We are honoring the Top 10 winners of our Student Open Letter Contest by publishing their entries. This one is by Fariza Fazyl, age 17.
Dear Ohio State Senators: I’m a Student, Not a Substitute
We are honoring the Top 10 winners of our Student Open Letter Contest by publishing their entries. This one is by Michelle Huang, age 17.
Combating Bias and Finding the Right Role Fit With English + Personality Testing
For any employer, hiring is not just about finding the most qualified candidate; it’s also about finding someone who fits with the company and its culture. It is imperative to identify people who can not only do the job well, but also those who will thrive in the company and adapt well to the environment.
One critical, but often overlooked, element is how they communicate – within the team, one-to-one, interdepartmentally, and externally.
Too often, traditional hiring practices may not be sufficient to garner a deep understanding of communication competency and general style, which can determine whether a new hire is a triumphant, successful addition to the team, or a costly error with potentially detrimental effects to business outcomes, organisational culture and staff morale.
Today’s workplace demands more than traditional methods. And the great news is that the solution is within reach. Utilising tools like English proficiency and personality assessments will help HR and L&D teams to gain better insight into candidates they have shortlisted. This reduces bias and improves role fit within jobs.
The Hidden Costs of Biased Hiring
Bias may not always be obvious, and it isn’t just about unfairness. It is also about inefficiency.
Decisions that are influenced by personal assumptions, rash judgements and misunderstandings mean that sometimes great candidates are overlooked and those who may not be the right fit are hired.
For example, when standard testing and assessments are not incorporated, some candidates may be dismissed or bypassed due to an accent or mannerism, while another candidate who seems “confident” may be given the job.
Companies often end up hiring people who perform well in interviews, rather than those who work well.
Personality Testing
Each role has its own requirements and demands, unique to the position and company.
Personality testing helps identify whether a candidate matches well with a particular job and the team.
Did you know that more than 80% of companies today are using some form of personality testing as part of their recruitment process? Interestingly, those companies are seeing a 30% improvement in employee retention rates and a 20% boost in their team’s overall performance.
Why? Because they made a more informed choice.
Assessments allow for a deeper understanding of each person’s working style. They can identify if a person is detail-oriented, whether they work well with structure or flexibility, and how they respond to stress and feedback.
These insights prove invaluable when hiring and help to prevent mismatches. By aligning a candidate’s personality with the job requirements, companies can set candidates up for success before they start their job.
Aligning Communication Skills With Job Success
Effective communication in any organisation is a vital component for success. It ensures people are aware of their roles, responsibilities and helps build strong client and employee relationships. Employers must ensure that communication is a priority if they want to have happy employees and ultimately great productivity. Research shows that 70% of employers consider English proficiency a critical skill within their teams.
Another study showed that over 1.5 billion people worldwide are currently learning English, as they have identified it as the language of business.
Consider the following benefits of learning English:
- Reduced conflict in the workplace
- Healthy employee relationships
- Improved productivity
- Improved relationship with clients
- Healthy work culture
- Employee satisfaction
Alison’s English language test offers insight to hiring managers about a candidate’s ability to:
- Understand written communication
- Communicate ideas well and maintain professionalism
- Engage in team meetings
- Write emails and reports accurately
This is quite useful when hiring globally. Having an objective measure of English skills allows hiring teams to make correct hiring decisions and avoid overlooking great candidates.
When the English is aligned early, it removes uncertainty, improves onboarding, and builds a more cohesive workforce.
Why does this matter?
Hiring mistakes can be frustrating for companies, and for smaller companies, this may even be devastating. Smaller organisations mean that every hire has a bigger impact, and there are fewer resources to make mistakes that HR departments often make with employees.
This is why it is important to have personality and English assessments in place. They provide a clear, results-driven outline that will surely help busy managers and business owners make more informed decisions.
Take the Guessing Out of Hiring
Most HR teams don’t have access to this level of insight. They make decisions based on resumes and cover letters.
Alison’s LMS+ is changing that.
LMS+ is much more than just a learning platform; it’s a tool for making results-driven decisions.
With this tool, you will have access to:
- Aptitude testing
- Workplace personality testing
- English proficiency testing
- Learning profiles
- Assessment dashboards
This tool and all its features were designed to reduce the time, error, and workload involved in making great hiring and upskilling decisions.
Hire Smarter With Alison
Even though we try to employ without bias, it may be impossible because employers and hiring managers are only human. However, these tools seek to minimise the influence of bias in hiring and assist in making better decisions.
Combining English proficiency, aptitude, and personality testing helps hiring managers get a better perspective.
They’re not just guessing or feeling; they are making well-informed decisions.
Ready to use data to find the right candidates? Schedule a quick demo to see how quickly you can adopt a data-driven approach to hiring.
Word of the Day: retrench
This word has appeared in 16 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
Coursera Coach Wins Newsweek AI Impact Award for Outcomes in Commercial Learning
By Mustafa Furniturewala, Coursera CTO
I’m excited to announce that Coursera Coach has won the Newsweek AI Impact Award for AI Education: Best Outcomes, Commercial Learning. This award recognizes innovations using AI to tackle key business challenges and deliver measurable impact.
Coach is an AI-powered personal tutor designed to make online learning more personalized, interactive, and effective for millions of learners worldwide. It’s powered by large language models and uniquely grounded in course material from top institutions like Stanford, Yale, and Google. By offering a personal tutor that delivers continuous support across Coursera’s catalog in 26 different languages, Coach helps learners engage more deeply with their courses, regardless of their background. Since its initial launch, Coach has exchanged over 34 million messages with more than 2.4 million learners.
“AI is reshaping our world, and the organizations receiving this award are at the forefront of that transformation,” said Jennifer H. Cunningham, editor-in-chief of Newsweek. “We are proud to spotlight the companies whose technologies and practices are pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve—responsibly and effectively.”
Coach beta was launched in April 2023 — just six months after ChatGPT’s release — and I’m incredibly excited by how it represents a major step forward in delivering on the promise of personalized and accessible learning. From the initial pilot on the lecture pages in 2023, to refining the UX to focus on video explanations, practice questions, pre-quiz prep and course navigations in 2024, we continue to enhance Coach to support more learners with even greater personalization, accessibility, and impact across the platform. With Coach, global learners, particularly those underserved by traditional education systems, can more effectively learn the skills they need to unlock economic opportunity.
Trump: Don’t Delete the History That Makes Us American
We are honoring the Top 10 winners of our Student Open Letter Contest by publishing their entries. This one is by Peter Philpott, age 16.
Our Attention Spans Are Shrinking. Stop Looking at Your Phone and Go Live.
We are honoring the Top 10 winners of our Student Open Letter Contest by publishing their entries. This one is by Emma Hua, age 16.
Word of the Day: ornithologist
This word has appeared in 18 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
Imitation versus Retrieval Practice in Foreign Language Pronunciation Learning
The question then is whether imitation is the best approach to learning pronunciation or whether an alternative approach is equally or more effective. Kang et al. (1) investigated exactly this research question. They looked at comprehension and production (i.e., pronunciation) of foreign language words and pitched an imitation approach against a retrieval practice approach. In two experiments, undergraduate students in the US studied 40 Hebrew nouns in 3 or 6 learning cycles in one of two conditions:
Imitation condition: The image of the word was presented and the audio file pronouncing the word was played simultaneously. The learner then repeated the word aloud.
Retrieval practice condition: The image of the word was presented, and the learner was prompted to attempt to pronounce the word. Then, the audio file was played.
Final comprehension and production tests were given immediately after practice or two days later. For the comprehension test students heard each of the words and had to pick the correct picture for them. They found no difference between the imitation condition and retrieval practice condition on this test given immediately after practice. However, on the delayed test students performed better after having studied the material using retrieval practice than imitation. For the production test students were presented with images and asked to say the word out loud. Here, retrieval practice outperformed imitation on both immediate and delayed tests.
Importantly, performance in pronouncing the word correctly and overall quality of pronunciation during the final practice cycle was significantly lower in the retrieval practice condition compared to the imitation condition. This in itself is not surprising because one would assume that a learner’s performance to pronounce the right word correctly will be higher in a condition where they have just heard an audio file of it compared to a scenario where they have to retrieve it from memory. What is surprising is this additionally invested effort in attempting to retrieve the word from memory to pronounce it during practice pays off by resulting in better comprehension and pronunciation scores on the final tests after practice. This results pattern aligns well with the idea of desirable difficulties (2) that states that introducing effortful processes during practice (e.g., retrieval practice) is more beneficial in the long term even though during practice they may result in lower performances.
What to take away from this? After reading this study, I changed my behavior slightly when engaging with the pronunciation task on the language learning app: Before the audio file plays, I press the recording button and attempt to pronounce the sentence first. It does feel a bit more effortful, and I do make more mistakes than with the imitation approach, but that additional challenge makes it also more fun and hopefully more effective in the long run. In the classroom, teachers could embed activities that prompt students to attempt pronouncing words or reading out sentences first before offering them the correct pronunciation as feedback. That said, I would not completely discontinue imitation as a strategy. I think it has its place and can help scaffolding processes, too. Maybe mixing it up with retrieval practice is a good middle ground as it offers variation in practice which can be motivating.
