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Written by Nathan Hewitt

These 6 start-ups will be in the ‘spotlight’ at Spring HR Tech

The pandemic hasn’t slowed down innovation in HR tech

By:  | March 1, 2021 • 2 min read

While the past year has brought considerable challenges to the HR function, there is one silver lining: Innovation in HR tech is abounding. Despite the disruptions of the pandemic, the HR tech market has continued to thrive—with many new entrants tailoring solutions to the unique HR needs that have arisen in recent months, says Steve Boese, chair of the HR Technology Conference, which will be held in Las Vegas in the fall.

Steve Boese

“The HR technology start-up space has been extremely vibrant for years, and the pandemic, it seems to me, has not really slowed the pace of innovation very much if at all,” Boese says. “Newer, more agile tech companies can often provide important and immediate benefits to help organizations react quickly to a changing environment.”

Boese will share several of the most innovative solutions during a Spotlight Session at this month’s Spring HR Tech, a free and virtual event. Boese and conference organizers reviewed about 75 start-ups, conducting demos and meetings with about 30 of them, to ultimately select six standout start-ups that will demo during the conference session. The session, Six Emerging HR Tech Startups to Put on Your Radar Now, will begin at 2 p.m. Friday, March 19.

“These six showcased innovation, relevancy, impact and leading-edge technology for HR organizations that we felt represented a great selection of the best in new thinking in HR tech,” Boese says.

Although the start-ups address a range of issues facing HR, their work is being uniquely driven by recent events.

“As you would expect, the impact of the events of 2020—the pandemic and the social justice movement in particular—are definitely influencing the technology developments we are seeing,” he says. “So, areas like mental health and wellbeing, diversity and inclusion and even support for offboarding employees are three specific areas that will be showcased in the session.”

The participating companies are:

Unmind: a technology solution employers can use to support their overall mental health programs and strategies

FutureFit AI: a new approach to separations, offering people a more supportive and personalized experience as they transition to their next role

Hourly by AMS: a set of tools to help both organizations and candidates navigate the hiring process for hourly roles

Sapia (Formerly PredictiveHire) : a fully digital software solution for volume recruitment

Eskalera: a platform that drives employee inclusion through training, reflection and connection

Work Shield: a tool that manages employers’ reporting, investigation and resolution of workplace harassment and discrimination issues in their entirety

Click HERE to register for Spring HR Tech


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AI-assisted recruitment to reduce bias

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How Ai can build equity in hiring for the future

Traditional psychological assessment has reduced the hiring and promotional error rate in modern businesses successfully for decades. They have also been used extensively to identify ‘hidden talent’ or ‘potential’ in people with limited work experience such as graduates, and also applied as a means for identifying future leaders at different levels of seniority, as well as in succession planning.

Psych testing is essentially an old-school form of predictive analytics, but they are limited in insight, providing a test of your ability to do a test. That’s it. Traditional psychological assessments do not link to actual performance in the role, nor do they have any self-learning functionality. There is no performance data that feeds into psychological assessments and therefore they have limited predictive power and no learning capability.

The worst aspect of psych tests is that you need multiple tests to test for multiple attributes. This is because they are just not that smart. This is where innovation necessarily disrupts an old formula. The difference lies in the data – volume and variance. A psych test is usually multi-choice questions repeated in different ways to achieve validity. You and I might pick the same option for each question and the only way to distinguish between you and me is to ask us a lot of questions and hope we pick some that are different to recognise our differences.

Data that comes from free-text answers to open-ended questions is by definition going to be hugely varied. A question like ‘what’s a favourite experience of working in a team’ asks us to each delve into our own personal experience, a behavioural interview question which means our answers will naturally be different. 

This formula of using data that is uniquely personalised delivers variance that psych tests just can’t deliver. Ever. When it comes to developing an Ai based assessment the questions that a candidate is asked, and the answers to the questions are suitably diverse, psychologically robust and designed with the same rigour in standardised Psychological assessments.

With the processing power and advances in Natural Language Processing (natural language being the origin of all psych tests) instead of having to force a candidate through multiple tests you can distil many attributes from one test. That test is usually 20 minutes, asks 5 questions, with up to 80 features able to be discovered about that candidate including their critical thinking, their drive, self-awareness, accountability and team orientation, their propensity to stay in a role or not, their HEAXCO traits and their communication skills.

The ability to better understand individuals based on their answers to questions means we can provide accurate and insightful feedback to everyone within a couple of hours. Feedback allows everyone the opportunity to be heard, understood and cared for. This is equity.

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We cover this and so much more in our report: Hiring for Equality. Download the report here.

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Workday + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

Want to find out more about how our Workday integration works? Reach out!

An ‘unfair’ advantage is obtained for Recruiters by adding Sapia’s interview automation to Workday with faster, fairer and better hiring results.

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. Additionally, integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful Workday 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 + Workday

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. Thus, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.

Steps to integrate Sapia Workday

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

  1. Create a vacancy in Workday, 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.

Integrate Workday and get ahead

Get ahead of your competitors with Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai available for all Workday 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. Also 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 Workday 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 surfaces in Workday as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and Workday 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.

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 Workday 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 Workday 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 Workday to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack.

Getting started is easy

Lastly, let’s chat about getting you started – book a time here > 

 

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