Time to Focus on Facial Body Language

For years’ now we’ve learnt and mastered the art of reading body language, but we’ve missed an important part of the body, namely the face.

Facial expressions have become more vogue with the rise of Zoom, Facetime and Skype, but the game-changer has come with job interviews. Let me explain.

Job candidates have recently been bombarded with potential employers asking them to video their response to a series of questions as a way of sieving through the many thousands of people who apply for every job nowadays. This started way before Lockdown.

The videos have been watched by humans who listen to the answers and judge whether the person can proceed to the next expensive part of the recruitment process.

Now a company, Unilever, have taken this to the next stage and saved thousands of pounds. They’ve developed software that reads the facial expressions of the candidate as well as the body language. It looks for congruence with the words spoken. This artificial intelligence then decides whether to proceed.

Or not.

Scary.

Time to become more aware of our facial expressions. And there’s an app for that.