We’re thrilled to announce that along with our customer Iceland Foods, we won the award for Best In-House Innovation in Recruitment at the 2021 Recruiter Awards in London.
Established in 2002, the Recruiter Awards gala is the UK’s largest event for the entire recruitment community recognising outstanding achievements by agencies and in-house recruiters.
The award recognises the partnership between Iceland and Sapia that saved their store leaders 24,000 hours a year by implementing transformational change – during a pandemic.
Iceland receives a high volume of applicants – more than 120,000 per month – and faced a crisis in 2020: increased trade and Covid-19 absence meant that surge hiring needed to be automated, without losing the personal touch.
Automation was critical to increase the time store managers had to trade in their stores.
It had to be a simple solution that store managers would understand quickly and trust. The candidate experience had to be fast, inclusive and human.
The tool needed to work for the candidate market which is as diverse as the general population. The team settled on Smart Interviewer as their solution of choice.
Candidates have reacted well to the technology, with 99% positive sentiment towards the process and 77% of candidates more likely to recommend Iceland as an employer of choice.
There was 5x payback in four months, giving back 8,000 hours to the business and costing less than £1 per applicant.
On top of this there was zero gender and race bias, ensuring people hires are as diverse as the applicant group.
The Judges comments were that: “ this simple, straightforward submission ticked every box by demonstrating the contribution the recruitment function played to the success of their overall business. They also clearly demonstrated thoughtful consideration to the fact that many candidates would be applying for jobs at Iceland following the decimation of their previous career paths, for example, aviation industry employees.”
Read the case study of Iceland and Sapia innovated during the pandemic here.
An ‘unfair’ advantage is obtained for Recruiters by adding Sapia’s interview automation to Kallidus with faster, fairer and better hiring results.
As the first gate to employment, the hiring team has a huge influence on candidate experience, diversity and inclusion and overall business success. The way you hire can make someone’s day. It can set your business up to overtake the competition. It can be one step towards designing a fairer world for everyone.
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.
Recruiters are expected to:
The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful Kallidus ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.
Now is the time to:
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.
By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.
Watch this 2 minute video to see how Sapia works inside Kallidus for Iceland Foods.
Get ahead with Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai available for all Kallidus users. Automate interview, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort. Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.
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You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now – HERE. Else you can leave us your details to get a personalised demo
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.”
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.”
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.
It’s now well established that a wider talent pool means more opportunities for recruiting diverse candidates and this results in higher returns, increased productivity, and creativity benefit companies with a diverse workforce. The issue isn’t that we need these thighs to be proven anymore, but rather that nothing we’ve been doing to create the change we need has worked.
Though well-intentioned, DEI has not delivered. Companies have been motivated by the optics of their DEI programmes rather than taking consequential actions to bring about change. Unconscious bias training has been proven ineffective because it cannot address the systemic issues that lead to bias in the first place.
Companies have also spent large sums of money and resources improving their cultures that celebrate belonging, but neglecting their recruitment metrics because they excuse lack of diverse talent as a ‘pipeline problem’.
To address this we need to do something radical. Because what we are doing just isn’t working.
This is where Ai is, where the power of technology can really have a positive impact on the world.
You need to find undiscovered talent.
Undiscovered talent is the talent that you overlook when using traditional hiring practices that rely on CVs, which are limited in communicating real skills, and job interviews, which are beset with bias and limited in their insight. By using radical new talent intelligence that uncovers people for their job fit, based on science-backed insights, you start to uncover undiscovered talent. These are people who might have been dismissed because of things like age, past experience, ethnicity, gender or other preconceptions and biases that we have about who we think is a good fit for a job.
Our technology has uncovered some amazing talent for the companies that we work with, that they would have otherwise missed out on. This is a massive advantage when it comes to making an impact on this issue.
This is how we start to move the dial on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Want to know if technology can give everyone a fair go?
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