Workplace Wellbeing and Evidence-Based Hiring with Dr. Paul Jones

Are your organization's wellbeing initiatives making a real difference—or simply creating the appearance of caring?

In this episode of the HRchat Podcast, host Bill Banham sits down with Dr. Paul Jones, Associate Dean for Postgraduate Education and Student Experience at Aston Business School and upcoming DisruptHR Birmingham speaker, to explore the difference between genuine workplace wellbeing and what Paul calls "well branding"—highly visible wellbeing initiatives that fail to address the root causes of employee stress, burnout, and disengagement.

The conversation then shifts to evidence-based recruitment, where Paul explains why better hiring decisions don't come from adding more interviews or assessments, but from collecting the right evidence. He shares practical insights into structured interviews, psychometric assessments, ability testing, and why many hiring processes unknowingly measure the same qualities multiple times while overlooking the capabilities that truly predict success.

Bill and Paul also discuss bias in recruitment and the growing role of AI in hiring. They explore why bias begins long before interviews take place, how AI can unintentionally reinforce poor decision-making, and why human judgment remains essential throughout the recruitment process.

Whether you're an HR leader, recruiter, hiring manager, or organizational psychologist, this episode offers practical strategies to improve employee wellbeing and make smarter, more evidence-based hiring decisions.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• Why workplace wellbeing initiatives sometimes become "well branding"
• Addressing the root causes of burnout instead of treating symptoms
• The value of structured interviews and evidence-based recruitment
• How psychometric and ability assessments improve hiring quality
• Why more recruitment stages don't always produce better hiring decisions
• The "bananas, raspberries and strawberries" framework for evaluating recruitment evidence
• Recognizing and reducing bias throughout the hiring process
• Using AI responsibly to support—not replace—human decision-making

If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to the HRchat Podcast, leave us a review, and share it with colleagues working in HR, talent acquisition, and people leadership.

Connect with Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmjones/

Transcript

Welcome And Heatwave Context

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Jones, Jones, welcome to the show. Dr. Paul Jones, thank you very much for joining me today. How are you doing, my friend?

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Good. A little bit hot with the heat at the moment, but generally I am good. Having a nice time as 10 towards the end of the day, and I still be out for a walk near the beach later, so I am good today.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Yes, listeners, we are recording this episode uh towards the end of June, and here in Blighty, in England and in Wales, it is a scorcher at the moment. In fact, there are heat warnings and whatnot happening all over the place. The train companies are saying don't travel. Um, many companies are mandating employees not to go into the office if they can help it. Um, and that's because it's reaching about 40 degrees. There we go. Global warming for you in action. But despite that, um, we both had cool drinks today, and we are cool dudes, and we're gonna plow on through and record some cool content. Uh, this is your first time on the pod pool, even though you're not uh first of many, exactly. Um let's let's start with beyond my wee introduction a minute a minute ago. Tell us a bit more about yourself, uh, your background, your career background, your personal passions, what gets Paul up in the morning?

Meet Dr Paul Jones

SPEAKER_01 1:44

So, work wise, I work at Christ and University as Associate Dean for Education Student Experience, and I've been in all my education for the last 15 years or so, that was a practitioner covering HR learned development. My background's in work psychology as well as HR. So those are the type of areas I spend a lot of time working in, as well as the recruitment industry as well, which links into today's talk a little bit. In terms of what I enjoy doing, I used to enjoy cycling quite a bit and then got back into it recently and found I don't enjoy it quite as much when I'm peddling up really big hills and getting my heart went up to 178 beats per minute. But hopefully that will come down for the future. But the usual things reading, getting out to nice places, exploring the world, and music's probably one of the biggest things as well. I love finding new music to listen to. So those are bits about me, but the people element, I guess, is the independent thing for all those things. It's often been about understanding people, being nosy is a good way to put it as well. But just people's always been my interest at the heart of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 2:44

And I wonder at the moment, is is there is there a big work project or a big work goal which is going on at the moment, something maybe that you're working on that perhaps offers a new avenue or opportunity for you or just excites you?

A Book That Critiques Workplace Wellbeing

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I think the biggest thing I'm working on at the moment is a 95,000-word book. And it ties on to probably one of the things I'm gonna cover a bit later, which is about well-being, but trying to critique well-being in organizations from a philosophical perspective, a number of philosophical perspectives, just to try and dig into that then. And why I like the book format, it gives me a chance to be writing a format that suits me. It's just more satirical and trying to tear well-being apart a little bit, and then we can try and together as an audience across the world, try and put it back together. Because I think there's some performative things about well-being which is happening, and I want to try and tackle those things and call out basically before we try and fix it.

SPEAKER_03 3:37

95,000 words you said.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

It's a lot, don't know.

SPEAKER_03 3:40

Okay, it's a lot. Will there be an audio version at all?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

I think there'd probably be an audiobook, a bridge version of 10 different sessions, maybe to cover that much. It's a lot of words, but hopefully the mix between a more academic style, but also satirical musings and trying to make things a bit more absurd, that would make it a more enjoyable read then. So 95,000 sounds a lot, but hopefully the way it's been constructed makes it a bit more enjoyable to read them.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

Very good. So, this masterpiece you're working on at the moment, and uh our listeners can expect to see this out there sometime maybe in 2020.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Well, I'll hand it back to the publisher next March. Then there's the publishing process that goes through and refine it. But I've got 70,000 words down on digital paper at the moment, so that I still need refine and doing stuff. But there's a lot of work there already. So this is more keeping the pace going, making sure I try and refine the arguments, polish some things I've gotten, and finish off that last 22, 25,000, 22,000, 25,000 words, I think, roughly.

SPEAKER_03 4:43

So yeah, still lots to go at the moment. But you're doing better than J A R Martin by the sounds of it. So good work. I think so.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

I haven't I haven't put some ideas out there, not done anything about them actually writing stuff, which is good. So I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 4:59

I I think I'd read that people have now pretty much given up on the Game of Thrones books being completed at this point. But um, there we go.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

I think that time has come and pass, doesn't it? I think there was a a zeitgeist for those sorts of things at one point, and now we're well past that. So way back in the original.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Yeah, that said we've got the new series of House of the Dragon out. I saw that last night, the first episode. It's very good. But that is not HR related, so let's get back to that side of stuff.

Well Branding And DisruptHR Birmingham

SPEAKER_03 5:27

Um okay. Originally we were going to record this conversation today, and we were gonna use it as a last-minute excuse to also promote your involvement at this London tomorrow. But you are currently all the way over in Wales, beautiful Wales, near the Garapaninsula. I mean it's a jolly long way to come in extreme temperatures. So we've given you an hour, and instead, what that means, listeners, is uh Paul's uh pre-prepared uh deck, which was all ready for tomorrow. He's gonna use that in Birmingham in September, September 24th, uh back at the Button Factory. I've had a look at it. I know it's awesome. Um the topic is well branding. Do you want to take a couple of minutes, Paul, and and tell listeners A, what they can generally expect from uh uh a disrupt event? Well, actually, more specifically Birmingham. Um, you've been to a couple of those now. That's that's quite a unique community, lots of characters. Um, and and B, what are some of the hoped for learning outcomes from your from your talk?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Birmingham events, first of all. I so I fell in love with the format probably about two years ago now. So I'd come to my first event. I brought quite a few of my MSc students with me that were studying human resource management, and loved the community first of all, but also the petrocule style presentations then. So having five minutes, 20 slides, then rotating every 15 seconds without any choice. It's a very different way to have to put yourself through some presentation pressure then, in terms of getting messaged across. So I love the format, and we just come together to bring that format into ASP as well when we did an AI Summit. That worked really well. So I just love the format. But my talk in particular about World Brandon is really at the heart of the book I'm writing, which is the well-being can quite often be a performative thing that organizations do to say that they're doing something without really tackling the problems. The way I've described it as people previously in organizations would be it's almost almost like sticking plasters over wounds that we create for ourselves and organizations. So rather than just sticking the plasters over, how do we actually stop creating those cuts or forming bruises in organizations then? So the talk's gonna be challenging some of those ideas about how we need to move away from well-branding. So this idea of we talk a good game and we brand ourselves as looking after well-being. But actually, it's the talk of how we do these things, not actually the reality of it. So it's gonna be getting people to think about well-being. It might make some people think differently about what they're doing internally to organizations in terms of rolling out well-being strategies. But I think the big thing is they want people to think, think about what they do and think about the difference it makes. Now, are they really tackling the problem or they're tackling the symptoms of that problem? And I think what often it's about the way we promote these things is look what we are doing over here without actually making a difference to what people feel on the ground down.

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazette.com. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

Okay, very good. I've got so many follow-up questions to that, but we've got other things to get to today.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

About the next podcast episode, then, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 8:44

Well, I guess, but I'll do one quick follow-up. Uh, listeners, Dr. Paul Jones is a pretty stylish, cool dude. Um, my follow-up question is will you be wearing that lovely waistcoat of yours on stage in Birmingham?

SPEAKER_01 8:57

There's a range of waistcoats I've got, so I don't leave the house without a waistcoat usually in some kind of survival bar. There'll be some kind of waistcoat, no doubt. So if you look at me online, I think most pictures will have some kind of waistcoat action. And very yesterday, I was walking along the beach, and there was a guy who was even more stylish than me, which I know is hard for you to believe, Bill. But he was totally dressed, white trousers, white shirt, but he had this beautiful waistcoat of various colours on. It just looked amazing, shining the light yesterday with the sun. So I've got some inspiration over thing. How could I raise my waistcoat game?

SPEAKER_03 9:32

A waistcoat of many colours. I wonder if his name was Joseph, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

He looked like he was foreign, so I think it might be a foreign version of that name from somewhere a bit different, or we might see from different historical text, then. So I think, yeah, maybe a bit more cosmopolitan in terms of the name, but possibly. Foreign, maybe English.

SPEAKER_03 9:55

Who knows?

unknown 9:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

All refined English people wear waistcoats, we know that.

SPEAKER_03 10:02

Very good. Okay, let's get into the hard-hitting meat of our conversational sandwich today, then.

What Structured Hiring Gets Right

SPEAKER_03 10:09

Um, many organizations, Paul, are structured, sorry, use structured interviews, ability tests, and psychometrics to make recruitment more objective. In your opinion, what do these methods give us and what do they still leave unexplained?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

So, recruitment's one of my favorite areas. I worked across the recruitment sector, both as a recruitment consultant, but in various HR roles. But doing both work psychology and HR, recruitment's always been a key part of what I've learned about, but also enjoy thinking about. So they give us a structure basically. We know from the different research that's been conducted over many, many years, that to do good recruitment, we need a very careful structured process. So we ask a combination of structure interviews and psychometrics, capability test, that tends to give us the best way to try and recruit people, the most effective way. So we can talk about things like predictive validity, and that's about trying to make sure we can predict how likely a person is to perform well in a role. So we know the stats from different parts of research tell us about the best methods and what we can do with each of them to bring those things in the workplace. They do give us a way to reduce bias, make things more consistent, give us structure. They're really useful things to have in place then. But they're not all seeing not omniscient. They are very useful if they work well. They don't give us a full picture of how we can recruit because there's still missing gaps in that process, then. But also what I see quite often is even though we know the research around these things, the way that's implemented in practice can quite often not be as good as we might hope for. So the best practice ideas for research don't always translate to the workplace then.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Okay, so for this particular interview, I said, Paul, if you've got anything you want to uh uh have included within this conversation, just

More Steps Do Not Mean Better Hires

SPEAKER_03 11:59

shoot it over. Um and you suggested a question here, which is a wonderful question. Um, I don't really fully understand what it means, though. So I'm just gonna pose it and let you talk. Um here's the question: Have employers confused more recruitment activity with better recruitment decisions? What did you mean by that? And what's the answer?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

So it's very easy to imagine a world where we try and convince ourselves the process is more rigorous because we put more processes into that process or more things or activities into that process. So if you think you could have psychometric testing, you could have a structure interview or quite a few structure interviews, you could have an assessment center, you might get them to do some kind of work-based test. I was talking to someone recently and they'd applied for quite a senior role. I think they said there was up to 20 different things that had to do through that whole process, then. And I think we can convince ourselves the more things we put into a process, the better results we might get. But I don't think that's the case then. And we did talk briefly yesterday. I was going to give you, I give you an example yesterday. So every process we have should be looking for bits of evidence we can add into the process. Now, if we were going to find out whether someone had bananas, raspberries, and strawberries, then we'd want to have questions or evidence collection methods where we could just assess each of those different things then. But quite often we don't think about those different areas as well as we could do. So we might ask quite a few things that relate to bananas, and we might ask the same, we might have different methods for getting to the same result then. So we can have five different things that all measure how many has Paul got bananas. What good is that when we're not measuring then strawberries or raspberries as well? So we need to have evidence collection points for all the key things are important for the job, rather than get caught up and thinking if we add all these processes in, actually that's going to make it better. It doesn't necessarily add anything to the process of getting stuff. If anything, it can detract from the process because the candidates will get frustrated. You wasted extra time. And I'd rather see the time used for what I describe as critical subjectivity to make sure you spend time on deconstructing and analyzing the evidence collection process in all different stages as well, and make sure it's done properly rather than trying to shoehole lots of stuff in. Then the actual decision making isn't spent that long trying to deconstruct people's different interpretations, the bias that could be in it, how they view things differently but from different angles. So I think for me, it's more about use the right methods for what you want to do, but spend more time, the spare time, actually discussing what you've found and coming to the right decision at that point in time.

SPEAKER_03 14:33

Agreed. That does not sound bananas to me. Okay, so uh next question.

Bias And AI In Screening

SPEAKER_03 14:38

Recruitment often tries to remove subjectivity from decision making. In your opinion, is that realistic or is subjectivity always present in the process? And on top of that, what where does where does AI fit into this with the parsing technologies and reviewing of uh applications and all the other ways that AI is now being used in the screening process, all the way up to the actual hire? Let's not talk about the employee experience beyond that. Can we ever really hope to remove biases from AI? I I don't know if that's possible. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 15:10

We take humans I would take AI first of all. So subjectivity is present in everything in the recruitment process. So if you imagine when you're recruiting someone, you might create a job description person specification if you're doing things properly. Whoever creates that's gonna have some type of bias or some type of thoughts they've had for themselves to be able to construct that. It's never a perfect process. Sometimes it's quite rushed, sometimes it doesn't happen at all. So already right from the start of the process, it's gonna be involving some type of bias and subjectivity, because inherently every single person is biased. And I will ask my students in class quite often, and people I come to disrupt HR events to are they biased? And we all don't we all want to say we're not biased, but we're all gonna be biased because we've got a set of experiences, um, things we've learned over time, the personality we've developed from when we were born. These things also have a subjective nature, a biased nature to it, but it's that being able to tackle that and recognize these things and then try to curtail our bias, which is really important then. So we're never gonna get rid of subjectivity from the process or bias. I think with AI, we have to be really careful, and we've spoken by AI quite a bit. I love AI, I try to use the tools as much as possible, and I want to be on the crest of the AI wave rather than being drowned in the backsplash and not being able to do things with AI. So I think there's great ways we can do it. But what we see quite often is people cognitively offload this stuff to AI for AI to make the decision, and that's the wrong way to do it. So I'd much rather us use AI to try and pull information together, but we still need to critically analyze that to interrogate it, to ask questions about it. So if we went back to recruitment, could use AI to generate the questions for interviewers to give us some options, could use it to generate questions, what we could try to analyze the evidence and to ask questions of it and discuss those things. What I'd be very careful of is then just offloading that decision making and saying, Dear Mr. or Mrs. A system, you just handle the process of recruiting people from start to finish. You look at CVs, you look at keywords, we give you the job spec, or you create the job spec yourself, and then we just say what you want to do. There's danger in terms of how we use these systems. What I do see happen a lot is there seems to be new systems evolving every day, new systems released. And I'm sure people are making a lot of money from all these systems, and some of them are very good in terms of what they do. But I want us all to be able to be critical of them, not to avoid using them and just poo-poo them, but actually delve into what they can do, what they can't do to test them, and to actually have that critical foresight and interest in thinking how can I get the best out of the system, but how can I guard against the bias and subjectivity that'll always be inherent in them because nothing we create is going to be free from bias. If we decide an AI system is going to come to fruition, we fill it with the right resources to train it. That's the decision of deciding what resources to go into it. So we could be quite biased in those things. The source we use have been written by people usually. Those people have been biased in terms we do, what we put into it. We know that history favors the victor. So all the text from many hundreds and thousands of years, that's a biased view of history because that's subjective in terms of the way these things are being curated. So it's it's biased from the start. What we have to do is recognize this bias, then do our best to try and counteract answer.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

Well, you're taking me back to my A-level days, historiography, the bias within historical accounts.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 18:46

It was somewhat interesting at the time, but it was a long time ago for me. It's in the past now. There we go. Boom, boom. Um, we are.

Making Space For Evidence Deliberation

SPEAKER_03 18:57

Yeah, maybe more than a couple, my friend. We are coming towards the end of this particular conversation, then I'm off to jump in a river with my son. Um, before we wrap up today, what would recruitment look like if organizations built in more time for evidence deliberation before making final decisions, Paul?

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I think what I've noticed in organizations is that people will rush the decision-making part towards the end. So you imagine if you've been interviewing all day, you might get eight interviews, you might be recruiting for a role, people are tired, they just want to go home to either their family, to have food, to have a nap on the sofa, to melt in their house if it's really hot like it is now. Whatever they decide to do, sometimes that time is not the best time to make a decision. Putting time in a different stage is really important and to make sure you get it right. So we sometimes see job descriptions, person specs being rushed just to get a job out there, putting time in to get that right. Think about what evidence you want to collect and to make sure we get the recruitment process right, being able to discuss with colleagues about putting questions together or the different techniques or tasks you want people to do as part of a recruitment process. So it covers the bananas, raspberries, and strawberries we talked about earlier. Then the discussion part, the ending, crafting proper time to delve into why do we feel certain ways if we interpret something as an interviewer? Why do we interpret those things? Not just write it down and say, This is what I thought. Where did those thoughts come from? Discussing that transparently, being critical about it, but sharing that criticality with colleagues to make sure you've got a space to properly discuss these things. One of the risks I see is we we concentrate so much on trying to be objective and showing objectivity and rigor, we become scared of actually discussing how we are partly subjective all the time. So making that open, making that a discursive process, making that transparent, that could have real value then. It may add some more to that predictive validity, but at the very least, we try and maximize what we know is a good process to get the most out of it. Because that translation from what we know works from a research perspective does not always translate translate that well to translate that well to the real world, then. So I think that's what we could do.

SPEAKER_03 21:08

Okay, very

Where To Connect With Paul

SPEAKER_03 21:09

good. And just finally, for those people in the real world who are listening to this episode right now, who are thinking to themselves, I've got to connect with Dr. Jones, Jones, Carl and Dr. Jones. Very important. Very important. Do they do that through LinkedIn, Paul? Do they email you? I bet you are super cool and on TikTok in places. Tell oh, in the Substack, of course, tell them about that. Give us more info.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

The best place to contact me would be LinkedIn, probably. That's where I tend to do a lot of the more public promotion of things I'm working on. But alongside that, I do my own Substack. So one of the key things for me is I try to be controlled of writing at least a thousand words every week. And it tends to be philosophical stuff where I'm trying to reach the audience to get them to think differently, to think critically. So Substack, um, I'm down as a museum poll on Substack. Um, so that should hopefully be easy to find. Uh and you can, I'm sure you can put in the blurb for this. It's a museumpaul.substack.com. I'm on LinkedIn, there's Paul M. Jones on LinkedIn with hyphens in between. Um hopefully on the on the podcast, there'll be some links we can put in as well for people to contact me. But if you search for me at Aston University, that's another way to contact me then. So I'm happy to have discussions. Happy to be able to connect with people, especially if they want to have conversations where I get them to think a bit differently and they want to critique the way we do things across HR and work psychology and well-being. I love having conversations where we can try and drive some activity to make things better for a critical mindset.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

Okay, very good. Paul M. Jones, is that correct? Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_01 22:46

I will double check for you now on LinkedIn so I can give you the most important one now. So I don't get it wrong on this very hot day because what I wouldn't want to do is give you the wrong information. So it's LinkedIn slash IN slash Paul M Jones all one word.

SPEAKER_03 23:04

And I'm assuming um the M stands for marvelous. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 23:11

So it doesn't, but I'd like it to. What it does do is stand for Michael, and depending on who I talk to, then I either tell them it's named after two saints, St. Paul and St. Michael, or I tell them the truth, which was named after an actor in Starsky Hatch, Paul Michael Glazier. So it depends how it feels on the day by which pathway I go down there. Either way, marvelous is better, so might as a change for the future.

Closing Thoughts And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Okay, Dr. Paul Marvelous Jones, my friend. Thank you very much for your time today. As always, it's been great chatting, and we will be getting you back on the show before you know it. So thank you. My pleasure. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening. And listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.