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Written by Nathan Hewitt

Contact Centre recruitment & retention – this will blow your mind!

Imagine being able to dial-up (or down) any chosen metric such as NPS, retention, absenteeism, staff turnover or any performance data point simply through smarter, predictive, data-driven hiring.

Predictive Talent Analytics turns the imaginary into reality, presenting a variety of businesses, including contact centres, with the opportunity to improve hiring outcomes and raise the performance bar. With only a minor tweak to existing business processes, predictive talent analytics addresses challenge faced by many contact centres.

Recruitment typically involves face-to-face or telephone interviews and psychometric or situational awareness tests. However, there’s an opportunity to make better hires and to achieve better outcomes through the use of Predictive Talent Analytics.

Many organisations are already using analytics to help with their talent processes. Crucially, these are descriptive analytical tools. They’re reporting the past and present. They aren’t looking forward to tomorrow and that’s key. If the business is moving forward your talent tools should also be pointing in the same direction.

Consider a call-waiting display board showing missed and waiting calls. This is reporting.

Alternatively, consider a board that does the same but also accurately predicts significant increases in call volumes, providing you with enough time to increase staffing levels appropriately. That’s predictive.

Descriptive analytical tools showing the path to achievement taken by good performers within the business can add value. But does that mean that every candidate within a bracketed level of academic achievement, from a particular socio-economic background, from a certain area of town or from a particular job board is right for your business? It’s unlikely! Psychometric tests add value but does that mean that everyone within a pre-set number of personality types will be a good fit for your business? That’s also unlikely.

The simple truth is that, even with psychometric testing and rigorous interviews, people are still cycling out of contact centres and the same business challenges remain.

With only a minor tweak to talent processes, predictive talent analytics presents an opportunity to harness existing data and drive the business forward by making hiring recommendations based on somebody’s future capability.

Telling you who is more likely to stay and produce better results for your business.

But wait, it gets better!

Pick the right predictive talent analytics tool and this can be done in an interesting, innovative and intriguing way taking approximately five minutes.

Once the tool’s algorithm knows what good looks like, crucially within your business (because every company is different!), your talent acquisition team can approach the wider talent market armed with a new tool that will drive up efficiency and performance.

Picking the right hires, first time.

Predictive talent analytics boosts business performance

  • Volume & time – with the right choice of tool, your talent team can simultaneously engage hundreds or thousands of candidates and, within a few minutes, be shown which applicants should be at the top of the talent pile because the data is showing they’ll be a good hire.
  • Retention – Each hiring intake is full of talent with the capability to perform for the business. An algorithm has effectively asked thousands of questions and subsequently identified the people who will be capable performers, specifically for your business.
  • Goodbye generic – Your business is unique. If the algorithm provided by your predictive analytics provider is unique to your business, then every single candidate prediction is personalised. A contact centre has the potential to analyse thousands of candidates and pick the individuals who best fit the specific requirements of the business or team, driven by data.

Consider this. Candidate A has solid, recent, relevant experience and good academic grades, ticking all the right hiring boxes but post-hire subsequently cycles out of the business in a few months.

Candidate B is a recent school-leaver with poor grades, no work history but receives a high-performance prediction and, once trained, becomes an excellent employee for many years to come.

On paper candidate A is the better prospect but with the fullness of time, candidate B, identified using predictive talent analytics, is the better hire.

Instead of using generic personality bandings to make hiring decisions, use a different solution.

Use predictive talent analytics to rapidly identify people who will generate more sales or any other measured output. Find those who will be absent less or those who will help the business achieve a higher NPS. Bring applicants into the recruitment pipeline knowing the data is showing they will be a capable, or excellent, performer for your business.

Now that’s an opportunity worth grasping!

Steven John worked within contact centres whilst studying at university, was a recruiter for 13 years and is now Business Development Manager at Sapia, a leading workforce science business providing a data-driven prediction with every hire. This article was originally written for the UK Contact Centre Forum


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Finding hidden human talent – insights from HR Tech World Congress

The Pulse of Innovation in HR

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend Sir Ken Robinson’s opening keynote speech – ‘The Pulse of Innovation’ – at HR Tech World Congress in London.

(You might recognise Sir Ken Robinson from his Ted Talk, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’, which has been viewed almost 45 million times so far.)

As expected, Sir Ken’s speech was filled with equal parts of humour, inspiring stories and thought-provoking ideas around creativity and innovation at work.

Sir Ken opened by highlighting that the average lifespan of organisations is now shorter than it ever has been, and he stressed the importance of continuous innovation and adaptation to external factors in order for organisations to survive – quoting the famous example of Kodak as a company that failed to do so.

Given the context of his speech, it came as little surprise that he stressed the importance of HR’s role in facilitating innovation by identifying and refining talent, and he brought forward one key point which I found particularly interesting – human talent is often buried.

Human talent is often buried

Sir Ken’s point is that talent is not something that we can easily identify, it is something that is hidden within individuals, and it is HR’s role to ‘mine’ for that talent.

“Human talent is highly diverse and it’s often buried. Human resources are like natural resources, you have to go and find them, cultivate them, refine them. If you do this you find that people are capable of extraordinary things.” Sir Ken Robinson

Everyone has potential but it can be quite difficult to see it amongst all the noise and stereotypes we bring with us.

To illustrate this point, Sir Ken cited his own experience interviewing Sir Paul McCartney and George Harrison, both members of a band I think you might know the name of.

During the interview, Sir Ken was surprised to find out that neither of these immensely talented musicians was recognised by their music teacher as ‘top of the class’ – yes, they happened to have the same music teacher in school.

This truly highlights the limitations of our ability to be able to determine what talent looks like (the poor music teacher must really have had to re-evaluate his assessment protocol!).

One of the reasons for this is that we are all inherently bias. While this bias is not conscious, it does affect decisions we make every day.

The ability to categorise or stereotype is an important developmental and evolutionary process that helps humans make sense of the world.

Stereotypes help us make judgements quickly without having to source all pieces of information, but it is detrimental when applied to identifying human talent and hiring decisions.

A basic example; in recruitment and talent acquisition, if successful salespeople in our organisation have all previously had red hair, we might decide that we should only hire red-haired sales assistants.

As human beings, when we try to identify what good ‘looks like’ we concentrate on a few aspects of an individual, and may end up ignoring other important factors that lead to success.

This was further highlighted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, where it was found that 40% of individuals in their study of 1,964 ‘high potentials’ (employees in the top 5% of the organisation) were incorrectly classified as belonging in that category.

In other words, almost half of those identified by managers were not high potentials at all.

42% were below average, with 12% actually being in the bottom ranks with regards to leadership effectiveness.

The point clearly illustrated here is the inability of managers to correctly identify high potentials by not concentrating on the right traits and skills of an individual – they are only human after all.

Taking the human [bias] out of hiring – to make it better for the human

Sir Ken Robinson spoke in detail about the success of the Beatles and how it was due to the diversity within their group – something that is almost impossible to achieve when allowing subjectivity to guide hiring decisions.

One way of addressing subjectivity and unconscious biases in the hiring process is to make use of data-driven technologies.

Using data to inform hiring decisions means HR can take into account the traits and skills that actually lead to performance, rather than keep focusing on hiring based on subjective stereotypes of success.

At Sapia, we develop predictive models, powered by artificial intelligence, that can predict the likelihood of candidates performing well in organisations based on their behaviour – not on the stereotype they fit into.

Our algorithms and questions are created so that everyone is given an equal opportunity to succeed and be considered, based on what actually drives performance – regardless of age, gender or nationality.

Through adopting AI and data science in the HR field, we can get one step closer to bias-free hiring and increased diversity within organisations.

Whilst AI does take the human out of some part of the hiring decision, the outcomes ensure the human is at the forefront with more opportunities for all.


If you would like to learn more about how AI can impact hiring outcomes in your organisation, feel free to get in touch with our sales team. You can also try it out here for yourself right now! 

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Meet SmartInterviewer: the algorithm that seeks to prevent discrimination and predict job-hopping

In an ideal world, the hiring process is discrimination-free and those who are hired stick with whatever company hires them for a long time.

Sadly, neither notion holds particularly true. Discrimination is still very much alive. And new employees continue to leave their companies at an alarming rate. A hiring firm seeks to eliminate both issues — through AI-based tech. 

From the outside looking in, Sapia’s promises nearly sound too good to be true. Founded in Melbourne Australia in 2013, they describe themselves as a combined effort of data scientists, engineers, HR professionals, programmers — and rock climbers. They have based their business around the idea of empowerment of all parties — all for the greater good of fair decisions. “We believe that using data, and ideally actual performance data, is the best way to deliver fairness and better decision-making”, they say.

“Smart Interviewer is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback.”

Their ideas come together in their newest invention: a chatbot called Smart. Rather than you spending countless of hours on initial candidate interviews, Smart Interviewer will do the top-of-funnel interviews for you. According to Smart Interviewer’s parents, it is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback. Moreover, the company reports a 95% completion rate. 

Unconscious bias

It’s no surprise that humans are prone to unconscious bias, and that’s what the company wants to tackle with Smart Interviewer. “When a recruiter first screens a resume, they do so for +/- 6 seconds. So what is it that they are seeking?”, they ask. Their answer to the unconscious bias is simple: data. “Only clean data, like the answers to specific job-related questions, can give us a true bias-free outcome.”

Job hopping

While Sapia has been shortlisted for several tech and AI-based awards, there have been some critical notes too. MIT Technology Review writer Karen Hao labelled the hiring firm’s initiatives as ‘misleading’, ‘troubling’ and ‘causing greater scrutiny for their tools’ labour issues beyond discrimination’.

“Job hopping, or the threat of job hopping is one of the main things that workers are able to increase their income.”

Hao quotes Solon Barocas, an assistant professor at Cornell University and principal researcher at Microsoft ResearchBarocas, an expert at algorithmic fairness and accountability, does raise a valid point in Hao’s article. The fact that Smart Interviewer asks job hopping-related questions, isn’t a good thing for candidates. “Job hopping or the threat of job-hopping is one of the main things that workers are able to increase their income.” 

AI bias

While AI-based systems are designed to eliminate bias, there have been multiple cases where bias can actually creep into algorithms. Amazon stopped using a hiring algorithm after finding out it favoured applicants based on words such as ‘executed’ and ‘captured’, which were far more common in men’s resumes. It proves that even though when gender, race or sexual orientation are no longer part of the process, there are still ways for AI systems to discriminate.

The answer may lie in mandated transparency, according to Barocas. “If firms were more forthcoming about their practices and submitted their tools for such validation, it could help hold them accountable”, he says. 

At the end of the day, and we’ve got ourselves to thank for this: AI bias may be an easier fix than human bias.

Meanwhile, it’s easy to forget why Sapia came up with Smart Interviewer in the first place. The same way it is easy to be overly critical of organisations who are trying their best to really bridge a gap when it comes to discrimination in the forms of a lack of diversity and inclusion with regards to hiring. At the end of the day, and we’ve got ourselves to thank for this: AI bias may be an easier fix than human bias. 

By Jasper Spanjaart, ToTalent, 29/07/2020

To get the Research Paper:

Assessing Job-Hopping Attitudes From Chat Interview

 


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

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Hire Better People Faster

Do you wish you could harness the very best attributes of your people and just hire more of them, quickly, without bias? Do you spend more time recruiting than you would like? Have you ever gone against your better judgement and hired hastily only to discover the whole process has cost your business greatly?

The fact is, in retail, staff turnover is a whopping 2.5x higher than that of other industries. And if every bad hire costs your business 1.5x their annual salary, the costs mount up. Not to mention the lost sales from not having a full team on the store floor every day … bad hire costs, add up – fast.

Know which staff will fit, perform and stay – before you hire them!

You’ll love this. Built on robust psychological and data science, PredictiveHire’s technology compares tens of thousands of data points specifically attained from retail staff based around the world.

Your applicants will be compared to this powerful data to predict their likelihood to stay with you – creating really powerful candidate shortlists. The results speak for themselves.

Superdry are already experiencing the value today

Simon Amesbury, Superdry’s Resourcing Manager sums it up by saying:

“PredictiveHire ticked all the boxes: Cost savings. Time efficiencies throughout the process – less time on screening, sifting, interviewing, assessing, the list continues. A simpler life for store managers by speeding up shortlisting. And a way to boost the number of long-lasting, productive staff.”

Simon says: “Start now. The savings are there to be taken and the benefits are yours to gain!”

To get started and experience smarter hiring with no upfront costs, contact us for a discussion on how PredictiveHire can help you resolve your retail hiring issues.


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