We know that the global pandemic has caused a disruption in global workforces. Much has already been said about the Great Resignation, and how it has morphed into the Great Reshuffle, a period in which many are looking to reinvent themselves in the light of new jobs and careers. No industries or role types have been spared, either, it seems – even recruiters are leaving positions in the tens of thousands.
With a reshuffle, however, comes uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety. The war on talent may have benefited some, but the path to career reinvention is by no means guaranteed. Consider the following factors, factors job-hunters must face every day:
It’s little wonder that some Great Reshufflers, especially emerging adults (ages 18-24), are experiencing anxiety about working in the post-COVID world. Instability is the only constant. Consider, too, that some people are better at dealing with uncertainty – or, in technical terms, they are higher-than-average in the HEXACO personality traits Flexibility (or Adaptability, as it’s sometimes known).
This hypothesis is supported by at least one study, published last year in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. It suggested that, “…due to the outbreak of ‘Fear of COVID-19’, people are becoming depressed and anxious about their future career, which is creating a long-term negative effect on human psychology.”
The traditional face-to-face interview is typified by stilted small talk and a general air of nervousness. If a candidate is low in Extraversion, high in Agreeableness, or high in the Anxiety and Fearfulness scales of the Emotionality personality domain, their experience of walking into a blind interview is likely to be worsened by the additional stressors left by COVID-19.
Consider, as is likely to be the case, that the candidate might possess a combination of all three traits, in the proportions laid out above. These people, especially if they are young, may not even bother to apply for a job in today’s climate.
The ramifications of this are obvious: You risk, at best, filling your workforce with open, disagreeable, type-A employees. At worst, you risk baking unfairnesses or bias into your recruitment process, at the cost of good candidates who don’t shine in awkward face-to-face situations.
Take this small data visualisation from our TalentInsights dashboard as a key example. Please note here that the following results apply to the outcomes of the hiring process, and not Smart Interviewer’s recommendations.
It presents an assessment of candidate hiring outcomes according to key HEXACO personality traits. The red dots represent female candidates, the blue dots male. Immediately, we can see that when it comes to Conscientiousness – one of the best predictors of workplace success – females and males are more or less identical.
The main differences between the two genders occur, however, in the domains of Agreeableness and Emotionality. Combined, these two traits are good predictors of anxiety and/or aversion to fear. As you can see, females tend to be higher in Agreeableness and Emotionality than males.
Though the difference is not incredibly significant, it is still present – and it may require a slight change to the way you bring female candidates into your hiring process. The data proves, of course, that your best candidates are just as likely to be female as male – but your recruitment tactics may be producing outcomes that favour males.
We’ve said it before, and it’s the whole reason we exist: A blind, text-based Chat Interview with a clever, machine-learning Ai. Smart Interviewer is our smart interviewer, and it has now analysed more than 500 million candidate words to arrive at the kinds of data points you see above. It helps you combat bias at the top of your funnel, and gives you the Talent Analytics you need at the bottom.
And it works. Take it from the candidates high in Agreeableness:
“I have never had an interview like this online in my life… able to speak without fear or judgement. The feedback is also great to reflect on. I feel this is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves and at the same time the responses back to me are written with a good sense of understanding and compassion also. 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.”
– Graduate Candidate A
“[It was] approachable, rather than daunting. I found the process to be comprehensive and easy to complete. I also enjoyed that the range of questions were different than those commonly asked. The visual aspects of the survey makes the task seem approachable rather than daunting and thus easier to complete.”
– Graduate Candidate B
The future of work is uncertain. But with a fair and unbiased assessment tool, you can prevent the best talent from being lost under the dust of the Great Reshuffle – and save a lot of time and money doing it.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
By Barb Hyman
I was prompted to write this after reading a piece by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in HBR who asked this same question in the context of consumer companies. I want to challenge everyone who is hiring to ask themselves the same question in that context.
My answer of course is unequivocally yes. It’s the right thing to do. It will boost trust in your hiring process big time, and it will be a boost to your employer brand.
Here’s some objective data: Aptitude Research interviewed more than 300 HR leaders in 2022 to find out, among other things, the benefits of giving candidates feedback. It improves quality of hire, candidate experience, AND first-year retention.
Imagine what the world would look like if everyone had better self-awareness. Today, not knowing yourself carries an even greater cost. How can you make good decisions about what career you pursue if you don’t actually know what career suits your personality? Imagine the careers you may be missing out on because you don’t have that self-knowledge.
When people ask me what our innovation has achieved in the world – I respond with, “We are raising the collective self-awareness of humanity.”
Unlike GPT-3, 4, or whatever comes next, Sapia’s AI-driven insights can enhance a person’s self-knowledge and agency. That’s the journey in life we’re all on – to understand who we are. “To know oneself is to have mastery over one’s destiny.”
Our AI-powered smart chat technology is aimed at helping candidates better understand themselves and even offers personalized coaching tips. It’s an innovation in recruitment that, as far as I know, no other company comes close to. It challenges the power balance in recruitment and empowers candidates to make the right decision for them.
Just look at these data:
In conclusion, sharing AI-driven candidate insights with your candidates is not only beneficial for them, but can also be a game-changer for your organization. If there’s any doubt about this within your team, feel free to pass this post around.
Is unconscious bias holding your business back? When it comes to building your team, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of choosing a candidate who seems like a good ‘cultural fit’.
But what if that means you’re missing out on a candidate who would be a great ‘cultural add’? Or the candidate that’s actually the perfect fit for the role and the team. When you make an effort to overcome bias and cultivate a workplace that values diversity – of background, experience, world view and so many more attributes – you’ll cultivate a workplace that’s not just great for your team, it’s great for your business too.
Hiring on a gut feeling that someone will be a good fit for the team is just one indication that your decision has probably been influenced by unconscious bias. Don’t be alarmed, it’s more common than you think. In fact, we all have unconscious bias and we are all affected by it.
You might observe it in the way someone treats or talks about others, or perhaps you’ve been at the uncomfortable end of bias yourself. When it comes to recognising our own ‘built-in’ biases, however, it can be challenging. And that’s why they call it unconscious.
Unconscious bias training has become not just a buzzword but a big business in itself. In this article, we explore the big questions around bias: What is unconscious bias? How does it impact the hiring process? Can unconscious bias be defeated? If you’ve already jumped to your own conclusions on those questions, that’s unconscious bias too!
Since the first humans gathered around campfires, bias has existed.
It is simply the way we feel in favour of something – an idea, a thing, a person or group – or how we feel against that something. Bias usually suggests that these feelings are judgemental, unfair or discriminatory.
Bias is about making assumptions, stereotyping or a fear of the unknown. It can be innate or it can be learned and unconscious bias is created and reinforced by our personal experiences, our cultural background and environment. Bias can be of little consequence – I hate broccoli – or potentially very damaging – I hate {insert name here!}.
The objective of overcoming bias in the workplace is creating a work environment where every employee can feel that the workplace is welcoming, safe and free from discrimination, harassment or unfair treatment. While that may sound ‘warm and fuzzy’, diverse and inclusive workplaces can help lift employee satisfaction, boost engagement and productivity and enhance the reputation of your business as a great employer. It can also lower your exposure to potential legal action from unfair or unjust employment practices.
When it comes to hiring, there are some biases that are more common than others. Some need no explanation – gender bias, ageism, racism, name bias – however psychologists and researchers have identified over 150 types of bias that impact the way we engage and interact with others. Here, we look at just a few. Chances are you’ve let one or more of these biases influence your decisions and, as a result, missed out on a perfect candidate.
Confirmation bias – where an opinion is formed quickly on a single detail (bad suit, good school) and the interviewer ‘fills in’ their own assessment of the candidate with questions that they believe confirm or justify their initial impression or judgement.
Overconfidence bias – can be closely connected to confirmation bias, when the recruiter lets their confidence in their own ability choose the best candidate in the way of objective assessment.
Illusory correlation – where a recruiter believes certain questions are revealing insights about the candidate that actually don’t exist or are not relevant to their ability to perform in a role.
Beauty Bias – this one speaks for itself. Will a great looking person necessarily be the most successful choice for the role? The simple answer? No.
Conformity bias – this bias can occur with group assessments when recruiters fall in with the majority even if their opinion about a candidate differs. Peer pressure can have a lot to answer for.
Contrast effect – also called judgement bias, this is where a candidate is compared with the resume and candidate that went before, rather than being reviewed on their own skills and merit against the requirements of the role.
Here’s some more:
Affect heuristics – this unconscious bias sounds very scientific, but it’s one that’s being a very human survival mechanism throughout history. It’s simply about making snap judgements on someone’s ability to do a job based on superficial and irrelevant factors and your own preconceptions – someone’s appearance, tattoos, the colour of their lipstick.
Similarity attraction – where hirers can fall into the trap of essentially hiring themselves; candidates with whom they share similar traits, interests or backgrounds. They may be fun to hang out with, but maybe not the best match for the job or building diversity.
Affinity bias – so you went to the same school, followed the same football team and maybe know the same people. That’s nice, but is it really of any relevance to the hiring decision?
Expectation anchor – where the hirer is stuck on what’s possibly an unrealistic preconception of what and who the candidate should be
Halo effect – Your candidate is great at one thing, so that means they’re great at everything else, right? Judging candidates on one achievement or life experience doesn’t make up for a proper assessment of their qualifications and credentials
Horn effect – It’s the devil’s work. The opposite of the halo effect where one negative answer or trait darkens the hirer’s judgement and clouds the assessment process.
Intuition – going with that gut feeling again? While the emotional and intellectual connection may come into the process, it’s largely irrelevant. Focus on their actual experience and capabilities instead.
In an ideal world, every hire would be approached in an objective way, free of unconscious basis and based on the candidate’s ability to do the job well. However, we don’t live in that perfect world and, time and time again, bias can cloud our judgement and lead to the wrong recruitment decisions. So what can we do? Let’s first talk about what doesn’t work.
The efforts of any business to drive affirmative change in their business are to be respected. However, there’s a very good reason why unconscious bias training simply can’t work. Why?
Because unconscious bias is a universal and inherently human condition. Training targets individuals and their well-worn attitudes and world views.
While awareness and attitudes may change, inherent bias will remain because that’s the human condition.
So if humans can’t solve a very human problem, what can? Sapia is challenging the issue of unconscious bias in hiring by promoting ‘top-of-funnel’ screening that entirely avoids humans and their bias. Instead, candidates are interviewed and assessed through automation and algorithms. The data that trains the machine is continuously tested so that if ever the slightest bias is found, it can be corrected.
According to an Article Published By Fast Company:
(Ref. https://www.fastcompany.com/90515678/science-explains-why-unconscious-bias-training-wont-reduce-workplace-racism-heres-what-will)
From a scientific perspective, there are reasons to be cautious that unconscious bias training will have a significant impact on racism, sexism, and other forms of workplace discrimination.
Contrary to what unconscious bias training programs would suggest, people are largely aware of their biases, attitudes, and beliefs, particularly when they concern stereotypes and prejudices. Such biases are an integral part of their self and social identity.
Contrary to popular belief, our beliefs and attitudes are not strongly related to our behaviours. There is rarely more than 16% overlap (correlation of r = 0.4) between attitudes and behavior, and even lower for engagement and performance, or prejudice and discrimination.
The closest science has come to measuring unconscious biases is via so-called Implicit Association Tests (IAT), like Harvard’s racism or sexism test. (Over 30 million people have taken it, and you can try it for free here. These have come under significant academic criticism for being weak predictors of actual behaviours. For example, on race questions (black vs. white), the reported meta-analytic correlations range from 0.15 to 0.24.
The hardest thing to influence through any D&I initiative is how people feel about concepts such as gender or race. Systematic reviews of diversity training concluded: “The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.”
Using machines and artificial intelligence to augment and challenge decisions is fast becoming mainstream across many applications and industries. To reduce the impact of unconscious bias in hiring decisions, testing for bias and removing it using algorithms is possible. With humans, it’s not.
Sappia tackles bias by screening and evaluating candidates with a simple open, transparent interview via a text conversation. Candidates know text and trust text.
Unlike other Ai Hiring Tools, Sapia has no video hookups and no visual content. No CVs.
All of these factors carry the risk that unconscious bias can come into play. Nor is data extracted from social channels as our solution is designed to provide every candidate with a great experience that respects and recognises them as the individual they are.
A research study by The Ladders found that recruiters only spend about 6 seconds looking at a resume. With bulk-hiring, it’s probably less. That’s 6 seconds to make or break a candidate’s hope.
Sapia’s AI-based screening comes into to its own with high volume briefs, with the capability to conduct unlimited interviews in a single hour/day, assessing >85 factors – from personality traits to language fluency and other valuable talent insights. Candidates receive personalised feedback, coaching tips for their next interview and faster decisions on their progress in the hiring process.
Sapia is not out to replace human recruiters but we are here to work as your co-pilot, helping you to make smarter, faster and unbiased hiring decisions.
AI-enabled enabled interviewing and assessment also tracks and measures bias at a micro level so businesses can understand the level and type of bias that may previously have influenced decisions. With candidate and client satisfaction rated 95%+, it’s a game-changer for changing behaviours.
The ability to measure unconscious bias is just one more reason to use AI-based screening tools over traditional processes.
Sapia gives every candidate an opportunity to tell theirs. Through our engaging, non-threatening process where unconscious bias can be taken out of the equation (literally!), we will help you get to the best candidates sooner.
You’ll get a shortlist of candidates with the right traits and values for your business so you can move ahead to interviews with confidence and clarity. With time and resources saved on upfront screening, your team can concentrate on making the interviewing stage more rewarding for hirers and candidates alike.
With Sapia, you can soon be on your way to building more diverse, inclusive and happier workplaces. We know we can work for your business, so we’d love to work with your business. Let’s talk.
Get diversity and inclusion right whilst hiring on time and on budget. In this Inclusivity e-Book, you’ll learn: