Hyundai Canada uses A.I. to remove hiring biases

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part one of a three-part series on the Canadian auto industry’s drive for racial diversity, from the office to the shop floor.

Hyundai Canada President Don Romano foresees the day when the automaker’s senior management will reflect the country’s diversity.

“Our executive ranks are not going to look anything like they look today. They’re going to look more like what our customer base looks like, which isn’t a bunch of old white guys like me.”

Amid the growing calls worldwide to stamp out racism, the automaker recently enacted a series of measures, including the use of artificial intelligence, to weed out unintended bias in its hiring practices.

Hyundai’s action plan began with a June 3 companywide email from Romano stressing the need to combat racism in Canada.

While Hyundai has increasingly emphasized employee diversity in recent years, it would push its efforts even further, the email said.

Currently, about 37 per cent of Hyundai’s 227 employees in Canada are nonwhite. The company plans to increase that percentage, although it won’t be setting internal targets, said Lydia Bowser, Hyundai Canada’s senior manager of human resources. Such a target, she said, “creates wrong behaviours and bad decision-making. We want our growth to be credible.”

BLINDED TO BIAS

Hyundai has hired the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) — which, as a first step, conducted employee training on unconscious bias.

Unconscious bias is defined as a preference or inclination formed without reasonable justification that prevents a person’s judgment from being balanced, said Renée Bazile-Jones, a CCDI associate.

The training of 150 employees, conducted by Bazile-Jones, was the company’s best-attended Zoom group meeting during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bowser said. Hyundai Canada has also hired experts to conduct employee training on Indigenous culture and Black history.

“Being able to have those conversations across the organization and then share ways to mitigate bias is a huge piece,” Bazile-Jones said.

Hyundai also set up employee resource groups designed to give Black, Indigenous and Person of Colour (BIPOC) staff the opportunity to share their opinions and insights with senior management.

“They have to be willing to tell the CEO directly [about the] organization and how it needs to change, where it needs to change, what it needs to change,” Romano said. “And we have to be totally open to their ideas and their suggestions.”

REVISE RESUME REVIEWS

To mitigate unconscious bias in its hiring practices, Hyundai Canada is using AI technology to screen the first round of resume review, Bowser said.

“We’re still in the early stages of getting this tool ready for implementation,” she said. “It’s an AI tool that is integrated into an existing Applicant Tracking System so that every resume that comes into Hyundai will be automatically and immediately screened.

“No candidate will be left unscreened, which increases the likelihood that more diverse candidates [such as women, minorities, Aboriginals and people with disabilities] will be considered.”

The biggest challenge, said Bowser, is ensuring “we pay attention to criteria we’re putting into the system. It ensures that resumes are screened based on experience and skills rather than any other factors.

“For example, we need to be open to different levels of education and not just B.A.s or MBAs, as it’s possible some designated groups don’t have the same access to those.”

‘INTERNAL CONSULTANTS’

Hyundai Canada is also building a database of employees who have lived or worked overseas and have knowledge of relevant work experience.

While more than 37 per cent of Hyundai’s workforce is non-white, currently none of the executive team is female or BIPOC, said Bowser. Thirtyfive per cent of employees are women. “We recognize that we have work to do.”

Companies attempting to effect change also need to implement processes designed to monitor progress, Bazile-Jones said.

“Most organizations don’t know what they don’t know,” she said. “Unless they’re putting a rigorous measurement system into place, they don’t have factual information to deal with and understand the experiences of their workers.”

Bowser said the anti-racism plan is a Hyundai Canada initiative that will likely be rolled out to the company’s dealer network.

The measures, Romano said, mark the beginning of a longterm commitment at Hyundai Canada.

“This is critical,” he said, “that you’ve got to just look in the mirror and say, ‘Listen, this is not the legacy I want to leave behind.’ ”