising the way we work, how we position ourselves and understand the world of work. If you have seen AI modelling at work there is real potential to build models which have an impact on people’s lives. 

How to make work more meaningful. 

We want to get people in the right position so they are productive and happy, which will make them stay longer. Which is ultimately good news for both the company and the person. 

So how can we measure it? 

These are areas that measure what makes work meaningful. Individually we can rate how important each of these areas are to us.   

  • Achievement driven 
  • Recognition driven 
  • Building relationships 
  • How much support we expect in our work environment 
  • Working conditions 

Collecting the data 

  • If we gather this applicant data we can predict how they would behave in work-related situations before they are hired.
  • If we know a candidate is driven by these motivational areas, we can compare it against the company’s current culture. This will assess if the hire is a good fit for the person and the organisation. 
  • After they are hired we can track them over time to see how they grow alongside the organisation. 
  • It means we can give a company live feedback. They can understand how the organisation and the people within it have changed. This gives them an opportunity to change in order to make work meaningful again.  

What is meaningful to people right now?

At Cognisess we are able to track which of these factors are meaningful and important for each generation at work. 

  • Recognition has increased over time 
  • The level of support needed has grown  – with machine learning we can track and tailor it over time, as the support you need at 21 is different to when you are 40. 
  • The need for relationships at work has decreased – our relationships with our colleagues are becoming purely transactional. It is less important to network and work with the right people. 

The future of work

At present, even the most abstract things can be automated to be quicker and more efficient. Some may worry that AI and automation will make work obsolete.  However, what humans excel at is really difficult to automate. 

Humans are able to hold multiple and completely different options about themselves at the same time and think they are true, for example, I’m corporate, conscious and also a rebel. From a psychological point of view this is completely fine, but from a data and AI point of view it’s highly frustrating as we can’t model it. At the moment there are attributes humans are just better at like creativity and situational judgement. It’s not that we are not trying, it’s just really hard. 

At the moment, AI, automation and machine learning have made the more menial tasks in certain jobs redundant. This means we can focus on redefining how we work and how we can make work meaningful. 

If you would like to watch the full talk, click here.

If you would like to discuss this further please contact us below.

Will AI empower women & how?



Will this ever change? 



How can HR support this change? 



Dr Boris Altemeyer



Creating equal opportunities for all with AI








What is Computer Vision and AI?



Why should we trust machines to assess human behaviour?



Making fast and accurate hiring decisions for every candidate – every time





Make every day a good decision day with AI


People Analytics will change the way HR makes its decisions: but what’s driving this change?

Amongst marketing colleagues throughout any sector of business, it is inconceivable that customers would not have their fingerprints and footprints of their data analysed to the nth degree to better understand their value, buying behaviours, patterns of consumption and preferences.  CRM and other data driven disciplines like ASO, SEO, NPS are the life-blood of decision making in marketing. Sure hunches in marketing are still important – but only if they are backed up with data. So, why is it the case, that HR do not as yet apply the same rigour in better understand human potential and performance when making key hiring and appraisal decisions?

HR and People Management have always been an inherently human set of processes…. the clue is in the title. But are people necessarily the best judge of people? Traditionally HR, hiring managers and recruiters are trusted with the responsibility of using their experience to assess and select the best talent available in the market. Knowing what a ‘good hire’ looks like is part logic (reviewing CVs and experience track record) and part intuition (having a feel for whether the person will fit the organisation through interviews).  Both of these practices are fraught with inconsistencies, inaccuracies, subjectivity and even bias (unconscious or otherwise). But in fairness to the HR profession it has been very difficult, up until now, to replace the wisdom of experience with anything else.  But advances in Big Data, Cognitive NeuroScience, automation and machine learning – have heralded a new era of certainty and reliability in the form of People Analytics: the science of assessing people through data.

New Technology – New HR Solutions

Humans and AI are finally able to start working together to make better business decisions. In a recent McKinsey study, 47% of executives have embedded at least one AI capability into their business process.  However, HR remain the function which is least convinced of the benefits to their organisations in deploying AI in HR falling way behind operations, product development, service delivery and marketing and sales. Lack of coherent internal and external data sets, lack of skills to operate in an increasingly digital and data driven HR environment and lack of leadership to drive changes in traditional practices: are some of the main reasons cited for lack of uptake amongst businesses for People Analytics.

As a pioneer in bringing machine learning and People Analytics into the HR market over the past 5 years, here are a number of key benefits that Cognisess have delivered for those companies who have been early adopters for AI in HR.

Saving time – AI has an appetite for data. It is able to process applicants and identify the top candidates faster than an employee manually organising them. This means HR managers can spend more time preparing applicants for the role. Recently the world’s largest brewer, AB InBev, was able to interview their strongest candidates just 3 days after they’d sent in their application. Before employing Cognisess Pro’s people analytics, it took them 10 days. Cognisess saved them time, enabling them to hire the best talent faster.

Saving money – One bad hire can cost €45,000 (£39,294) in loss of productivity. Predictive analytics cannot foresee the future, but in can prevent unsuitable candidates from advancing through the process. It reveals not only the best talent –  but also those candidates who will fit or adapt into a specific company the culture, thrive in the role and therefore stay – thus saving companies a considerable amount of money and resource in the long term.

Increasing diversity, decreasing potential bias – Humans are naturally biased, and although we all do try to minimise it, our bias is always subconsciously present. In the past, there was no way to eliminate it from the recruitment process – predictive analytics and machine learning has completely transformed this. For instance, Cognisess Deep Learn ™ our AI engine, doesn’t take into account race, gender, age or background. Instead, it focuses purely on a person’s cognitive ability and emotional and social attributes to perform to any given role. This change allowed hotel giant, IHG, to eliminate potential bias by 93% from their recruitment process. This not only increases their prospect of developing a truly diversified workforce, but also demonstrates a clear commitment to fairness and inclusion for the employer brand.

How will it transform HR?

“Companies who adopt a predictive analytics system create a brighter future. They not only gain useful objective data on their applicants and employees, but they also gain insight about their talent pools. Managers can identify strengths and weaknesses – even uncovering hidden talents!” Comments Chris Butt, CEO of Cognisess. This approach encourages employees to develop their adaptability and skills whilst managers can better envision a person’s progression in a business by using AI to create complete picture about people and their potential.

As People Analytics become more affordable, accessible and user-friendly we will see many more companies recruit and appraise through a predictive analytics platform, whilst dialling back less reliable traditional recruitment methods. Forward thinking companies such as DFS and Knight Frank are already using our predictive analytics platform, Cognisess Pro to transform their approach. Cognisess Pro’s objective method of assessing talent works well to support and validate recruiters ‘gut instincts’ about a candidate with the data and evidence to back up why they are a good fit for the role. With Cognisess Pro, companies can constantly refine the attributes they are looking for whether it’s short term memory or emotional intelligence – or any other of 120 attributes the platform analyses.

The benefits for HR

Increased Efficiency

With 73% of applicants abandon job applications if they take longer than 15 minutes, there is clearly an art to retaining candidates until the end of an application. Cognisess Pro’s gamified assessments engage the candidate whilst gaining insights for the recruiter – 90% of applicants have a positive experience on the platform. “Our clients often see an increase in applications using our platform.” Reveals Chris Butt, CEO of Cognisess. A positive application experience also leaves candidates with a good first impression of a business.

Increased Diversity

With ethnically diverse teams outperforming non-diverse teams by 35%, it consciously pays to focusing on a person’s innate abilities and skills to identify what a balanced and diverse team fit looks like. Predictive analytics create a fairer process for all by removing subjectivity and bias. Typically recruiters are disposed to hiring the type of person they personally connect and recognise through experience or preference – rather than ability or potential.  Having a more objective approach greatly increases the chances of a building a more diverse and productive workforce.

Increased Speed to Hire

People analytics allows HR to recruit quickly cut through the volume of applicants and information to identify the best talent whilst creating a positive and fair process for every participant. Simultaneously the technology allows recruiters and managers to monitor and benchmark their existing employee talent pool to quickly spot opportunities to redeploy talent – rather than always reaching for an external solution.

Learn more about AI in HR

Cognisess is already supporting some of the world’s leading businesses to transform their approach to managing talent and potential. 

For more insight, download our recent case study with global hotel giant IHG.

What is unconscious bias and why it should be reduced in talent recruitment?

Unconscious bias: a brief overview

Every one of us carries a degree of unconscious bias. This is informed by our personal experiences, stereotypes and cultural context. It’s the way our brains make quick judgements about people and situations without us even registering it. Ultimately these inherent biases can impact decision-making in the hiring process. For instance, during a study by PNAS, participants were invited to review a number of job applications. Despite the applications being randomly assigning a male or female name, each reviewer was more likely to conclude:

  • The male applicants were better qualified than female candidates.
  • They were inclined to hire male candidates over female applicants.
  • The male applicants were deemed more worthy of a higher starting salary than the female candidates.   
  • They were more willing to invest in developing a male candidate than a female one.

This is a prime example of unconscious bias at play. Although reviewers didn’t deliberately discount females because of their gender; their unconscious bias did. Ultimately this would impact on the hiring decision, career development and salary of the candidates. It may have even prevented the best candidates from being considered for a position.

Can bias ever be eliminated or at least reduced?

“Because we are all human, we all harbour conscious and unconscious biases. Sometimes they’re useful – like when we stubbornly always choose to stay at our favourite brand of hotel; but often they’re not. Even when we try our best to identify and minimise them, they are always there as they form an intrinsic part of being human,” revealed Cognisess CSO, Dr Boris Altemeyer: “

Although this bias is instinctive, there are methods recruiters can use to minimise the risk of affecting hiring decisions. The emergence of artificial intelligence provides an effective solution to reduce bias. According to Dr Altemeyer: “AI doesn’t have to worry about understand its own unconscious bias, because it has none.”

Cognisess Pro, our market leading AI recruitment platform, makes it optional for candidates to disclose age, gender, race or the schools they went to and that can be hidden from assessors too.  More significantly this information is never taken into account for Cognisess assessments. This is called ‘blind recruitment’ and focuses purely on the attributes and abilities that matter when hiring a candidate. This process provides decision makers with an in-depth understanding of a candidate’s suitability for the role – regardless of background. The platform is data-driven with 50 assessments to choose from measuring over 120 attributes. This range of data has been proven to assist companies like AB InBev, CIL and IHG  make better informed and fewer bias decisions about recruitment and assessments.  For example, hotel giant IHG has recently eliminated potential bias by 93.75% using Cognisess Pro, enabling a fairer and more accurate approach to talent management compared to their more traditional recruitment processes.

Why should companies strive to minimise it?   

It is a given that leading recruiters are committed to a fairer recruitment process for applicants. This is important in building a credible employer brand and reputation to compete in the talent market.  But making a conscious effort to remove bias also provides other significant benefits. “Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.”  according to a recent Mckinsey report. Adopting an approach like Cognisess Pro which can reduce or eliminate bias, will lead to the development of a more diverse workforce.  “Teams which have a more diverse composition bring so much more to the business in terms of having strength in depth to maximise opportunities like problem solving, creativity, customer empathy and innovation which can benefit a company in both the short and long term,” confirmed CSO, Dr Altemeyer.

Additionally, a recent analysis of talent attraction strategies revealed that  67% of applicants want to join a diverse team .  Focusing on this will support companies to attract more candidates and the best talent into the applicant pool.

Taking the first steps to address bias

“In the battle for talent, not every company is going to win the hearts and minds of the top 3% of graduates every year – and that thinking in itself is a form of bias”, stated Cognisess CEO Chris Butt: “Therefore companies have no other option to but too look beyond the obvious to identify talent in its many forms and how it can ably fill the skills gaps they have.”

Cognisess Pro is the most advanced People Analytics and Assessment Platform on the market today bringing AI to HR. It is helping companies create a fairer process and pinpointing the best person for the role based on ability and potential – not gender, age or race. If you are uncertain of how to best start the journey of integrating AI into your HR processes, contact us today to schedule a demo.

Three Good Reasons to Utilise AI Over Traditional Recruitment Methods


It’s the less biased approach




It cuts time and costs




It allows you to retain your employees





Why Amazon’s Ml / AI CV Selection Tool Developed a Bias










Contact us to schedule a demo of Cognisess Pro – the most advanced People Analytics and Assessments Platform in the market today.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace

“Work shouldn’t be a race between humans and machines, but a part of life that helps people recognize their full potential.” Said Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Similarly at Cognisess we believe the future artificial intelligence (AI) will not dominate the workplace, instead it will integrate and replace many outdated methods to create a more efficient, data-driven HR function.

Our CSO, Dr Boris Altemeyer has recently commented that “the relationship between AI and humans will be one of augmentation – not automation –  so we should be prepared to collaborate with these new technologies which will bring huge benefits to the way we make people decisions.” Below Cognisess has highlighted how AI will transform your future workplace.

Traditional Recruitment Methods will be Replaced

This is already materialising. Cognisess is collaborating with numerous brands, such as Vauxhall, to implement AI in their recruitment process. Deloitte Human Capital Trends research also found that 38% of companies are currently already using AI in their workplace.

AI is making it possible to recruit potential, basing decision making on a candidate’s capabilities instead of their credentials. Boris Altemeyer, Cognisess’ Chief Scientific Officer, told Growth Business that: “rather than asking a person to qualify whether they think they would be good at something, they can be tested to find out where they have the actual potential to be good. This opens up the use of AI to further enhance recruitment, employee performance and career learning & development. By providing an even more accurate and scientific understanding of people’s’ true talent and potential.”

According to Talent Board, 47% of applicants have no communication with employers for at least two months after handing in their application. This demonstrates how difficult it is to manage the volume of CVs companies receive. In compassion Cognisess Deep Learn, our AI analytics engine can process millions of data points in real time. This increases the number of candidates a company can process in a quicker time frame, with an increased chance of finding the right person from a wider pool of candidates. CV’s will not be able to compete long term with Deep Learn’s efficiency and data on each applicant’s cognitive performance, behaviour patterns, emotional intelligence, core skills and personality traits.

AI Will Allow Us to Focus on the More ‘Human’ Tasks

AI can process data more efficiently than humans, but there are skills we are stronger in. A Korn Ferry study found human talent is 2.33 times more valuable compared to assets like technology. “At the very core of Cognisess is a desire to realise people’s potential. People are a company’s most valuable asset and we have developed our AI software to nurture employee’s skills” Comments Chris Butt, CEO of Cognisess.

HR admin roles have a 90% chance of automation by 2035, in comparison, HR managers only display a 0.6% chance. AI is capable of handling data and performing mundane tasks, but lacks soft skills. HR Managers need to solve conflict between two employees or creatively problem solve – which AI is unable to do. At Cognisess, we have observed that our clients are able to make a more informed hiring decision when they have data on each individual. Cognisess Pro is able to identify the top candidates for the role, but ultimately it is down to the judgement of the recruiter on who they believe is the best candidate.

The Key to a More Productive Future Lies in People Development

In the future employee’s roles will involve more soft skills, dedicating less time to routine tasks like data handling and more time on adding value to the company – whether that is through their people skills, creativity or problem solving abilities. Cognisess Pro will give the workforce an opportunity to retrain their skills in preparation for this. The Deep Learn AI engine measures your skills through a series of assessments to identify an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

As a company, we will evolve our technology according to the needs of the workplace. For instance, we identified it is difficult to achieve the right team dynamic and an incorrect employee combination can lower productivity – so we created Team Fit. If you would like to discover more about high performing teams, read last weeks blog here.

AI will have a concrete presence in our future, not to replace us, but to transform our workplace for the better. But why wait for the future? Live in the future now by signing up to Cognisess Pro. Cognisess Pro has 120+ cognitive, emotional and base skills assessments and is able to differentiate between poor skill and conditions such as dyslexia. Reap the benefits of the future today.


blogs news cognisess predictive people analytics

Humanising AI

 In light of recent data privacy and GDPR developments and the associated fallout, this recent article from the Guardian which quoted Cognisess raises some interesting and valid points.  We do welcome this debate and think it is very timely.

However, whilst it rightly challenges where the human value is within these new systems – it perhaps underplays the significant benefits that predictive analytics and AI can offer job seekers and employees when done right.

We have seen the introduction of AI and automated processes, working in parallel with trained professionals, bringing greater transparency and less bias than traditional HR and recruitment practices, which can often be inherently flawed, with limited accountability. And that can only be a good thing.

We have also noted this technology enabling a greater democratisation of human capital, particularly with startups and SMEs who need access to affordable and dependable tools that are currently only available at a premium price to bigger companies. It’s the smaller players who have fewer resources and need to move with greater agility, who will benefit most from this revolution. Of course, the bigger companies will benefit from managing their scale better with greater transparency but it’s the army of smaller businesses who have the greater need to work smarter, faster and take greater risks in their talent acquisition efforts.

While the games and quizzes the Guardian mentions do indeed help to indicate which candidates might or might not be the best fit for a role, they can also empower people, from students to seasoned professionals in helping them to understand exactly where their talents lie and therefore more easily find the right opportunities to fulfil their potential.

Currently we rely on hearsay as to why we might not be successful for a job role or promotion. But now you as a candidate or employee can expect an accurate and transparent account of where your skills did not match on that occasion. This is a tremendously human improvement from the current level of feedback one might expect. Over stretched Human Resource professionals will never have the time or tools to accurately feedback detail to all candidates with the same speed and accuracy as the AI will.

And rather than ‘bewildering’, these tools are designed to help identify attributes which may often be overlooked by a fatigued or distracted interviewer. It is no fault of recruiters or employers that the job market is becoming increasingly complex. The bewilderment factor is in fact more prevalent from the speed at which the demand for new skills and capabilities are emerging.

Through candidate focused platforms like our and others, candidates can now freely familiarise themselves with a range of assessments and job requirements, and use these supporting resources to help them with both their search and their personal development.

Undoubtedly, workforce and HR Analytics is a rapidly evolving and growing industry and increased competition is a good thing, but quality will remain as important as ever, as will delivering real value and reliability for employers and employees alike. We believe that systems like Cognisess Pro will in fact add a stronger human dimension – if for no reason other than managers will have the time and accurate information to make the best people decisions.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be running a series of articles to highlight some of the work we’ve been doing in these areas with our advisors and clients to ensure that maximum transparency and data integrity is enshrined throughout the Cognisess platform and procedures.

For more information about how Cognisess uses AI to reduce bias for HR and recruitment practices contact us at

Combating Bias in Recruitment: Cognisess addresses the issue in the Sunday Telegraph article

The Sunday Telegraph added their voice to the debate surrounding the introduction of automation and AI into the workforce area by publishing an article regarding the future of recruitment and how it may remove bias from the recruitment process:

The article chooses the timing of the #MeToo movement to examine the future of candidate recruitment and asks whether it is possible to remove the bias out of talent selection using AI to analyse key employment skills, capability and performance – thus potentially replacing the traditional job interview. The argument being that machines are neither aware nor interested in someone’s age, gender, looks or other points of subjectivity which humans are sub–consciously (or consciously) prone to.

The article highlights how the Cognisess platform is designed to eliminate bias at the early stage screening process as well as the final stages of recruitment. “Unlike a human being AI has no inherent bias and even if all of the data is not completely perfect, the volume it accesses – three million data points every 10 minutes per applicant in some cases – gives it a considerable advantage over humans.” Commented CSO Dr Boris Altemeyer in the article.

Cognisess Deep Learn™ is the AI engine and the intelligence behind everything at Cognisess, using machine learning and algorithms to synthesise and observe probabilities and patterns. It’s an innovative and dynamic predictive analytics tool with the ability to learn, absorb and react to multiple information streams and data sets.

Dr Altemeyer explains “Technically this system can recruit in its entirety, but we would never advocate removing people completely from the process. If you think about humans reviewing 60 or more video interviews a day and still being absolutely unbiased or as sharp as when they watched the first one that would be a tall order for anyone, so it’s about getting as much of the purist data to them, so they make the best decisions”.

There are ever increasing pressures on companies to reduce bias and speed up hiring processes meaning HR and Recruiters have no choice but to turn to new technologies to make them more accurate, transparent and fair. These technologies mean that candidates and employees can not only look forward to being handled in a way that is inherently fairer and more accurate – but also they are hoping the new technology will provide a more personalised and individual approach – far greater so than any HR or Recruiter would ever have the time to dedicate.

AI may not solve societal inequality through talent recruitment – but it will improve social mobility far more than a human recruiter will be able to. Cognisess’ mission is to deliver a more accurate, fairer set of actionable insights into how we, as people, are assessed. And ultimately, that’s all most of us really want when putting ourselves forward to be considered for career opportunities. We simply want our potential to be judged objectively as to whether the job opportunity is well within our capability levels or perhaps it’s more of a stretch into a related field.  So let’s bring it about and be ever more transparent.

For more information about how Cognisess uses AI to remove bias from talent and recruitment assessment contact us at