AI hiring innovation helps volume recruiters in crisis

I am not a CFO but surely every CFO out there is encouraging, if not mandating, that their leaders look for investments that keep delivering business value (over those that are a sunk cost, or a one-time use).

I am a CEO though, and I like to ask the same question around meaningful data that keeps delivering value to a business. Because I am a CEO of a HR Tech company solving for human recruitment at scale, I also ask this question about meaningful recruitment data. 

Sure HR departments are drowning in data, but it’s often not the right data. 

Meaningful recruitment data isn’t:

• Data that sits in your ATS and HRIS.
• Data from a traditional psychometric test .
• Engagement data (it’s retrospective data). 
• Leaver data (also retrospective).
• Or even leaver data by gender (it’s too late).

Meaningful recruitment data:

• Allows you to discover talent easily.
• Is re-useable, scalebale, giving you ‘forever insight ’ vs. one-time use.
• Can be fed into your processes to make better, fairer decisions.
• Allows you to make decisions faster, winning you the best talent before anyone else.
• Allows you to measure–essential when you are changing behaviours.

Think about a candidate who completes a typical assessment and then gets hired. Usually, that’s the end of the data story.  Josh Bersin reckons about $2bn a year are spent on these ‘disposable’ assessments.  Each time one of these assessments is used it is a sunk cost. The data goes into the system and stagnates there, never to be used again.

Wouldn’t you love to know what your newest hire is capable of, beyond the job they’ve been hired for?  What other roles they could fill as business needs change? Or say you need 1,000 contract tracers fast? Or your business plan calls for 200 agile coaches or 50 product managers immediately? 

If you don’t have easily accessible data on your employees’ aptitudes, their strengths and underutilized skills, then every time you are forced to restructure you do it inefficiently–at huge cost to both your people and your bottom line. 

HR teams need to be thinking about how we use data about company employees to continually improve recruitment and retention. In much the same way that marketing and advertising uses data to learn about what people want, and recommend things based on that.

Imagine the world of possibility if recruitment data was used this way. Imagine if we built an Amazon recommendation system for people’s skill sets that looked at their ability to perform in any role? 

What are you waiting for? Let us show you what we can do for you.

Top performing HR vendor

The HR Service Provider Awards 2020 hosted by HRD Mag sets out each year to find the best HR vendors in Australia.

Sapia Awarded A Silver Medal in the Category Of Recruitment Systems & Technology

Taken from the HRD website:

The winners are selected from a pool of submissions from vendors providing an overview of their business or product, insight into their point of difference in the industry, statistics around market share and growth over the past 12 months, and other relevant information such as industry accolades, client testimonials, and the like.

Finding a dependable service provider can be quite a daunting task for HR professionals. From an impressive array of vendors offering their expertise, HR professionals need to choose the one that suits their company’s unique needs.

To assist HR professionals with this challenging task, HRD’s annual Service Provider Awards recognises the industry’s top performers. The Sapia submission was judged by a panel of HR leaders who determined the top performers in this category.

 Thank you HRD for recognising Sapia as a top-performing HR vendor in your fourth annual Service Provider Awards report! 

About Sapia

Sapia automates interviews so that every applicant is interviewed in-depth and at scale for you. All by using a text chat so that you can get to the best people fast.

Much faster: Candidates are assessed, scored and ranked using Ai, dramatically reducing recruiter time and effort. 90% recruiter time savings, against standard recruiting processes.

Improves candidate experience: An accessible, mobile-first familiar text experience that candidates enjoy with no confronting videos interviews or questionnaires. 99% candidate satisfaction and 90% completion rates.

Inclusive and fair: Blind screening at its best using Ai with the same structured behavioural interview for every candidate. Gender/Ethnicity/Indignity mixes preserved through recruitment stages due to Ai objectively assessing performance/personality, not their background.

See Solutions Here > 

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Once the novelty of working from home wears off, and for many it already has, comes the challenge of maintaining connection, building affiliation and building cultures.

The jewel of Australia’s tech sector, Atlassian, has been lauded for giving staff the privilege of working from home forever. But when I posted the story on our team Slack channel, I added a comment warning of the longer-term impact of “remote forever”.

One of our senior team members replied: “Why do people travel in the morning to an office, in a packed tram/train carrying a laptop, then work on that laptop only to carry it back home in a packed train, wasting precious time? That looked comical to me for a long time.”

When I worked for another technology company, we spent a lot of energy trying to convince leadership that WFH did not mean a free ride and would, in fact, unleash productivity and improve engagement. COVID-19 has brought forward the idea of WFH as an alternative arrangement for many who would not have otherwise considered it.

While we may be revelling in the success of dismantling the long-held bias that you need to see someone at work to trust they are doing the work, it comes with its own challenges around organisational relevance.

Does it matter what company you work for if the only difference between one job and another is for whom you are completing a task, and perhaps the one or two people with whom you work closely?

Work is a relationship, and relationships thrive on intimate and frequent connections.

When we all worked in offices, some of that intimacy was built by the serendipity of conversations you had while going about your day’s work.

There was always the potential to catch someone from outside your team and share an idea and solicit a different perspective. There was an ease of connections and interactions that can be hard to replicate in a remote work context.

How do you look out for people, mentor them, develop them, when your interactions are all booked in, bounded within a strict working day?

Being remote is a little bit like trying to establish a long-distance relationship which, as many know, has the chances of success stacked against it.

Then there is the influence of place, and of space. At REA Group, where I worked for some years, the building fed the culture. Its design and redesign had been carefully thought through to maximise connections and space to collaborate – and not just with those in your immediate team.

Why do people go to church to pray, the pub to drink, and the footy to watch their team, when they have the Bible at home, beer in the fridge and a TV in the living room? Because they are looking for connection, community and inspiration.

Once the novelty of WFH wears off, and for many it already has, comes the challenge of maintaining connection, building affiliation and building cultures when people and teams are not physically spending time together in a shared space.

Ongoing remote work presents practical challenges for organisations, particularly around company culture and organisational HR.

Is there a way to assess performance when you can’t see people at work? How do you look out for people, mentor them, develop them, when your interactions are all booked in, bounded within a strict working day? What way to acknowledge someone for something you heard they did well, as you might if you jump in a lift together?

Diversity of perspective

There is a real risk our employment relationship becomes transactional, which affects engagement, which then affects productivity.

We know from our own work in this space, personality is not 16 types on a table. It is way more nuanced and diverse than that. In a population of 85,000, equal men and women, we find at least 400 uniquely identifiable personality types.

We live in a world of hyper-personalisation, from our morning news feed to our Netflix profile based on our viewing history. How can an organisation retain that diversity of perspective. That is when it usually thinks of two binary ways of working: in an office or at home? It can’t. That is why the future of work has to involve a new type of technology. One that can navigate the rich mix of types we work with and adapt to their communication and working style.

I have championed for WFH when in senior HR positions. However, this experience highlighted the many things I might have taken for granted in an office environment. It has nothing to do with fancy decor and an ergonomic chair. It’s more the human moments of serendipitous connection that disappeared so quickly, almost without time to say goodbye.

It would be great to think we all emerge from this situation with a mind to honour the things we have learnt about our “work selves” and, most importantly, to build company cultures that thrive by accommodating those diverse needs.

Join the movement

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog!

You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details here to get a personalised demo.