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Written by Nathan Hewitt

It is possible to give personalised feedback to every candidate!

A major AI-based experiment has proved it’s possible to give personalised feedback to every job applicant, solving one of the biggest complaints about the recruitment process.

Over a six-month period, Sapia gave personalised, same-day feedback to 250,000 candidates after each completed a text-based interview using its AI platform, says CEO Barbara Hyman.

The candidates ranged in age from 16 to 80 and included people from non-English speaking and Indigenous backgrounds. The feedback highlighted their strengths, as well as tips on areas for development.

The outcome, Hyman tells Shortlist, is that 99% of candidate reported satisfaction with their interview experience; 70% said they were more likely to recommend the company as an employer of choice; and 95% reported they loved receiving their feedback and “found it empowering, constructive and ‘scarily accurate'”.

Recruiters using Sapia gain insights into each candidate’s personality and the quality of their response to behavioural interview questions.

Sapia realised candidates would benefit from receiving some form of feedback and insight into their traits as well, and so it began rolling this out 15 months ago. The feature has since won a UK-based candidate experience award.

The feedback specifically does not include information about whether the candidate is a good fit for the role, “because that’s not our job – that’s the client’s job”, Hyman says.

For AI to be trusted, she says, the candidate needs to trust it, and so the candidate needs to get something out of it – including “the ability to understand themselves”.

Candidate experience isn’t simply an automatic email that says, “thanks, we’ve had lots of applicants, but we may not get back to you”, Hyman says.

Rather, a good candidate experience is “when everybody gets something out of it”.

“There really isn’t any excuse now for ghosting. And the feedback that companies give when they do it through humans is not that constructive. Getting a phone call saying you’re not a great culture fit – what’s that telling you? That’s a big cop-out.”

 

Employers’ fears allayed

When Sapia first deployed the candidate feedback feature, its clients were initially too scared to use it, says Hyman.

“They thought that if you give candidates feedback, you’ll risk a whole lot of candidates calling up and asking, ‘why didn’t I get the job?’ or candidates would disagree with it and it would undermine their trust in the process. This might diminish their employer brand,” she explains.

But these fears proved unfounded when recruiters started reading the responses candidates were invited to give about their feedback, which included whether they agreed with the feedback and whether they would recommend the organisation as an employer or retailer (most of Sapia’s clients are consumer brands).

“The fact we were able to show to clients what candidates thought about it really disrupted that fear and killed the notion feedback is a ‘risk’.

“In fact, what candidates feel is feedback is a gift, and that gift is really playing out in terms of employer brand,” says Hyman.

Reference: Shortlist 2020 | https://www.shortlist.net.au

Shortlist is a subscription news service that keeps recruitment agency and in-house talent acquisition professionals informed about all the crucial developments in their sector.


TRANSFORM CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

Make a difference to every candidate

Candidates crave feedback and growth. Drawing on smart personality science, every candidate receives personalised feedback and coaching.

Relatable. Explainable. Familiar.

  • No confronting videos, un-relatable games or lengthy quizzes
  • Completion rates of 90%+
  • Increases win rates for talent
  • Amplifies trust in your employer brand

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog and join the conversation

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


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SnapHire + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

You can take full advantage of SnapHire ATS and get ahead of your competitors by adding Sapia’s interview automation for faster, fairer and better hiring results.

Reduce hiring complexity

There’s a lot expected of recruiters these days. Attracting candidates from diverse backgrounds and delivering exceptional candidate care whilst selecting from thousands of candidates isn’t easy.  

The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful SnapHire ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.

You can now: 

  • Reduce your screening time by up to 90%
  • Increase your candidate satisfaction to near 100%
  • Achieve interview completion rates over 90%
  • And reduce screening bias for good

Sapia + SnapHire

Gone are the days of screening CVs, followed by phone screens to find the best talent. The number of people applying for each job has grown 5-10 times in size recently. Reading each CV is simply no longer an option. In any case, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.

You can now streamline your SnapHire process by integrating Sapia’s interview automation with SnapHire.

We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.

  1. Create a vacancy in SnapHire, and a Sapia interview link will be created. 
  2. Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
  3. See results as soon as candidates complete their interview. Each candidate’s scores, rank, personality assessment, role-based traits and communication skills are available as soon as they complete the interview. Every candidate will receive automated, personalised feedback.

By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.

Integrate SnapHire and get ahead

Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai is available to all SnapHire users. You can automate interviewing, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort! Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

Together, Sapia and SnapHire deliver an approach that is: 

  • Relevant—move beyond the CV to the attributes that matter most to you: grit, curiosity, accountability, critical thinking, agility and communication skills
  • Respectful—give every single person an interview and never ghost a candidate again
  • Dignified—show you value people’s time by providing every single applicant personal feedback
  • Fair—avoid video in the first round interviews and take an approach that’s 100% blind to gender, age, ethnicity and other irrelevant attributes
  • Familiar—text chat interviewing is not only highly efficient, it’s also familiar to people of all ages  

The interview that all candidates love

As unemployment rates rise, it’s more important than ever to show empathy for candidates and add value when we can. Using Sapia, every single candidate gets a FirstInterview through an engaging text experience on their mobile device, whenever it suits them. Every candidate receives personalised MyInsights feedback, with helpful coaching tips which candidates love.

There are thousands of comments just like this …

“I have never had an interview like this in my life and it was really good to be able to speak without fear of judgment and have the freedom to do so.

The feedback is also great. This is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves.

The response back is written with a good sense of understanding and compassion.

I don’t know if it is a human or a robot answering me, but if it is a robot then technology is quite amazing.”

Take it for a 2-minute test drive here > 

Recruiters love using artificial intelligence in hiring

Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in SnapHire as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and SnapHire deliver an approach that is: 

  • Fast—Ai-powered scores and rankings make shortlisting candidates quicker
  • Insightful—Deep dive into the unique personality and other traits of each candidate 
  • Fair—Candidates are scored and ranked on their responses. The system is blind to other attributes and regularly checked for bias.
  • Streamlined—Our stand-alone LiveInterview mobile app makes arranging assessment centres easy. Automated record-keeping reduces paperwork and ensures everyone is fairly assessed.
  • Time-saving—Automating the first interview screening process and second-round scheduling delivers 90% time savings against a standard recruiting process.

HR Directors and CHROs love reliable bias tracking

Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results. 

Together, Sapia and SnapHire deliver an approach that is: 

  • Measurable—DiscoverInsights, our operations dashboard that provides clear reporting on recruitment, including pipeline shortlisting, candidate experience and bias tracking.
  • Competitive—The Sapia and SnapHire experience is loved by candidates, ensuring you’ll attract the best candidates, and hire faster than competitors.
  • Scalable—Whether you’re hiring one hundred people, or one thousand, you can hire the best person for the job, on time, every time.
  • Best-in-class—Sapia easily integrates with SnapHire to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack. 

Getting started is easy

Let’s chat about getting you started – book a time here > 

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Sage Advice: How AI and Smarter Hiring Can Boost Your Business

In case you missed it: The other week, Sage CEO, Stephen Kelly, sat down with Sapia’s Steven John, number 45 on the Sage Top 100 list for 2017, and asked him his thoughts on AI and just how important he feels it is to get it right.

Stephen Kelly: “I’m really pleased to be engaging today with Steven John… an absolute expert in recruitment and people development.”

“So, Steven, tell us a bit about what you’ve done. You’ve got a massive following, 18,000 followers on Twitter. You’re a renowned expert. Tell us a bit about that.”

Steven John: “Well, my background is technology and recruitment. As a lot of recruiters do, I kind of fell out of university with no real idea of a career path and landed in tech recruitment. I spent 13 years as a recruiter and then more recently had the opportunity to take my professional skills that I learned in recruitment and bring them into a business that’s using AI to help businesses make smarter hires.

“I’m a customer success manager for an AI business called Sapia.

“In terms of what we do, we use predictive models to help businesses make smarter hires so they can identify who might be a better or more likely to be a better salesperson or deliver a better customer service experience to their customers.

“Whatever the metrics or the KPIs that their business is using to understand how its people are operating, our solution can help you understand, from the candidate market, who should we be spending our time with, who should the human beings within our talent team be spending time talking to.

“Because of the model, the algorithm has helped us sift through quite a large number of candidates. I’m sure you guys get hundreds of thousands of candidates here. So how do we identify those shiny pins in the haystack? So that’s what our models do.”

Smarter hiring using AI

SK: “Well, I think that’s brilliant, Steven. And obviously, kind of the relevance and gems of this Facebook Live session is to bring it down to all the entrepreneurs out there who are thinking about growing their business, living their dreams, pursuing their passions, and we all know the fuel of that is talented people.

“You mentioned artificial intelligence – AI, machine learning, predictive analytics aimed to make smarter hiring decisions that will really boost your business forward. What is your current experience of where we are on that journey?”

SJ: “I think a lot of businesses are ready. I think more businesses are ready than they probably realise. If I think about the numerous engagements that I’ve had with numbers of businesses, prospects and current clients, the things that strike me as quite interesting are the amount of data that businesses have.

“Surprisingly, some of the businesses who I would have thought would be incredibly data-heavy, will have a lot of data on their people, haven’t been quite so. But the good news for those businesses and even the smaller businesses is that there are solutions available in the market that can help many companies get started on that journey.

“Sometimes I am surprised by how other businesses or some businesses invest their time, money and effort in technology solutions, in buildings, in lots of infrastructure and pieces of kit. But what they don’t necessarily do is invest as much money in their people.

“The encouraging thing is there are now lots of solutions available to businesses of all shapes and descriptions that will really help them start to make smarter decisions for their hiring processes.

“The people are the lifeline of the company. The cost of people is probably one of the most.”

SK: “It’s worth noting most of our customers who are in the services business, about 70% to 80% of their cost base is the people they hire and manage. And we believe in people science.

“So certainly, when they’re here, we want to be pretty scientific, but the recruitment of them could be as scientific as that so we get the right person with the right skills, the right attitude, and the right competence to be successful.”

Sage Advice: How AI and Smarter Hiring Can Boost Your Business

 

 


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.

Have you seen the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook?

If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.  If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.

Download it here.

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Sapia nominated as one of six global HR Tech startups to ‘put on your radar right now’

It’s been an exciting start to 2021 for Sapia (Formerly PredictiveHire) and I’m pleased to share that we have been nominated as one of six global HR Tech startups to watch, by the HR Technology Conference and Expo, which is taking place this week.

I’m extremely proud of my team for achieving this feat – it’s been a team effort, and after several months of implementing new processes and initiatives, it’s a wonderful accomplishment. I am thrilled that Sapia has been recognized as one of the leaders in the industry by the HR Technology Conference this year.

Sapia was among six companies chosen from 24,000 applications to have the honour of presenting. It gives us the opportunity to showcase our technology to over four-thousand viewers that will be tuning in over the week. It’s a huge honour to be showcasing how our Ai-enabled chat technology can truly change recruiting.

We launched our exclusive Ethics Charter called FAIR earlier this year; a call to arms commitment that includes a guarantee towards inclusivity, fairness for all, explainable AI, transparency, privacy policies and accountability. We also recently commissioned exclusive research with Aptitude Research to uncover global company attitudes towards automation, technology in talent acquisition and unconscious human bias.

We’ve hit several milestones when it comes to evolving our offering for the better, and presenting at the conference this weekend is the cherry on top. Our biggest priorities right now are raising awareness of the importance of ethical AI and abolishing unconscious human bias. The world right now is at a stage where this is critical for the success of companies of the future and we’re proud to be discussing this and more at Friday’s session.

Sapia will be featuring in a session on innovative HR tech startups on Friday March 19 at 2:00PM ET.

To register for the virtual webinar, guests need to enter their details via this link: https://blog.hrtechnologyconference.com/hr-technology-conference-exposition-spring-set-to-explore-industrys-startup-ecosystem.

More about Sapia

Sapia is a frontier interview automation solution that solves three pain points in recruiting –  bias, candidate experience, and efficiency. Customers are typically those that receive an enormous number of applications and are dissatisfied with how much collective time is spent hiring.  

Unlike other forms of assessments which can feel confrontational, Sapia’ Chat Interview™ is built on a text-based conversation – totally familiar because text is central to our everyday lives. Every candidate gets a chance at an interview by answering five relatable questions. Every candidate also receives personalised feedback (99% CSAT). Ai then reads candidates’ answers for best-fit, translating assessments into personality readings, work-based traits and communication skills. Candidates are scored and ranked in real-time, making screening 90% faster. Sapia fits seamlessly into your HR tech-stack and with it you will get ‘off the Richter’ efficiency, reduce bias and humanise the application process.  We call it ‘hiring with heart’.

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