Written by Nathan Hewitt
The Candidate Experience Playbook
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.
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Sapia named top performing HR vendor
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.
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You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to get a personalised demo
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Here’s where to start with improving your employer brand
In this jobs market, the secret to success is not necessarily a huge job ad budget or a top-range salary and perks package. You don’t even need to be the biggest, or the best known – many are the top-notch candidates that have been ghosted by the world’s most sought-after companies.
You do, however, have to invest in employer brand. Most of us know this, of course, but few companies have made the appropriate investment in long-term brand building. It’s a marketing play, fundamentally, and it’s difficult to do right, but the benefits can be huge for your business.
Why should you care about employer branding?
It’s your best long-term approach to recruiting. If you give every candidate a caring, consistent, and memorable experience, you will dramatically increase your fill rate AND your talent network. People talk about good experiences – in fact, according to our own data, a single good experience while applying for a job makes candidates 77% more likely to recommend you as an employer of choice.
The good news is, too, that the impact of an employer brand can be easily measured, according to Dr John Sullivan: By the number of job applications you receive each year. Now, don’t confuse this point with the opening sentence of this post – there’s a difference between a company’s brand and its employer brand. You might be a Fortune 100 company with a household name, but if your job application process is terrible, people will know you and remember you for that.
(And, if you’re not careful, a poor employer brand will end up affecting your wider brand.)
Where do you start with improving employer branding?
Your employer brand touches everything. You have seconds to introduce yourself to candidates, show off your best features, and get them to apply. That doesn’t mean, however, that you need to throw everything out and start again. Start with some easy wins, and then take a wider focus to include things like your technology and feedback processes.
Stodgy artwork, pixelated logos, spelling errors, outdated information, broken links… these will break your recruitment strategy before it has had the chance to work. So start here.
Employer brand audit checklist
| Channel | Items |
| Website | Is our ‘About us’ section up to date? |
| Do we have a ‘careers’ or hiring information page? | |
| Do both sections, along with the rest of our website, adequately reflect our values? | |
| Social media platforms | Is our ‘About us’ section up to date? |
| Do we include correct contact information, including to our website? | |
| Does our imagery and content reflect our brand values? | |
| Are our job postings attractive and adequately promoted on the page? | |
| Recruiting portals (Seek, Indeed) | Is all of our information up to date? |
| Are our visual branding touchpoints (logo, header/banner images) of sufficient quality? | |
| Is all of our information up to date? | |
| Third-party recommendation apps (e.g. Glassdoor, Productreview.com) | What is the average star/quality rating of our reviews (mostly negative, positive, mostly positive)? |
| Have we made an effort to visibly address customer/employee feedback on the platform? |
It’s important to note that the branding and visual appeal of your organization is not primarily your responsibility – maintaining it is a team effort. But portals and third-party apps are often overlooked over time, as a brand develops and organization information changes. It’s never a bad idea to champion the task of regular housekeeping, and get your best marketing minds to help.
Improving employer brand with technology
With our Ai Smart Interviewer on your team, you’ll give every single candidate an engaging, empowering experience with your brand, boosting its value from the moment they click ‘apply’.
You can have offers out to the best candidates in just 24 hours. This is an incredible value proposition for candidates who are applying for 5, 10, maybe even 20 jobs at a time and usually don’t expect to hear anything back.
Here’s how it works:
- Every candidate interviews with our Ai over chat (and in return, gets personalised insights and tips – another tick for your employer brand and EVP)
- Shortlisted candidates auto-progress to a non-Ai Video Interview (which, candidates rate 9/10)
- Hiring managers review the video responses and pick the best with the help of our Talent Insights profile.
Our customers have cracked the candidate experience code, enjoying application completion rates in excess of 80%, and candidate satisfaction scores of more than 90%. Everyone gets an interview, and no one is ghosted.
Remember: There’s no space in this market to be slow.
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All disruption has to fight against fear
Depending on which media you read, technology, and specifically Artificial Intelligence, will create or destroy thousands of jobs. It is already radically changing many, as well as how we apply and hire for them.
Fear of New Invention
Back in the day when cars were first released, there was such a fear about the danger they presented to society, that when they came to a junction, they were required to stop the car, get out and fire a warning shot so that the people in the surrounding area would be safe from unexpected danger.
I was reminded of this when reading the commentary around Amazon and its use of AI to screen talent.
Amazon’s AI Experiment Went Awry
In case you missed it, Amazon did an experiment. They analysed 10 years of CV data to build a predictive model to help filter through what I am sure is hundreds of thousands of applications to work at the company. Because the sample group was mostly male, the CVs were naturally based towards male ‘traits’ if there is such a thing. The model built off this training data naturally ended up mirroring that sample group which meant it preferred male to female CVs.
CV’s Trigger Bias
It is pretty obvious to all of us that if you create a product off one homogenous group, then you will end up flavouring it with the characteristics of that group. YouTube found that when the team they used to build their iOS app didn’t consider left-handed users when it added in mobile uploads, causing videos recorded in a left-handed person’s view of the landscape to be upside down. I presume because the team building it was comprised of all right-handed people.
Suggested reading: A CV Tells You Nothing
Humans are heavily prone to unconscious bias
In fact, we rely on biases to survive.
While these biases help us not go insane, unfortunately, it has led us to the point today where they are having a very significant effect in the workforce. There are many serious forms of bias, but the best known is gender bias. A recent study showed simply by changing the name of an applicant from a woman’s to a man’s, with every other detail kept the same, the ‘male’ applicant was more likely to progress to an interview. The exact same CV.
When humans do screening, they are prone to making snap judgements based on superficialities, ignoring the very many factors that can help actually predict whether a candidate will perform. This is where data platforms actually have an advantage, by doing ‘blind screening’ and making the process both faster and fairer. However, this only works when the data that goes into the model manages for human frailties.
When it comes to using data to build predictive models to inform and guide decision-making, it is important to really dig deep on the input data.
And if you think unconscious bias training is the answer … read this first.
Think carefully about input data
The key insight for this experiment for Amazon is that relying on CVs to assess talent, is inherently flawed. This is accentuated even more when you accept that what differentiates talent now and will become even more acute in the future is not hard skills, not what uni someone went to or degree they have, but soft skills. Jeff Weiner who has the benefit of this kind of rich data from 600m users attested to that this week.
https://qz.com/work/1423267/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-the-main-us-skills-gap-is-not-coding/
At Sapia, working with dozens of companies across the world to help blind screen thousands of candidates, we know that it’s the behaviours and values of a potential coworker that will influence their performance and tenure. Values, such as commitment and attitudes are invisible in a CV. It’s not easy to see either in an interview. But it’s easily tested using well-crafted data platforms.
So let’s try to look beyond the news grab, the headline which naturally attracts attention when it has Amazon in the first line.
- Algorithms will be biased if the data they are built with is biased.
- Algorithms can be tested for bias. Humans can’t be
- Algorithms can be trained to remove bias. Humans, truthfully cant be
- Algorithms are blind to your gender, skin colour age. Humans are very sensitive to this, especially when it comes to hiring
We have a once-in-a-Millenium opportunity to extend and enable better, fairer thinking through careful and conscious AI-assisted decisions.
The algorithms we build aren’t sentient beings or unmanageable acts of nature, they are built by humans. When we recognise that and are conscious of those risks, we can start to counteract these biases through technology to help humans see what’s in front of us more clearly, without the filters of bias.
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