A good candidate experience doesn’t cut it in the current recruitment climate. It’s the most basic thing that hiring managers need to fulfil, but if that’s all you are delivering you are going to miss out on talent. 

You need to hire fast (interview-to-offer in 24 hours) and your process needs to be frictionless – ie. you can’t be asking candidates to jump through hoops to prove themselves to you. No games, no CVs, no third interviews, no asking them to make time for an interview when you are free. 

Those days are over. The global talent shortage is being felt across every industry and recruitment needs to be re-imagined.

And, there’s only one solution: automation. 

Woolworths Hiring Process: Automation is the key

Yes, it can be hard to cut through a lot of hype around automation, but it is possible that leaders can develop a  clear-eyed way to think about how these technologies will improve their organizations.

This is not about replacing jobs of HR managers, but giving them the tools to help them grapple with the challenges in the current hiring environment.  It’s about empowering HR teams to be able to do the seemingly impossible – and be good at it. Or to put it another way, help them create a human-centric organization with super-human intelligence.

Introducing Video Interview

This was the challenge that Woolworths Group brought to us.  Even before the pandemic, the Group was realising that they needed to invest in more efficient processes to keep up with the recruitment demands of the company. But remaining fair about who they hired and treating candidates with respect was not up for compromise. 

They had just recovered from surge hiring needs brought on by COVID and wanted to make sure they never had to go through that as a team again. The task had been slow and manual,  took too long to hire and the tech they had used was not reliable. 

They were looking to redefine their whole approach and realised they could not deliver a positive experience to candidates without the help of technology. 

Sapia’s current chat-based candidate assessment was chosen as a front-runner after an extensive search for tools, given the fact that it meant that bias was removed from reviewing candidates and because it also meant they could give every candidate constructive feedback – even if they didn’t get the job.

However, there was still an opportunity to solve for the sheer volume of video interviews that had to occur in the next step.

This made Woolworths a perfect candidate to roll out Sapia’s Video Interview product, a video interview delivered via conversational chat that candidates can do in their own time, and doesn’t require any scheduling input from hiring managers.

Woolworths Interview Process: 24-hour time to decision

This means anyone can now run a fully automated hiring process that is both fair, candidate-friendly and insanely fast. Woolworths was the first customer to go live with Video Interview and as the largest private employer in Australia it was a true test of the effectiveness of the product.

Within one week of going live Smart Interviewer, our text chatbot, had interviewed more than 10k candidates, all without bias. The introduction of an end-to-end fully automated chat based assessment process where every candidate is interviewed and every candidate receives personalised feedback transformed their recruitment for candidates.

But, what was transformational for hiring managers was that the top candidates were then able to do Video Interviews through the platform by video recording answers to a set of questions on their phone. No-one had to schedule an interview and hiring managers could quickly assess the best candidates for the role by simply watching a video – also, in their own time. 

Time-to-decision is as little as 24 hours in some cases with the Group achieving an NPS score of 8.8. 

Automation the answer for the current climate 

The issues that Woolworths faced are felt by most large companies hiring at scale. With the introduction of Video Interview, Sapia can now create and deliver a solution that streamlines the Woolworths recruitment process and improves the efficiency of large-scale recruitment for other companies as well.

• Giving everyone a fair go at getting the job 
• Giving every candidate feedback 
• Keeping it frictionless for candidates
• Removing the need to schedule any follow up interviews asynchronously 
• Empowering hiring managers with objective intelligence about every candidate 
• Enabling hiring managers to have the final say by watching a simple video in just a few minutes.

If you’d like to know more about Video Interview and how we have integrated video into our product suite without compromising fairness, please get in touch.

You can also download our Woolworths case study.

Frontier technology that puts people at the heart of their recruitment solution is rewarded for its ground-breaking approach that also solves for bias and reduces recruitment costs.

Melbourne, Australia, September 21 – Sapia, a text-based AI recruitment solution has been recognised globally for its commitment to creating a hiring experience that is empowering and motivating to the individual and which enhances your company’s brand.

The TIARA Talent Tech Star, awarded to Sapia, honours the most exemplary businesses globally in the talent acquisition industry.

Selected from a group of international finalists as a bold and innovative startup, Sapia was deemed top of the class. All for having demonstrated the value and impact of their solution at a time when agency and in-house recruiters are embracing technology and new ways of working.

The Candidate Experience Solution of the Year Award recognised Sapia as

“a matching solution that could fundamentally change the way
candidates experience recruitment, delivering valuable insight to both the
employer and the candidate whether they are recruited or not.”

The judges included the Head of Search & Staffing UK&I and EMEA at LinkedIn, Sales and Marketing Director of ManpowerGroup UK, and  Head of Innovation and Transformation at PwC.

Sapia awarded for solving a core pain point

Sapia CEO Barb Hyman said the team was honoured to receive industry recognition for their candidate experience solution which was a core pain point that the company solved along with bias and recruitment costs.

“For far too long as an industry HR has failed so many jobseekers by not giving everyone an equal chance to prove themselves and then ghosting those who do make it through to interviews,” Hyman said.

“With Sapia, everyone gets a chat interview and is treated equally by replying to text-based questions on their phone, without any demographic data being used to make hiring decisions.”

She said the company’s goal around candidate experience is to be recognised as the most inclusive recruitment solution at scale. The team has done extensive testing on how different groups respond to chat-based interviews. This includes a range of candidates from a multitude of gender, race and language backgrounds. For these groups, the experience has been transformative. For candidates who might otherwise feel intimidated by a video format feel safe and comfortable interviewing by chat.  The demographics collected on this front are only used in reporting for HR leaders against DEI targets, and not in any hiring decisions.

“We hold ourselves to incredibly high standards when it comes to creating an inclusive product, and ultimately it’s placing people at the core of what we do, that sets us apart from others, and makes our solution so successful for our customers.”

The Qantas Group, the Iceland Group, Telefonica, Bunnings and other trusted consumer brands have seen dramatic improvements from applying Sapia to their hiring/ promotion decisions.  

About Sapia 

Sapia (Formerly PredictiveHire) is a frontier technology solution which solves for three pain points in recruiting: bias; candidate experience, and efficiency. With only five free-text behavioural questions taking around 20 mins, and using over 80 features extracted from the candidate responses, our predictive models assign a “suitability” score to each candidate. To date, 400,000 candidates looking for roles in retail, healthcare, customer service, hospitality, contact centres and graduate roles across 34 countries have experienced Sapia with positive feedback averaging 99%.

Media Contact | Barb Hyman, CEO  barb@sapia.ai

Have you seen the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook?

Finally, 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.

To find out how to interpret bias in recruitment, we also have a great eBook on inclusive hiring.

And then suddenly the video interview went mainstream! 

Whether it’s Google Meet, Facetime or Zoom, 2020 will always be remembered as the year that video meet-ups went mainstream. It’s how kids kept up their lessons. How their parents hooked up with their personal trainers. It’s where people met up for Friday drinks. And of course, it’s the technology that enabled millions to stay connected to colleagues and clients while working from home. 

And just as video has impacted so many parts of our lives and businesses, it also accelerated the adoption of video tools in contemporary recruiting.

It might be considered the next-best-thing to ‘being there’, but could video interviewing actually be filled with traps that are working against the best interests of recruiters, candidates and employers? 

What is a video interview?

There are two types of video interviews:

• one-way or asynchronous video interviews – where candidates record their responses to a set of job-relevant questions.
• two-way video interviews  – using one of the platforms described above or bespoke tools that connect the interviewer (or interviewing panel) in conversation with candidates.

Can video interviews really reduce unconscious bias?

Within both types of video interviews, an ability to reduce unconscious bias is promoted as a key benefit.

Unconscious bias is the sum of the inherent beliefs, opinions, cultural background and life experiences that shape how we assess, engage and interact with others.

There are several ways that video interviewing might help reduce unconscious bias:

• A consistent experience – With a structured approach to interview questions and process that provides every candidate with the same parameters. A standardised experience for every candidate can be seen to reduce bias.  When questions are set, there’s little or no room for distracting small talk (in two way interviews) that may reveal bias triggers.
• No geographic or travel barriers – By interviewing all candidates in a location of their choosing, the bias of distance and the effort and expense of travel to attend an interview in person is reduced. 
• Open the opportunity to more candidates – With the ability to automate video interviews and applications, recruiters can connect with many more candidates, helping to reduce the bias that may see a CV or application ignored or put aside.

The bias problem that’s staring you in the face.

As much as proponents of video screening or interviewing claim it removes bias from the process, by its very nature, the opposite is in fact true. 

As soon as an interviewer or hirer sees a candidate, the blindfolds of bias are removed. No matter how aware or trained in bias the reviewers may be, images and sound can trigger bias. Additionally, it can distract attention from the things that really matter. Here are just a few things that someone talking to the camera will reveal. All possible points of unconscious bias:

• gender
• age
• skin colour
• cultural background
• visible disabilities
• attractiveness or otherwise
• what people wear – headscarves, religious jewellery, or maybe you just don’t like stripes or the candidate’s personal style
• the background of the video – are you making judgements about candidates because of their home environment or choice of art on the walls 
• accents might sound ‘funny’ or strange to your ear
• candidates may have unusual voices or speech impediments that would not impact their ability to perform in the role 
• you may negatively associate candidates with other people you’ve worked with or met 
• the candidate may be highly nervous  about ‘performing’ for the camera, affecting their ability to speak normally and communicate clearly

No rule says you need to see someone to hire them

That’s just a bias (much like the bias pre-Covid) that you need to see someone at work to know that they are doing the work. 

Blind hiring means you are interviewing a candidate without seeing them or knowing them. It’s fair for the candidate and also smart for your organisation. 

If you are hanging your hat on the fact you just finished bias training- research has shown consistently unconscious bias training does not work.  

While we have all been dutifully attending it for years, the truth is the change factor is zero. 

Video interviews vs text interviews. Which delivers blind interviewing at its best?

Sapia’s Ai-enabled, text chat interview platform has been designed to deliver the ultimate in blind testing at the most important stage of the recruitment process: candidate screening. 

Unlike video interviewing, Sapia removes all the elements that can bring unconscious bias into play – video, visual content such as candidate photos or data gathered from social channels such as LinkedIn. Sapia even takes CVs out of the process.

Read: The Ultimate Guide To Interview Automation With Text-Based Assessments

An enjoyable and empowering candidate experience

While being ‘camera shy’ works against many candidates in video interviews, Sapia evaluates candidates with a few simple open, transparent questions via a text conversation.  

Candidates know text and are comfortable using it.  A text interview is non-threatening and candidates tell us they feel respected and recognised as the individual they are. They are grateful for the space and time to tell their story in their words. It’s the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback.

Better hiring outcomes with Sapia

Beyond a more empowering candidate experience, the platform helps recruiters and employers connect with the best candidates faster and cost-effectively. The platform uses Ai, machine learning and NLP to test, assess and rank candidates according to values, traits, personality, communications skills and more. 

Recruiters can gain valuable personality insights and the confidence of a shortlist with the best matched candidates to proceed to live interviews. By removing bias from the screening process Sapia is helping employers increase workplace diversity. 

Find out more about Sapia’s Ai-powered text interview platform. Also, see how we can support your best-practice recruitment needs today. 

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Finally, you can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now HERE >