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.”
In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, author Bob Cialdini explains how the contrast principle can unfairly distort our perceptions of quality and value. By comparing a really good thing to something that is just okay, we tend to judge the latter as far worse than it is. It works the other way, too: when presented with a host of bad options, the best of the bunch – the lesser of all the evils – looks disproportionately attractive.
Cialdini gives us myriad examples: Realtors who show you a couple of dingy properties to make the target property look better, and retail salespeople who suggest a really expensive coat to get you to settle for the cheaper belt. The principle also turned a series of bad management decisions into the Watergate incident, if you can believe that.
It doesn’t stop there, however. The contrast principle is a natural and inextricable part of the traditional face-to-face interview.
Janie is bright, exuberant, and chatty. The interview starts strongly. She strides proudly into your office, hand outstretched, smiling warmly. Her clothes are fashionable. Her resume is colourful and well-designed. You like her right away, as does everyone, because she’s a ray of sunshine. She probably plays the harp and makes her own muesli.
The interview goes well. Janie knows what to say, and because she is extraverted, she knows how to deftly circumvent tricky technical questions. There’s a slight concern in the back of your mind that she is not sufficiently experienced, but you figure that her outgoing, can-do attitude will more than make up for that (and you might be right).
Alice is your next appointment. She’s a lot quieter than Janie. She speaks a lot less, too. Her smile is genuine, and she is perfectly well spoken, but Alice is clearly nervous. Her manner is cautious, full of apprehension.
You notice that her resume is excellent. Ticks all the right boxes. She’s a veteran in the field. But there’s something amiss: She’s just not like Janie. As a result, you’re probably not going to call her back for a second interview.
This is one of the most common ways the contrast principle plays out: If the second candidate does not match the energy of the first, if her presence does not illicit the same rise in dopamine, then we are likely to favour the first candidate. Objectivity quickly goes out the window.
There are many suggestions out there for mitigating or removing the contrast principle, but the truth is this: If humans do your face-to-face interviews, you cannot prevent the potential for contrast bias. Even conducting what’s called a ‘blind resume review’ will not help. Yes, you can assess resumes stripped of identifying characteristics, like race or gender, but you cannot account for the fact that the details themselves are easily doctored and falsified. Don’t forget that 78% of people lie.
The bottom line is this: You need a blind, non-human smart interviewer to do your first-round interviewing for you. It’s the only way to be free of biases, compromise hires, and the intractable likeability factor. We can help with that.
To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.
Is your recruitment team swamped by the sheer volume of job applications and CVs? Taking too long to get the right people in place? Spending too much time on administration and not enough time building relationships? Or building your business?
If you’ve just answered “yes” to these universal challenges for recruiters and hirers, recruitment automation can deliver the solution that you need. Especially at a time when unemployment is high and more candidates are seeking opportunities in all available roles.
Recruitment process automation can help to lift productivity, get to the best candidates quicker, fill roles sooner and reduce hiring costs.
All this while improving the candidate experience and lifting your organisation’s talent profile and brand reputation. It’s not surprising then that there are few if any, recruiters or hirers, who haven’t already brought automation into the hiring process.
From the way we shop or pay bills online, to how we order food or choose our entertainment, data-driven technology has changed the way we do everyday things. Technology helps us to make better use of our time and lets us transact or connect in more convenient and efficient ways.
In much the same way, recruitment automation is the technology that automates or streamlines tasks or workflows within the recruiting process that would previously have been done manually.
These new technology tools and platforms address tasks at every step of the hiring process. They often leverage technologies such as machine learning, predictive data analytics and artificial intelligence.
Reviewing and screening CVs and job applications is widely acknowledged as time consuming and repetitive tasks of the recruitment process. It’s often one of the first processes that recruiters prioritise for automation.
In an age of high volume briefs– such as team roles in retail, customer service or graduate internships – it’s standard to receive a high volume of candidate applications. Properly and fairly reviewing every candidate among hundreds or even thousands is beyond any recruiter. It’s not, however, beyond the capacity of technology.
Sapia is a leading innovator in the recruitment technology space.
Since 2013, Sapia has worked to solve and consistently improve the frontier problem of every recruiter and every employer. That is how to get to the right talent faster while consistently improving the candidate experience.
Sapia’s solution addresses top-of-funnel recruitment needs with an artificial intelligence-enabled automated interview platform, designed to integrate seamlessly with leading Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
While some automated interview platforms use video and voice technologies, Sapia uses mobile-based text. Candidates know text and trust text, and they welcome the opportunity to tell their own story in their own words and in their own time.
The automated interview is built around a few open-ended text questions that can be customised to the specific role family – sales, retail, call centre, service etc – and specific requirements relating to the employer’s brand and employment values.
The platform uses AI, ML and NLP to provide reliable personality insights into every candidate. It can accurately predict candidates’ suitability for the role. Additionally, it can guide their progression through the recruitment process. It delivers insights that recruiters and employers need to make better hiring decisions at scale.
See How Sapia’s Interview Automation Works Here >
Sapia provides blind-screening at its best. The platform effectively takes a candidate’s gender, age, ethnicity and other traits out of the process. There is no visual content, voice data or video that can act as triggers to subjective bias. Also for most customers, even CVs are removed from initial screening.
The blind screening means all candidates are competing on a level playing field and have the opportunity to tell their story without the subjective biases of a traditional human interview or a cursory review of their CV. Blind screening also supports employers’ diversity goals.
Integrated with an ATS, a simple Sapia interview link sent to an applicant’s mobile lets recruiters nail speed of recruiting, quality of candidates and a better candidate experience in one.
Sapia will help to:
Improving the candidate experience is a priority for every recruiter and employer. This is as the effect of a poor experience can cause lasting damage to reputations and brands. Sapia is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction. Candidates enjoy the process and value the personalised feedback/coaching tips.
Recruitment automation doesn’t describe just one technology product or platform. Automation will generally involve a suite of platforms, software, tools and technologies. All of them work together to provide end-to-end functionality throughout the hiring process. Integration with an applicant tracking system (ATS) or candidate relationship management (CRM) platform helps bring all the tools and data together in one place.
The efficiencies and savings of recruitment automation can be gained through every step:
Recruiting and HR are all about human capital. So at first, glance using machines and technology can seem counter-intuitive.
Recruitment automation technology, however, is not designed to take the human touch out of the equation, it’s designed to help humans work smarter.
Here are ten of the benefits and advantages:
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Finally, discover how Sapia’s Ai-powered interview platform can help support your recruitment needs today. It’s a powerful way to bring all the benefits of recruitment automation to your business. You can also take it for a test drive here >
To find out how to use Recruitment Automation to ‘hire with heart’, we also have a great eBook on recruitment automation with humanity.
Most people are very familiar with a performance review. It’s the annual anxiety fest when every employee has their performance assessed and rated, perhaps against benchmarks agreed at last year’s review or defined by their job description.
So is a talent review basically the same thing? Well yes and no. While a talent review will still see employees rated and ranked, the focus extends beyond current and recent performance to consider their potential as future leaders in senior or key roles within the business. It’s all about mapping an organisation’s business needs against the capabilities and potential of its people.
Talent review plays an essential role in business planning, pinpointing skill gaps and helping organisations to develop and retain their best talent.
Forward-thinking organisations believe that talent review is bigger than an annual event. Rather, it’s an essential part of an always-on process of talent management that fosters a high-performance culture from the very first engagement with employees.
Sapia’s Ai-enabled chat interview platform helps businesses to plan for future success by ensuring candidates with the very best potential are identified and engaged upfront. This approach provides talent momentum from the outset, ensuring every hire is building ‘bench strength’ and providing leaders with confidence that the next generation is ready to step-up and step-into key roles as needed.
It’s no secret that high performers and team leaders share certain personality traits and behaviours. In fact, it’s a science that organisations have long embraced in their pursuit of excellence and competitive advantage.
Since it was first published in 1962, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that classified 16 personality types has been at the heart of most personality assessments and recruitment science. Much of the appeal of Myers-Briggs was its simplicity in reducing complexity to concise descriptors. These descriptors may have sufficed when only human intelligence was doing the processing and decision-making.
But in an age of data, it’s a big compromise – a compromise in accuracy, nuance, and the real diversity of personality types that exist in our population. It’s also a compromise we no longer need to make.
Read: Hire for Values
Sapia is a leading innovator and advocate of leveraging data and technology to enhance the recruitment process. In developing our award-winning automated chat interview platform, our data science team looked at how we could move beyond the limits of Myers-Briggs personality testing.
Our data team fed text responses to interview questions from 85,000 job applicants into our personality classifier. Spread across two regions, the UK and Australia, 47% of applicants were identified as male, 53% as female.
Identifying 400 unique personality groupings and how they could be usefully applied to decision-making is beyond the ability of the human brain… but not beyond technology. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, our artificial-intelligence enabled platform got to work with findings that were both surprising and not surprising at all.
What did we find?
The ‘not surprising’ part of our research is that even at 400 groupings, there are distinct differences in personality profiles. It’s not surprising when you consider that humans are not linear beings and that our personalities are highly complex and nuanced.
The most surprising thing we discovered was that personality types by role were distinct. The personality profiles attracted to sales roles, for example, were noticeably different from the profiles attached to a carer role. Even more surprising were the imperceptible differences in the personality distribution across the 400 types between men and women – a sign of how conscious or unconscious biases can play into our decision processes.
Differentiated by size, sector, structure and history, every organisation is unique. So every talent review will be unique too. Talent reviews need to be designed around the specific needs of the business but generally will bring performance management, learning and development and succession planning together.
When senior leaders meet for a talent review, their principle objective is to talk about the performance of individual employees in their teams and how those employees might take on more responsible roles in the future. Through this process, the critical positions in an organisation will be identified. Critical positions mean any role that business operations would stop or be seriously compromised if no one was able to step into the role immediately.
Keep in mind that these critical roles may not necessarily be management roles and will also depend on the nature of the business. In a manufacturing business, for example, the chief engineer might be solely responsible for keeping a production line in working order. Talent reviews need to consider every employee across an organisation.
An ongoing talent review process not only matches an organisation’s talent to existing roles, but it also helps identify new roles that will need to be created to achieve plans for future growth or expansion. It’s also possible that as a company moves forward, key roles may change or even become redundant. The most successful businesses are dynamic and flexible.
A structured review process reviews employees in terms of key strengths, career ambitions and readiness for promotion. Talent reviews provide a forum for a range of important conversations that every organisation interested in best practice needs to have:
There is a range of methods that organisations use to assess their employees for talent reviews. While some will arrive at a ranking or score, others may use a more nuanced approach to assessing their talent.
Talent reviews can often reveal glaring disparity and bias in team leaders’ expectations of employees and how they rate them. An agreed and standardised approach across the organisation is essential. By ensuring employee expectations are aligned among leaders and cultural values are socialised across the organisation, potential friction around accountability can be diffused.
Rank and yank – what not to do
Though their ranking process has long been dropped, Jack Welch, the celebrated or controversial (pick your own path!) CEO of General Electric once insisted on an evaluation that reduced every employee’s performance to a number. Following evaluations each year, the lowest ranking 10% were fired across the business. In contemporary business, this ‘rank and yank’ approach would not be considered best-practice HR.
The 9-box performance and potential matrix
A less controversial ranking for employees is the 9-box matrix. This commonly-used assessment tool assigns employees to one of nine boxes on a grid that on one axis rates their performance (underperformance, effective performance, outstanding performance) and on the other rates their potential (low, medium, high). Employees ranked in the box where outstanding performance and high potential meet are those assessed most likely to be future leaders.
Taking a step back from the talent review process, Sapia has worked to solve and improve the frontier problem of every recruiter and every employer – how to get the right talent on board sooner.
With policies and process to put the best candidates in place every time, ongoing talent management and talent reviews can be more streamlined and rewarding for employers and employees alike.
The first step to creating a step-change in the process is ensuring that everyone is assessing talent on the same criteria. These need to align with your organisation’s specific needs and values, which are ideally defined and documented as part of your business, brand and employer brand plans.
While Sapia’s early data breakthroughs were based on 85,000 interview responses, machine learning and artificial intelligence means that our platform never stops learning. Today, our Ai-powered platform has analysed more than 165 million words in text-based interviews from more than 700,000 candidates.
Continuous learning means that Sapia can help recruiters and employers make smarter, evidence-based employment decisions at the early career stage.
Within our science-based approach, behavioural interview questions are tailored around the agreed assessment criteria for the role. These questions are related to past behaviour to reliably assess personality traits. They can be customised to the specific role family – sales, retail, customer service etc– and aligned to the organisation’s agreed values and characteristics that will define their leaders of tomorrow.
Sapia’s bespoke Ai-platform analyses candidates’ responses across a range of criteria including readability, text structure, semantic alignment, sentiment and personality to identify candidates with the best future potential.
Making the wrong choices for future leaders can put your business at risk. At times of talent review, careers can be derailed and employees demotivated. A properly executed talent management process that begins with smarter recruitment choices is one of the best investments in the future of your business.
The insights delivered through a disciplined, standardised and ongoing process of talent assessment can be used at both organisational and managerial levels to drive your business forward. Creating a culture of high performance begins with best practice in early career candidate assessment. With Sapia’s platform as a key element, a robust talent review and management process will work to:
This article is presented by Sapia as part of our mission to promote best practice in contemporary recruiting and HR. Our Ai-enabled text chat interview platform can help any organisation identify future leaders while providing candidates with an efficient, empowering and enjoyable experience. The user satisfaction rate for our award-winning platform is 99%.
You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now – here – or leave us your details to get a personalised demo