Our smart interviewer aims to make life easier for hiring and talent acquisition professionals, while making job-getting a fairer and more pleasant experience for candidates. This requires a product suite that takes both stakeholders from one end of the journey to the other – application to offer – as seamlessly and personably as possible.
To that end, we’ve introduced a new product to supplement our candidate-favourite Chat Interview tool. Called Video Interview, this new tool revolutionises the current market approach to video-based interviewing and assessment. Now, Sapia’s user journey looks like this:
Thanks to the combination of Chat Interview and Video Interview, hiring managers can conduct hundreds of interviews without having to schedule calls, resulting in amazing hiring velocity. As a result, the average time-to-decision for Sapia’s customers is now under 24 hours, giving our customers the flexibility they need to hire fast in a highly competitive candidate market. Better still, all candidates also receive personalized feedback once they complete the process, whether they are hired or not.
In contrast to our ethical smart interviewer, Video Interview does not use an Ai or algorithm to screen candidate responses. We recognise that, unlike with text, bias is almost impossible to eliminate once video and voice are introduced; to suggest that an Ai can remove bias from the assessment of a video interview is fundamentally dishonest.
Video Interview is currently delivering a Candidate Happiness Score of 9/10, with a completion rate of nearly 76%. 86% of candidates say that the end-to-end experience has made them more likely to recommend the hiring company as an employer of choice.
The new product innovation was created as a direct response to a need by Australia’s biggest private employer, Woolworths Group, who urgently needed to hire better and faster.
Our CEO, Barb Hyman, said that this need has been reflected by many talent acquisition specialists and hiring teams across the globe.
“In a world where there is a massive shortage of talent, even for recruiters themselves, businesses need to find a less taxing way to assess talent,” Hyman said.
“We believe that the introduction of Video Interview makes us the only truly automated hiring solution that addresses fairness, fit and speed, while genuinely engaging candidates,” she said.
Woolworths Group (ASX: WOW) handles more than 1 million candidates, applying for 40,000 roles a year. It estimates that it has saved about 5,000 recruitment hours in the first week of using Sapia alone.
“We love the tool, and we knew candidates would love it because it’s mobile and it’s interactive,” Keri Foti, Head of Advisory & Talent Acquisition Services at Woolworths, said. “We also love the fact that we can measure advocacy for Woolworths at the end of it.”
Decentralized recruitment, while enabling larger companies to hire efficiently, suffers in a labor-short market.
Under ordinary circumstances – like, say, the world before COVID and the Great Resignation – it’s ideal to let local hiring managers build their own workforces. Generally speaking, the decentralized approach is better for productivity, candidate experience, and the overall satisfaction of hiring managers, who look favourably on the trust and autonomy they get from head office.
However, when good candidates are hard to come by, the dearth of talent puts stress on the joints of such a sprawling network. We hear this frequently from companies who come to us to help improve efficiency, diversity, and quality of hire.
These challenges (and others) have effected a drop in confidence in the way companies interview and process candidates. An Aptitude Research and Sapia.ai report from earlier this year found that 33% of companies aren’t confident in the way they interview, and 50% have lost talent due to poor processes. Meanwhile, 22% of the average talent pool is drained at the application stage.
Statistically speaking, roughly one in five people, at minimum, are bailing out of your application process at the very beginning.
As with many things in business, the answer to alleviating organizational pain lies in small, iterative improvements. Our recommendations do not include haphazard technological upgrades, nor do we advocate for widespread process changes. These will more than likely cause your decentralized hiring network to fall apart.
Here are some good places to start.
This is particularly important for the retail and hospitality industries, but certainly applies to any companies that hire entry-level team members at volume. Given the average level of job experience at this level of employment, most resumes and cover letters aren’t useful in gauging candidate quality. On the contrary – they take up precious hiring manager hours, are cumbersome for candidates to write, and are the main cause of the 22-24% candidate drop out rate we mentioned above. That’s not even accounting for the fact that anywhere between 60-80% of resumes contain falsifications.
Decentralization, almost by definition, makes capturing useful information difficult. But if you use an ATS as a tool for centralization, consider adding a candidate NPS measurement step to your application process. It can be as simple as a Net Promoter Score scale (1 to 10). If you hire at volume across multiple localities or regions, asking this one simple question can help you produce meaningful insights about how candidates find your process. What gets measured, gets managed, and though there are many other data points you might want to collect, this is a good (and relatively easy) place to start. If you’re keen to learn more about this, check out our podcast episode on candidate experience with Lars van Wieren, CEO at Starred.
Quantitative data is gold, but qualitative data is platinum. Make a habit of interviewing (not surveying, interviewing) your hiring managers on the ground. You’ll uncover invaluable insights that may enable you to make fast changes at scale. We help our clients collect qualitative feedback from hiring managers as a matter of course, leading to increases in productivity and hiring manager satisfaction.
Here are some useful questions to ask your hiring managers:
This kind of bottom-up research aims to understand how hiring managers are actually behaving and interacting with systems. Some may be breaking from established protocols, but if you ask them why and how, you might uncover tactics and efficiencies that can be brought back to the rest of the organization, thereby improving the way all hiring managers operate. Two adages apply here: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, and ‘People will always find the path of least resistance’.
This fact-finding method is better than surveys because surveys impose a limited scope in which potential problem areas are preset. “We’re asking you about these things,” you’re saying, “and therefore, we’re suggesting they’re most important.” As a result, other problems and possible solutions are likely to be excluded from discovery. You’ll always learn more by having real conversations, because they can go in any conceivable direction.
Again, incredibly useful for retail, but applicable in a wide range of industries and contexts. Think about the universal touchpoints you have with customers (a.k.a candidates) across your decentralized network. In retail, some good examples might be your receipts and carry bags. These provide you invaluable real estate to advertise your jobs and employer brand. Consider putting a URL or QR code on these assets, and you might drastically increase the amount of people who know about and apply for the jobs you advertise. This tactic has the added benefit of capitalizing on active and loyal customers; after all, if they’re buying from you, they’re a prime target for recruitment marketing.
The best part about this manner of advertising? You already own the space, and the design can be centralized and rolled out at scale.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that Sapia’s Ai Smart Interviewer is a dynamite solution for the inevitable pain points of decentralised recruitment. Our technology can be rolled out across your entire company, and takes care of the application, screening, interviewing, and assessment stages of your process.
Hiring managers save time – as much as 1,600 hours per month, for some of our customers – but they still get the option to approve and interact with short-listed candidates. Better still, our platform captures vital data on diversity and candidate experience, enabling you to see exactly how your network is performing, individually and collectively.
Best of all, Sapia tech integrates directly with the leading ATS platforms, and can be rolled out in as little as four weeks.
Woolworths Group, Australia’s largest private employer, uses Sapia to hire more than 50,000 candidates per year, nationwide. To see how they flourish in a labor-short market, check out our case study here.
It’s been an exciting start to 2021 for Sapia (Formerly PredictiveHire) and I’m pleased to share that we have been nominated as one of six global HR Tech startups to watch, by the HR Technology Conference and Expo, which is taking place this week.
I’m extremely proud of my team for achieving this feat – it’s been a team effort, and after several months of implementing new processes and initiatives, it’s a wonderful accomplishment. I am thrilled that Sapia has been recognized as one of the leaders in the industry by the HR Technology Conference this year.
Sapia was among six companies chosen from 24,000 applications to have the honour of presenting. It gives us the opportunity to showcase our technology to over four-thousand viewers that will be tuning in over the week. It’s a huge honour to be showcasing how our Ai-enabled chat technology can truly change recruiting.
We launched our exclusive Ethics Charter called FAIR earlier this year; a call to arms commitment that includes a guarantee towards inclusivity, fairness for all, explainable AI, transparency, privacy policies and accountability. We also recently commissioned exclusive research with Aptitude Research to uncover global company attitudes towards automation, technology in talent acquisition and unconscious human bias.
We’ve hit several milestones when it comes to evolving our offering for the better, and presenting at the conference this weekend is the cherry on top. Our biggest priorities right now are raising awareness of the importance of ethical AI and abolishing unconscious human bias. The world right now is at a stage where this is critical for the success of companies of the future and we’re proud to be discussing this and more at Friday’s session.
Sapia will be featuring in a session on innovative HR tech startups on Friday March 19 at 2:00PM ET.
To register for the virtual webinar, guests need to enter their details via this link: https://blog.hrtechnologyconference.com/hr-technology-conference-exposition-spring-set-to-explore-industrys-startup-ecosystem.
More about Sapia
Sapia is a frontier interview automation solution that solves three pain points in recruiting – bias, candidate experience, and efficiency. Customers are typically those that receive an enormous number of applications and are dissatisfied with how much collective time is spent hiring.
Unlike other forms of assessments which can feel confrontational, Sapia’ Chat Interview™ is built on a text-based conversation – totally familiar because text is central to our everyday lives. Every candidate gets a chance at an interview by answering five relatable questions. Every candidate also receives personalised feedback (99% CSAT). Ai then reads candidates’ answers for best-fit, translating assessments into personality readings, work-based traits and communication skills. Candidates are scored and ranked in real-time, making screening 90% faster. Sapia fits seamlessly into your HR tech-stack and with it you will get ‘off the Richter’ efficiency, reduce bias and humanise the application process. We call it ‘hiring with heart’.
The good people at SuccessFactors have created an HR software system to help you deliver business strategy alignment, team execution, and maximum people performance. They’re passionate about helping you empower your workforce. And with Sapia, you can now take full advantage of SuccessFactors ATS to get ahead of your competitors by integrating Sapia’s interview automation for faster, fairer and better hiring results.
From attracting candidates of diverse backgrounds and delivering an exceptional candidate experience, you’re expected to do a lot! All whilst you’re selecting from thousands of applicants…
The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful SuccessFactors ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.
You can now:
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.
You can now streamline your SuccessFactors process by integrating Sapia’s interview automation with SuccessFactors.
By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.
Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai is available to all SuccessFactors users. You can automate interviewing, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort! Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.
As unemployment rates rise, it’s more important than ever to show empathy for candidates and add value when we can. Using Sapia, every single candidate gets a FirstInterview through an engaging text experience on their mobile device, whenever it suits them. Every candidate receives personalised MyInsights feedback, with helpful coaching tips which candidates love.
“I have never had an interview like this in my life and it was really good to be able to speak without fear of judgment and have the freedom to do so.
The feedback is also great. This is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves.
The response back is written with a good sense of understanding and compassion.
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.”
Take it for a 2-minute test drive here >
Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in SuccessFactors as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.
See Recruiter Reviews here >
Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results.