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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) with an AI-enhanced process that needs to be frictionless – i.e., 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 AI 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.
Also Read: woolworths success factors
Woolworths hiring process 2024: 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.
Woolworths 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 an ideal candidate to implement Sapia’s Video Interview Software, a product that delivers video interviews via conversational chat, allowing candidates to complete them in their own time without requiring 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.
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