To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.
New insights from Aptitude Research suggest recruitment automation can play a much greater role in talent acquisition than just improving efficiency for hiring managers, it can also make the interview process more human for candidates.
The research shows that when you shift the focus from an employer-driven view to a candidate-first view, then it is possible to reduce bias in hiring and improve the overall human element of talent acquisition.
For most companies, the value of automation is perceived through the recruiter and hiring manager experience, with the benefits to the candidate often ignored. However, recruitment automation has to be about more than simply moving candidates through the process quickly to have any significant benefit to a company.
When you focus on the impact and experience of the candidate, the benefits to both recruiters and candidates can significantly improve through recruitment automation. This approach has given rise to a movement called humanistic automation technology.
But humanistic automation sounds like an oxymoron right? Is it even possible?
The Aptitude Research showed not only is this possible, but that when Ai is used this way, it creates personal connection at scale, and works to reduce bias, something no other technology or even human-centred solution can deliver.
So, how exactly does it do this?
Here are four main areas of talent acquisition that candidate-focussed recruitment automation improves on,and how it achieves this:
1. Connection
There have been some slight improvements in building connections through the hiring process recently, but only 50% of companies have a single point of contact for communication, which results in candidates feeling engaged or valued through the process.
Recruitment automation with a candidate-focus means that communication is personalised for high-engagement with the ability for the conversation to adapt to what it learns about a candidate almost immediately.
As a candidate finding out that you are not successful is tough, and worse, most companies just ghost those they don’t wish to move ahead with. Automation can ensure that every candidate is engaged and cared for even when they are not moving forward in the process – and that doesn’t mean a standard rejection email. Ai can deliver highly personalised communication that builds connection even for those unsuccessful in their application.
2. Inclusivity
Although some companies have made efforts to remove bias from resumes, companies still have a lot of work to do on inclusion. For starters, many are relying on training programs, which have shown to be largely ineffective in delivering long-term change.
It’s true that recruitment automation can amplify bias, but automation that works to reduce bias is continually testing against biases in the system and has been shown to be effective in reducing the impact of bias in hiring decisions. Somethings humans cannot do (we’re inherently biased, whether we like it or not).
When you have the right data input gathered through blind screening and blind interviews – that don’t rely on CV data – then you can help companies achieve an equal and fair experience to all candidates.
Want to remove bias from recruitment and not just talk about it?
Download the Inclusive Hiring e-Book here
Inclusive hiring is not limited to gender and race. Companies need a broader view of diversity, equity, and inclusion that includes individuals with disabilities and neurodiversity. This requires the right digital tools and technology to ensure that candidates have a positive experience. In many cases, chat and text are more inclusive over video or even phone screening and interviews for these candidates.
3. Feedback
Most companies see feedback as a risky area and something they have no ability to do in a fair and timely manner. Essentially this is a lost opportunity for learning and development.
When you see feedback as a value proposition of an employer brand, its power in transforming your TA strategy becomes clear. Recruitment automation allows companies to deliver personalized feedback building trust and strengthening your employer brand.
Personalized feedback with tangible action items, means that candidates feel empowered even if they are rejected. Technology can help to deliver these action items in a human way, that even humans are not able to do at scale or even very well.
These insights are only made possible through natural language processing and machine learning that work in the background to reveal important information about the candidate. When a candidate feels like they are ‘seen’ that can be a transformational moment in their career paths.
Only recruitment automation can deliver individual feedback to everyone who takes time to do a job interview.
4. Trust
In an era of growing awareness around the privacy of data, only 1 in 4 candidates trust the data being will be used to drive hiring decisions. As companies look at recruitment automation through a candidate-centric lens, they must consider both the quality of the data they use and how to build trust between employers and candidates.
The biggest mistake that most companies make is using the wrong data. Resume data is not necessarily an indicator of performance or quality of hire.
Ethical Ai is something that hiring managers need to understand and use to evaluate providers. Providers using ethical Ai operate transparently, are backed by explanations, describe their methodology, and frequently publish their data.
Aptitude Research found that when data is transparent, it increases the trust in talent acquisition leaders, hiring managers, and senior leaders. With data transparency, 84% of talent acquisition leaders stated that they trust the data, and 78% of senior leaders trust the data.
Talent acquisition transformation has accelerated the demand for recruitment automation.
55% of companies are increasing their investment in recruitment automation this year. These companies recognise that automation can improve efficiency, lift the administrative burden, reduce costs, and enable data-driven decisions.
This report focuses on a new look at automation through the eyes of the candidate
After all, automation is more than moving candidates through a process quickly. It should also enable companies to communicate in a meaningful and inclusive way and build trust between candidates and employers.
Related
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Improvements to Sapia.ai customer data security and sovereignty
In June 2022, we announced that, thanks to our partnership with AWS, we now have introduced regional data hosting. This means that customers and their candidates will have increased speed when they use the Sapia platform, and means companies using the platform can have confidence that candidate data is treated in line with data sovereignty legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Here is the full list of improvements to data security and sovereignty for Sapia customers.
World-leading protections
Sapia’s platform is built on AWS, and is protected by anti-virus, anti-malware, intrusion detection, intrusion protection, and anti-DDoS protocols. We comply with most major cybersecurity requirements, including ISO 27001, Soc 2 Type 1 (Type 2 in progress), and GDPR.
Scalablility
We use AWS’ serverless solution, which can automatically support billions of requests per day. Our sophisticated tech stack includes React.js, GraphQL, MongoDB, Node.js and Terraform.
Regional data hosting
Sapia offers regional data hosting via AWS. All data is processed within highly secure and fault-tolerant data centres, located in the same geography as the one in which the data is stored. All data is stored in and served from AWS data centres using industry standard encryption; both at rest and in while transit.
Availability and reliability
Sapia uses a purpose-built, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that replicates data six ways across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs), making it highly durable. Our storage system is automatic, features continuous data backup, and allows for point-in-time restore (PITR).
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The End of Coddling
Resilient organisations, trusting your team and unleashing productivity
I live in Melbourne, Australia. When I speak to customers overseas they all sympathize with the restrictions imposed on us as a result of COVID-19. We are the State that that just can’t seem to take our eyes off the numbers, being used as an invisible algorithm to drive decisions like when we can see our friends and families again, go to the footy, or have a drink at the pub.
Scott Galloway talks of Covid-19 being an accelerant, not a change agent. Organisations who were already on the path of disrupting their own business models have surged ahead. Those with unfit practices might have been able to do a fun run, but what we have now is an ultra-marathon.
Organizations need a new playbook. We humans need a new playbook. COVID-19 is transformational for organizations, and it requires transformational thinking and responses.
The lack of deep thinking on this is reflected in the exhaustion we are all feeling right now. Many of us find ourselves spending 12 hours a day on back-to-back zoom calls. We are missing out on the key benefit of flexibility, which is unleashing productivity. Which means doing more in fewer hours, not doing more by working longer hours.
Asynchronous Work
Few of us have made the transformational changes required to accommodate true remote work. One of those changes has to be to embrace asynchronous working norms.
Asynchronous work needs asynchronous communication. This simply means that work doesn’t happen at the same time for everyone. Productivity and flexibility for employees come when we don’t all have to get in a room, virtual or otherwise to do our work. This usually means communicating in writing, not video.
The other change that needs to happen is less vertical decision-making, less requiring decisions to ‘go up’ to be made – and more pushing them down to the individual level as much as possible. It’s time to really empower your people. Leaders need to set the vision and trust their people to solve how to get there. This means creating cultures of trust and leaving behind cultures of control.
The good news is that a by-product of remote work will be a natural increase in accountability for performance. The reality is you can’t fake it or fudge it as easily when your actual work output, not your personality, is what is most visible to everyone. The talkers vs the doers are quickly exposed. The big ‘P’ personality types won’t survive as long as there is no place for them to entertain us with their stories and their charisma.
Our New Reality
This new reality won’t work for everyone and demands transparency around performance and expectations from both sides. For many, this may lead to a loss of confidence and validation that they would normally get from being part of a visible tribe in the office. When you don’t have a team or a manager around you to mentor you, notice your good work, or your bad work, you need to do the noticing yourself. Self-awareness becomes crucial. As does self-motivation, the discipline to see a task through without much pushing or oversight.
Organizations need to give way more attention to hiring and promoting these qualities that will enable individuals to be independently productive. It may even mean evolving your values to reflect those kinds of new survival traits.
What makes that shift especially tough for many organizations is that we have all been doing the opposite for years. To coin a phrase from Johnathan Haidt, we have been guilty of coddling our kids and our employees. Haidt, author of “The Coddling of the American Mind’ notes the impact of all that coddling and the resulting culture of ‘safetyism’, which stunts the development of that life skill- resilience, a trait critical for all of us right now.
Simon Sinek, a speaker/writer on cooperation, trust, and change says developing better managers can help young people build better resilience. This becomes harder in a world where you’re not spending time with your manager. Rather, the individual needs to take on more responsibility for their own learning and for their own motivation and engagement.
Creating Resilience
So how do you create more individual and organizational resilience? How do you hire for and build the skill of accountability?
It requires creating an expectation via explicit conversations about the need for you to own your own work, your own career. It demands hiring people who have heightened self-awareness, to know what they need help with, to ask for what they need.
Which jobs are better suited to me? What am I good at, not good at? How do others see me so I can better manage my relationships at work or at home? What part of me is helping me or hindering me in life?
The problem is that not every type of person will do that comfortably and this is where Covid-19 risks creating another privileged class of people who do better in that environment. This is where I advocate for technology as an essential co-pilot for employees to understand themselves better and help coach them to level the playing field. Technology that can draw out the best in people and help them find their strengths and agency.
The new playbook already has a few chapters written by some well-known disruptors. For example, Jeff Bezos banning PowerPoint from meetings, Google’s money-ball approach to hiring and promotion, virtually inventing people analytics. The text-only interviews of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, with 1000+ remote workforce in 73 countries.
In short, to leaders of all domains: move to the new playbook.
Get on with experimenting with fundamentally new ways of working. And, recognise that technology will be your co-pilot in that change.
Source: Barbara Hyman, Recruiting Daily, 1 October 2020
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Human in the loop approach
Transcript (Maura van As):
Hi everyone. I’m Maura van As, Head of Customer Success at Sapia, and today, I wanted to talk to you about our human in the loop approach. So when we talk about ethical AI at Sapia, we always put our human in the loop approach front and center, and especially in the natural language processing industry that we operate in today with tools like ChatGPT really changing the name of the game and it coming under increased scrutiny, we are confident that the human in the loop approach is more important than ever. And also something that we’re super proud of.
A human in the loop approach allows us to get this perfect intersection where we’re combining human and machine intelligence and we’re creating smart chat experiences that are predictive, but also responsible and personalized. Ultimately, my customer success team is incredible at building definitions of success. They spend a lot of time and energy and effort building custom algorithms that are models, if you will, of success in roles across organizations, across industries, all over the world.
And ultimately, our secret weapon in building those models is a human touch, which speaks to the irony of how even the most advanced technologies requires the human touch, human judgment, human oversight. We can’t live without that. And our human touch is actually our clients. So we bring our client experts to the table. Really, the rule of thumb with machine learning is what you put into it is what you get out of it. And our client experts are the owners of success, performance, of culture, of future proofing talent in our organizations. So we give them a seat at the table to make sure that we create and build with them so that we feel confident we’re teaching our AI what matters most, and we are continuing to teach it. We are continuing to evolve it, iterate on it, and retrain it.
And that makes us feel confident that our AI is accurate but also appropriate, and that we’re creating natural experiences for users that feel human and feel real. And it also speaks to the way that we partner. We set a real sense of joint accountability in our partnerships around validating and governing these models over time. So we constantly validate for accuracy, for fairness, and we retrain and teach our models to evolve in time. So really, this is a shout-out to our clients. You are the human in the loop for us. You bridge the gaps that AI can’t on its own. You make sure that we build responsible models and you are pioneers in building ethical AI with us in market every single day. So thank you.