Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke to the founders of two behavioral design start-ups, Kate Glazebrook of Applied and Frida Polli of Pymetrics, for the latest on the algorithmic design revolution that is transforming hiring practices.

Tell us more about your tools. How do they work?

MS. POLLI We use gamified neuroscience and A.I. to help companies understand what cognitive and emotional traits predict success in different roles, and help them match people to those roles. We test the algorithms to ensure that women and men (as well as people of different ethnic backgrounds) are getting similar scores, and if they aren’t, we adjust the inputs until they are.

MS. GLAZEBROOK Applied is the first hiring platform designed entirely around the psychology of decision-making that helps firms make recruitment decisions smart (more predictive of performance), fair (less biased) and easy. We anonymize applications, chunk them up into batches to allow for better comparative assessment, randomize candidates to avoid ordering effects and allow multiple evaluators to contribute their scores independently to harness the wisdom of the crowd. We also check for gendered language on job descriptions and provide automated, personalized feedback to every candidate on how they performed.