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How you can get 9/10 candidate satisfaction from a video interview

Competition for candidates today is fierce. COVID, border closures, BREXIT, the last two years have created a global candidate shortage that’s hitting large organisations hard. 

That’s why in today’s market, candidate experience is king. The consistent theme in all of my conversations with CHROs globally is how to improve candidate experience and get an edge on the competition.

However, the bottom line is ever present, especially in industries that are now in recovery mode. How can recruitment teams and hiring managers be expected to deliver a world-class, personalised and interactive candidate experience when they’re already stretched too thin?

The answer lies in human-centred technology with an experience that makes candidates feel valued and heard, while automating the components of the process that suck time out of your team’s day and extend the time to offer, losing candidates in the process.

Why Australia’s largest private employer turned to automation 

With close to 1 million candidates annually, and a video interview experience that was sub-par for candidates and frustrating for hiring managers, Woolworths needed to drastically re-imagine their recruitment experience, making it more efficient and engaging.

How Sapia re-invigorated and streamlined Woolworth’s recruitment process

With a completely automated interview process, every retail candidate is interviewed by Smart Interviewer with Sapia’s Chat Interview chat. The automatically shortlisted candidates progress directly to VideoInterview – a chat based video interview that is reviewed by hiring managers who can then move straight to offer. It’s a seamless process that’s designed to be fair and human-centred. 

The results are simply fantastic 

Candidate satisfaction has blown the team away – 9.2/10 for FirstInterview and an unprecedented 9.0/10 for VideoInterview. Yes, you read that right – 9/10 for a video interview, from almost 9,000 candidates. 

Completion rates for the video interview are above 75%, showing that candidates are happy to engage with a video interview that’s mobile-friendly, interactive and frankly, just works. Almost 50% of candidates complete both interviews on their mobile, making it easy for candidates to interview literally anytime, anywhere. 

Here’s what Woolworths candidates had to say about their VideoInterview experience: 

“The chat makes you feel like you’re in a safe space – it gives everyone an equal opportunity instead of in person interview as people can get extremely nervous”

“I found the process to be reflective and I liked how they wanted to know about me”

“everything was amazing! by far the best interview system i’ve encountered!  it allowed me be comfortable and be myself, it really allowed me to take my time with my responses rather than stutter over my words”

“It was great. I like the potential to retake videos and how quick you’ve responded. ”

“I felt really calm during this interview. Which I definitely would not be in physical interviews. I was able to really sort out my thoughts and express myself to the fullest.  I really love this format of interviewing !”

Automating the end to end experience has given time back to extremely time-poor hiring managers, who no longer need to manage shortlisting or scheduling and can simply review the video responses of the top candidates as they come in. Smart Interviewer has video interviewed almost 9,000 candidates, 

In some cases, candidates have moved from ad to offer in 24 hours – giving Woolworths an edge as they can move quickly to capture candidates who otherwise might have accepted offers elsewhere. 

If you’d like to have a candidate experience as good as Woolworths, get in touch here for a product demo


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PeopleScout + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

Supercharge your hiring by integrating PeopleScout and Sapia. With the click of a button you can be hiring faster, fairer and better than ever before.

Make a difference

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. 

Hiring is more complex than ever

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:

  • Find the right people, ensuring a diversity of candidates
  • Fill roles quickly and efficiently
  • Interrupt bias in hiring and promotion
  • Ensure every person hired amplifies the organisation’s values
  • Create a candidate experience that is engaging and rewarding

Technology is more powerful than ever

The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful People ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.

Are you ready to: 

  • Reduce your screening time by up to 90%
  • Increase your candidate satisfaction to near 100%
  • Achieve interview completion rates over 90%
  • And reduce screening bias for good

Your advantage: Sapia + PeopleScout

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.

We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.

  1. Create a vacancy in PeopleScout, and a Sapia interview link will be created. 
  2. Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
  3. See results as soon as candidates complete their interview. Each candidate’s scores, rank, personality assessment, role-based traits and communication skills are available as soon as they complete the interview. Every candidate will receive automated, personalised feedback.

By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.

Experience the Sapia Chat Interview for yourself

Integrate PeopleScout and get ahead

Get ahead of your competitors with Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai available for all PeopleScout users. Automate interview, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort. Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

The interview that all candidates love

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.

Together, Sapia and PeopleScout deliver an approach that is: 

  • Relevant—move beyond the CV to the attributes that matter most to you: grit, curiosity, accountability, critical thinking, agility and communication skills
  • Respectful—give every single person an interview and never ghost a candidate again
  • Dignified—show you value people’s time by providing every single applicant personal feedback
  • Fair—avoid video in the first round interviews and take an approach that’s 100% blind to gender, age, ethnicity and other irrelevant attributes
  • Familiar—text chat interviewing is not only highly efficient, it’s also familiar to people of all ages  

There are thousands of comments just like this:

“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 using artificial intelligence in hiring

Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in PeopleScout as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and PeopleScout deliver an approach that is: 

  • Fast—Ai-powered scores and rankings make shortlisting candidates quicker
  • Insightful—Deep dive into the unique personality and other traits of each candidate 
  • Fair—Candidates are scored and ranked on their responses. The system is blind to other attributes and regularly checked for bias.
  • Streamlined—Our stand-alone LiveInterview mobile app makes arranging assessment centres easy. Automated record-keeping reduces paperwork and ensures everyone is fairly assessed.
  • Time-saving—Automating the first interview screening process and second-round scheduling delivers 90% time savings against a standard recruiting process.

Don’t believe us, read the reviews! 

See Recruiter Reviews here > 


HR Directors and CHROs love reliable bias tracking

Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results. 

Together, Sapia and PeopleScout deliver an approach that is: 

  • Measurable—DiscoverInsights, our operations dashboard that provides clear reporting on recruitment, including pipeline shortlisting, candidate experience and bias tracking.
  • Competitive—The Sapia and PeopleScout experience is loved by candidates, ensuring you’ll attract the best candidates, and hire faster than competitors.
  • Scalable—Whether you’re hiring one hundred people, or one thousand, you can hire the best person for the job, on time, every time.
  • Best-in-class—Sapia easily integrates with PeopleScout to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack.

Getting started is easy

Let’s chat about getting you started – book a time here > 

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How do you really hire for values and culture, and is that the same thing?

Hiring for Values

When I was leading the People & Culture team at the REA Group, my new CEO was passionate about Values, and the central role they play in defining your culture. Following a successful change program to evolve new Values that mirrored the desired Culture, one that would set the business up for continued growth and as a talent magnet, she asked me how we were going to embed those Values through our people processes – who we hire, who we promote, who we reward etc.

It couldn’t be a screen saver pop up or posters on a wall. The values had to be really heard and felt. At the same time, we also had a business that was hiring in the hundreds each year so scaling culture means getting this right.

These are two distinct notions when it comes to hiring: hiring for values and for culture. One should stay pretty fixed, and the other should be dynamic as your business context is always changing. If a company’s values are its bedrock, then a company’s culture is the shifting landscape on top of it. Hiring purely for culture is a recipe for self-reinforcing hiring, aka hiring that is biased. As we all know, innovation comes from the diversity of background/thought/etc, so by hiring only for the culture you can decrease, or even stifle innovation.

Celebrate that just as your product is always evolving, so will your culture. That means people who were great when you were a team of 50 may not be the right person for when you get to 500.

At Sapia we work with our customers to ensure their values are embedded right from the chat interview. This takes many forms, including

  • Use the language of our customers when we are configuring the interview questions. From ‘team’ to ‘crew’ or ‘family, we use your language to build rapport with candidates
  • Ask questions that specifically talk to your Values. For example, safety is paramount for our airline and FMCG customers. We ask questions to gauge awareness of safety risks, such as “Drawing on your own experience, how would you make sure everyone in our store – our customers and your team members – are safe?”
  • Learning from every person who joins or leaves the business. For everyone we work with, we know who sticks around in the role and who doesn’t. This will generally be either because they weren’t the right fit and they self-selected out, or the business made a decision to exit them for behavioural reasons. Taking that performance data and using it to refine the benchmark for future hiring means every candidate recommended after using Sapia as your 1st interview is a better Values fit than the last one.

And that’s why machine learning is the holy grail of smarter hiring.

No recruiter could ever get that feedback data at the scale and speed to improve their recruitment process. But using Sapia we make a hard decision easier, meaning you can focus on hiring the right people to grow your business, at scale, without sacrificing the candidate experience. And if the VP for a global business focused on connecting people to opportunity can’t recognise bias, it’s a sure sign we need to pay more attention to who, and how, we hire.

“Talent is really distributed very evenly in the world, and opportunity is not.”

So, what do you think? Is your hiring values-driven, or based on the ever-intangible ‘culture-fit’? How do you scale hiring based on values? And how can we in HR, Talent Acquisition and Recruitment support hiring managers to grow innovative, diverse teams?


You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to book a demo


Suggested Reading:

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PredictiveHire finalist for In-House Innovation in Recruitment Award at UK’s Recruiter Awards

PredictiveHire and Iceland Foods are finalists in the 2021 Recruiter Awards for the category In-House Innovation in Recruitment.

Established in 2002, the Recruiter Awards are the UK’s most prestigious honours in recruitment.

The awards recognise best practice and celebrate achievement by agencies and in-house recruiters during the prior 12 months, also throwing a spotlight on marketing and technology. The In-House Innovation in Recruitment category recognises outstanding innovation by an in-house recruitment team that has led to the achievement of strategic business goals.

The success story PredictiveHire has been nominated for starts with 2020 creating a crisis for Iceland, as it did for many. Increased trade and COVID-19 absences meant store leaders were massively drained of time, yet there was a surge in both the need to hire and the number of applicants. As it stood, the recruitment process was 100% manual, and all done at store level by store managers.

PredictiveHire’s contribution to In-House Innovation in Recruitment

Iceland had to innovate. Hiring needed to be centralised and automated.Iceland's non-negotiables for an automated hiring platform

Iceland developed a set of ‘non-negotiable’ criteria for an automated platform and began looking. They ultimately chose PredictiveHire as their interview automation partner – they loved the notion of ‘hiring with heart’.  

Once PredictiveHire was selected, we had integrated with their API (Kallidus) and the applications started rolling in within four weeks. Iceland estimated in the first 4 months they saw 5x payback, 8,000 hours freed up for their time-poor store managers across the organisation, and over 50,000 applications were processed every month.  They also found that 97% of candidates who followed the link to apply completed the application process and 99% of candidates reported a positive experience. 

You can read the full Iceland Foods + Kallidus + PredictiveHire story here

The award will be presented at the annual Gala in London on September 23, 2021.

The rigorous judging process is done by a judging panel of 33 credible and experienced industry professionals including Rob McCargow, Director of Artificial Intelligence at PwC UK, James Fieldhouse, M&A Managing Director at BDO, and Karolina Minczuk, Relationship Director at Natwest Bank.

Other nominees are BDO in partnership with Amberjack, BUPA, GQR, and Virgin Media in partnership with Amberjack.


About PredictiveHire

PredictiveHire 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, PredictiveHire’s FirstInterview™ 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.  PredictiveHire 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.’

You can try PredictiveHire here (you’ll receive real personality insights), or leave us your details for one of our team to show you through the whole product

If you’d like to stay up to date with PredictiveHire, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.

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