Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Allison Silveus.
Hi Dr. Silveus, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Unbent, a start to finish hiring platform that is embedding social psychology, AI, and VR to assess frontal lobe bias relative to skills. I am also a mom and a daughter of an entrepreneur, and thus I have lived through the trials and tribulations of what entrepreneurs go through with the highs and lows. The Journal of Labor and Economics in 2015 evaluated the association between entrepreneurial parents having entrepreneurial children, noting that the probability of their children being an entrepreneur increased by 60%. My mom obviously didn’t know this back in 1982, but I am sure that the signs were always there growing up because fundamentally that behavior was modeled to me through social modeling.
While entrepreneurship has been studied significantly, it is usually defined with common traits of wanting to take risk and taking initiative. My dad is the epitome of this, and he is also extremely good at convincing people when it comes to closing deals. Obsessed with baseball, I grew up seeing the highs and lows, even during the 1980s when crude oil prices fell, and we lost everything and moved to Dallas. However, one of things my dad had a propensity for was perseverance and risk taking, even when our own family thought he was crazy. But he was okay with this. I explain this mindset referring to the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams.” Even when the whole world doubts Ray, he is still insistent on believing something would happen. This is very much a trait I have learned from my father.
In 2016, I began my journey for a doctorate very much in the mindset that this is exactly what I needed to make it in the world. After quitting my teaching career at the college, I picked up real estate and side work on a Latina STEM grant. This was in addition to my full-time doctoral hours and work with the university, which required a minimum of twenty hours a week. Fundamentally, juggling between doctoral hours, work, publications, kids, and the startup world taught me a lot about perseverance. However, had I not had the experiences growing up, I am not sure if I would have made it through the process. While Unbent wouldn’t exist without my education, it also represents a much-needed bend or turn in my own trajectory. In 2017, I became fascinated with social psychology and how our brains process faces that are similar and different from us. I set out on a journey to test the impact of role models that are like us, relative to the perceptions of being a scientist. I was also able to embed this work into what I was doing for Latina STEM.
My experiences, such as work in virtual reality helped me to intersect different research experiences into addressing a real pain for people, inequitable hiring. In 2019, while working a full-time job, publishing, finishing doctoral courses, and supporting a family, my husband and I decided to start classes at TechFW. We knew we could attack the customer pain that is largely addressed today with self-demographic questions and countless DEI training, but that fails to really address the individuality of a persons’ socio-behavioral profile. Furthermore, my goal is to use science and psychology to address the root cause for why people behave the way they do, even when their reactions fundamentally do not make sense.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I started my doctorate at Texas Christian University in 2016 thinking my trajectory would be staying in the academy. My children were young at the time, and I knew this would be a long commitment (at least 5 years). As time progressed, I began to see a system that fundamentally was driven by publications, committees, and overall uncertainty. I would leave very early for work and come home very late. Weekends were often consumed with homework, writing for manuscripts, work for a Latina STEM program, and then occasional showings of homes to bring in extra money. I decided to take a full-time job in 2019 while staying with my doctoral studies. I did this due to the financial needs because I figured it would be best to have one full-time job and pay tuition as opposed to work three jobs with tuition covered. In 2019, when I had my ah-hah moment for the company, I had to face the fact that I was juggling job, kids, and doctorate. I wanted to take the TechFW ThinkLab to get my feet wet in business, but the only way to do this was to send my husband to the classes. When I got home, he would recite everything he had learned to me, that way I felt like I was learning the material too. A close friend once asked me what it is like being a woman, mom, and entrepreneur. I told them it is very hard when you wear the guilt badge on your chest like a scarlet letter, referring to the constant comparison that occurs today between a working mom and stay-at-home mom. I asked my kids one night if they are annoyed with having a mom that works so much and is so focused on building a company. They told me that they have never been prouder of me and that they look up to us for working so hard. That was a great moment. It made me realize that my husband’s modeling and support for this journey was exemplifying equity for women indirectly.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Unbent is an AI-assisted, start to finish gamified hiring solution that combines psychology, virtual reality (VR), and AI to remove bias from the hiring process and find best-fit candidates for jobs. Our tools assess soft and hard skills in individuals and the biases associated with their decisions using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Our behavioral assessments utilize lifelike characters, in the form of avatars, with advanced analytics to assess behavioral patterns relative to an individual’s cognitive and affinity bias. Currently, biased hiring is not only impacting the ability to innovate but the overall brand of the company or system because people are not taking the necessary precautions to recognize their own biases, while also assessing applicants’ true soft and transferable skill level. Unbent Inc. aims to support our customers by:
1. Reducing recruiter bias associated with seeing names on resumes or demographics. Organizations are looking to contribute as it relates to racial justice, age discrimination practices, weight biases, gender biases, and equity, but do not have the solutions to execute on this action. For example, Moss-Racusin et. al. (2012) found that science faculty from research universities rated male applicants more favorably and hirable than the female applicants.
2. Providing a better match between the company who is seeking to hire a qualified candidate and the company itself, thus reducing hire turnover rate. Companies lose an average of $240K a year per bad hire (Frye, 2017), because they, on average, are making a hiring decision within the first 5 to 10 seconds of seeing the applicant due to frontal lobe bias (Forbes, 2019).
What sets us apart is that we are not trying to use the same existing platform that countless of hiring platforms adopt, i.e., resumes, boxes for demographics, and interviews. The current models have demonstrated issues with retaining talent, reflect biased hiring decisions due to subjective interview processes, and use assessments based on data that is self-reported.
I am most proud of how much we have been able to develop through our network and local Fort Worth-Dallas connections. Specifically, we have been able to accomplish the development of the Unbent VR/AI vision by leveraging local university partnerships (TCU with Dr. Rodney D’Souza and SMU with Dr. Klyne Smith). This is a win-win. We provide university students with experiential knowledge, and then we also get to see how our vision develops.
We want readers to know that we agree with them. The hiring system is broken but it doesn’t have to stay this way. We want readers to know that a much-needed integrated VR/AI system is in development and is ready to disrupt the current way we hire, but this time with science and social psychology.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc.?
I wake up daily and exercise in the morning. This is my time to adjust and boost my endorphins for the day. Since COVID, my husband and I had to adjust and recently bought a mytempo fit. I love it and will never give it up. I read a lot of peer reviewed articles and enjoy reading at least one to three articles from Harvard Business Review. To maintain sanity, my husband and I picked up ballroom dancing in 2019, and we have thoroughly enjoyed this.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.unbent.io
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unbentgamify/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/unbentgamify?lang=en
- Youtube: https://youtube/pEtlBt1aehk
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-silveus-ms-edd-36547839/
Image Credits
Red Bull Basement
