Meet Sonia Pawson, the Director of Government Skills at the Cabinet Office currently spearheading a team of 250 talent professionals responsible for delivering some of the most highly regarded graduate programmes in the UK, including the Civil Service Fast Stream.   

And as of 2023, Sonia finds herself orchestrating the intricate process of selection, assessment, and talent development in the age of GenAI.

As a chartered occupational psychologist, Sonia is one of a rare breed able to balance being an academic and a practitioner to deliver outstanding results. In fact, Sonia and her team are already approaching AI with cautious optimism, redesigning their selection process to embrace Generative AI while still capturing an accurate picture of a candidate’s true potential...

In this episode Robert and Sonia unpack… 

🤖 How and where her team are embracing and integrating AI into the selection process, and how they’re balancing improving efficiency with maintaining high ethical standards, and predictability

🏖️​​ How they brought together analysts, data scientists, and psychologists to experiment with a new algorithm to reduce their internal mobility process by 10 working days, how they use ‘sandboxes’ to safely test new ideas –– from chatbots to algorithms –– in a controlled environment, and how they make sure these new AI tools are fair and bias-free together 

📃​ Details into the analysis that Sonia’s team did to conclude that the CV is not as predictive as an assessment, why the age of ChatGPT means the CV is now well and truly unreliable and outdated. Plus, Sonia shares how the civil service are moving away from traditional language-based psychometric tests, towards an assessment that is task-based and interactive to measure behaviours in a way that is truly accurate and predictive.

💡The data points that show that candidate use of Generative AI is here, and why now it’s time for TA leaders to tackle usage head-on. Robert and Sonia pose the question… can you really afford to wait to do the same? 

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