We’re thrilled to announce that along with our customer Iceland Foods, we won the award for Best In-House Innovation in Recruitment at the 2021 Recruiter Awards in London.

Established in 2002, the Recruiter Awards gala is the UK’s largest event for the entire recruitment community recognising outstanding achievements by agencies and in-house recruiters.

The award recognises the partnership between  Iceland and Sapia that saved their store leaders 24,000 hours a year by implementing transformational change – during a pandemic.

Iceland receives a high volume of applicants – more than 120,000 per month – and faced a crisis in 2020: increased trade and Covid-19 absence meant that surge hiring needed to be automated, without losing the personal touch.

Automation was critical to increase the time store managers had to trade in their stores.

It had to be a simple solution that store managers would understand quickly and trust. The candidate experience had to be fast, inclusive and human. 

The tool needed to work for the candidate market which is as diverse as the general population. The team settled on Smart Interviewer as their solution of choice. 

Candidates have reacted well to the technology, with 99% positive sentiment towards the process  and 77% of candidates more likely to  recommend Iceland as an employer of choice.

There was 5x payback in four months, giving back 8,000 hours to the business and costing less than £1 per applicant.

On top of this there was zero gender and race bias, ensuring people hires are as diverse as the applicant group.

The Judges comments were that: “ this simple, straightforward submission ticked every box by demonstrating the contribution the recruitment function played to the success of their overall business. They also clearly demonstrated thoughtful consideration to the fact that many candidates would be applying for jobs at Iceland following the decimation of their previous career paths, for example, aviation industry employees.”

Read the case study of Iceland and Sapia innovated during the pandemic here.

A recent CNN story quoted only 12% of companies used AI last year to deliver not just a faster status quo, but a complete reinvention of the way they work. The automated learning that comes from AI  solutions grounded in machine learning also delivers exponential returns to those who start early.

That same news story quantified those benefits as a 20% increase in cash flows over 10 years and the inverse is true as well – a 20% decline in cash flows for those that wait. These kinds of stats should trigger ‘FOMO’  for any enterprise business.

‘BC’ (before Covid-19), the motivation ‘to AI in HR’ might have been the automation of manual expensive HR processes, like recruitment, in a world of declining HR budgets and growing concerns about the bias we humans bring to those processes. 

‘To AI’ your HR processes can also go beyond your bottom line. It’s a way to humanise your candidate experience. A way to reduce the asymmetry of recruitment, to empower both sides to make the right decisions. It gives you this kind of candidate feedback from a solution that looks like this.

Right now,  curiosity about AI is being replaced by a burning platform for change. For those wearing the exhaustion of surge recruitment using old traditional processes (not to mention the increased chances of bias as a result), the case for change is obvious. For everyone else who does any volume of recruitment, 4 factors will accelerate the move to AI solutions.

1. The need for humanity in your people processes especially recruitment. 

Even though tragically it will soon be an employers market as unemployment rises, any organisations, including government, that can make that experience better for job seekers is onto a winner. Nothing sucks more than having to line up at Centrelink,  or fill out endless tedious application forms, and then hear nothing.

We ‘live’ on our smartphones, we expect convenience and immediate results, we want to be able to navigate a wide range of opportunities fast and make decisions fast.  This applies to services we consume regularly (think Uber Eats, Afterpay, even banking services such as our next home loan). That immediacy and convenience is now the new norm for consumers, and candidates as a consumer of their next job are looking for the same experience.

Imagine if your applicants only needed to answer 5 engaging questions over a text conversation. Every applicant also receives their own personalised feedback which helps them prepare for future interviews!

Compare recruitment to applying for a bank loan where AI has been in use for a decade or more. That’s now a reality with AI in recruitment.

Use Sapia’s FirstInterview to see how easy it is for you to give every job seeker a fast, simple and empowering experience.

And read what job seekers think about it here.

2. The accessibility and affordability of AI solutions

We specialise in volume recruitment for those roles where it is even more critical to hire the right people now. Frontline roles like your customer service teams,  carers and health care workers, sales consultants, and blue-collar workers. Our ready-made predictive models are instantly deployable enabling you to go live in under an hour.  When using our AI saves you at least $20 on every applicant, (i.e. if you receive 1000 applications, that is a saving of $20,000), and deployment is as easy a sending a link to your applicants, AI offers value to any sized organisation.

3. The right AI tool can remove bias from your recruitment and deliver a more diverse workforce

No amount of bias training will make us less biased.

The ability to measure bias is one reason to use AI-based screening tools over traditional processes. The growing awareness that AI can be fairer for people prompted the California State Assembly to pass a resolution to use unbiased technology to promote diversity in hiring.

Avoiding bias is why we use text data to assess applicants. With 25 million words to draw upon in our data bank, across 10 critical volume hiring roles, our approach is both bias-free in its design and its execution. Our technology is built on the advances in ML and NLP that allow computers to gain valuable insights from large volumes of textual data. Our AI is entirely ignorant of race, age, gender or any of those irrelevant markets of job fit.

4. Knowing someone’s traits and values is a shortcut to hiring for culture 

Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a blog a few years ago on the ‘real skills’ that matter in hiring.

Whilst we all know what matters for our roles, our teams, our culture- real skills like resilience, curiosity,  humility, drive and so on, these attributes are invisible in a CV and very hard to assess fairly and scientifically in a phone call or f2f interview.

Using text data, we can not only uncover standard personality traits such as extraversion, openness, humility but also real skills that matter such a drive, critical thinking, team player and accountability. Our data science team has recently uncovered that the language one uses in answering standard interview questions show a correlation to how likely they are to hop jobs. New hires that leave early cost significant time and money for organisations. Identifying such candidates early on can help companies make better hiring decisions.

To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we have a great eBook on candidate experience.

Hiring with heart is good for business: candidate experience in C-19 times. Sapia launches its Candidate Experience eBook. This book provides an insight into the changing face of the candidate experience. 

If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the job searchers, that time is now. Unemployment in Australia has passed a two-decade high. The trend is similar for other countries. That means there are a lot more candidates in the market looking for work.

With so many more candidates, the experience of a recruiting process matters more. What are candidates experiencing? Are they respected, regardless of whether they got the job or not? Is their application appreciated. Are they acknowledged for that?

This may be the time to rethink your candidate experience strategy.

Here are two big reasons to prioritise improving candidates’ experience:

1. There is a much higher value attached to it – both for candidates and your organisation. 

This story won’t be unfamiliar to you:  An Australian based consulting firm advertised for a Management Consultant and decided to withdraw the advert after 298 candidates had applied. That was in their first week of advertising.

When candidate supply outstrips demand, that is bound to happen. Inundation of your Talent Acquisition team becomes an every-day thing. Employers are feeling swamped with job applications.

Being effective is much harder when there are more candidates to get through every day.

High-volume recruiting issues become further aggravated when two additional dynamics come into play:

>> When the role for which you are hiring requires a relatively low skill level.

In the example provided above, the Management Consultant role had several essential requirements which should have limited applications.  Included in the applicant list were hoteliers, baristas, waiting-staff and cabin crew (it’s heartbreaking). So when it comes to roles with a much lower barrier to entry, the application numbers can quadruple.

The traditional ‘high-volume low-skill role’ has now become excruciatingly high-volume. This trend is being seen across recruitment for roles like customer service staff, retail assistants and contact centre staff.

>>When your organisation is a (well-loved) consumer brand. 

Frequently, candidates will apply to work for brands that they love. Fans of Apple products, work for Apple. They also apply to work and get rejected in their millions. So, how do you keep people as fans of your brand when around 98% of them will be rejected in the recruiting process? That’s not only a recruiting issue – it’s a marketing issue too.

Thousands of organisations and their Talent Acquisition teams are grappling with both dynamics right now.

The combination of unemployment and being in Covid-19 lockdown means that consumer buying is being impacted. Their confidence is down. Buying is also down. With people applying for more jobs and spending less as consumers, the hat has somewhat switched. For many who were consumers, they have now become candidates. That may be how they are currently experiencing your brand. As candidates first, customers second.

If customers are candidates and candidates are customers, is there a reason for their experience to be fundamentally different? 

Candidate experience is defined as the perception of a job seeker about an organisation and their brand based on their interactions during the recruiting process. Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey.

Is there a difference? It’s all about how the human feels when interacting with your brand. A person is a person, regardless of the hat they are wearing at the time!

All about the human experience.

Millions, even billions, of dollars are spent each year by organisations crafting a positive brand presence and customer experience. Organisations have flipped 180 degrees to become passionately customer-centric. It makes sense to do so. Put your customers first, and that goes straight to the bottom line.

What is perhaps less recognised is the loss of revenue and customer loyalty which is directly attributed to negative candidate experiences.

How about those loyal customers who want to work for your brand? They eagerly apply for a job only to get rejected.

2. Candidate Experience improvements have become super easy to implement.  

For those who have tried in the past, you may well know that it can take an extraordinarily long time to ‘define’ a Candidate Experience strategy, create its metrics, find a budget and then execute on it.

Have a look inside the ‘too hard’ basket and there you may well find many thousands of well-meaning ‘candidate experience’ initiatives, that are still lying dormant! So many want to focus on candidate experience, but may shy away from doing so. This is because it’s perceived as time-consuming and expensive.

Plus, right now there is so much on which CHROs need to focus. From ensuring workers’ wellbeing to enabling remote working. Who has the time to also worry about the experiences of candidates?

However, that has changed. Boosting candidate experience is no longer too hard, too expensive, nor too time-consuming. Technology becomes more manageable, quicker and cheaper over time. Also (borrowing from Moore’s law), its value to users grows exponentially.

Candidate Experience Playbook: Hire with Heart

The good news is that for those organisations who genuinely want to improve candidate experience, it has become much easier to do so. Finally, it is possible to give great experiences at scale while also driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

Win-win is easily attainable. In the Sapia Candidate Experience Playbook, read how organisations are hiring with heart. All by creating positive experiences for candidates while also decreasing the workload for the hiring team.