Nigel Guenole

Affiliate Research Scientist

Dr Nigel Guenole is the director of research at the Institute of Management at Goldsmiths, University of London. Nigel’s work focuses on improving organizational effectiveness by integrating behavioral science with machine learning and statistics in the area of people analytics. He has over 20 years of experience solving people related business problems with data in many of the world’s largest companies.

Current projects focus on three areas. First, he works on identifying and removing bias in artificial intelligence technology systems used in talent acquisition. This is a particularly important area because the scale at which AI systems process job applications is so great that even minor disparities in treatment of different groups have profound effects on the hiring outcomes different groups experience. The second area focuses on candidate sourcing and application processes used by organizations in talent acquisition. Existing research suggests internal candidates outperform externals and cost less, and that candidates appointed via contested processes outperform those appointed via informal processes. However, consulting projects he is working on suggest shades of grey in this area. As a result he advocates developing talent attraction and assessment strategies with respect to each organisation’s unique context.

The third area focuses on the validity of profiling tools used in executive profiling. Talent management professionals are in the middle of a revolution in assessment technology where new methods are being proposed that were until recently unimaginable (e.g. social media scraping, gamified assessments). The reliability and validity of these methods for occupational uses is to a large extent an open question. Nigel applies his deep expertise in psychological measurement to evaluating the suitability of these new methods for occupational use.

Nigel has published many scientific articles and chapters, and has given many conference presentations on these topics. He is co-author of The Power of People: Learn how successful organizations use workforce analytics to improve business performance. This book presents the insights of dozens of directors of HR analytics from Fortune and FTSE firms on how to establish and grow the people analytics function.

Recent Research