Job hopping personalities

The secret to securing great talent is a first-rate candidate experience. If you have been in any way entangled in the aftermath of 2021’s Great Resignation, you know that even an attractive remuneration package, with compelling benefits, is not enough: Now, more than ever, prospective hires will want to see the best of your organisation, and that includes the best of you. You must be fast, decisive, and flexible, from the point of first contact.

This is a problem amplified by scale. If you’re responsible for hiring 100,000 employees per year, for instance, you may find you are required to provide a top-notch candidate experience for that many prospects. You could decide that it is better to do things the old fashioned way, but it is more and more likely that, in doing so, you will miss out on great talent. The cost of such losses is best avoided.

Automation, be it through an assessment tool, conversational Ai platform, or Applicant Tracking System (ATS), is the simple key to solving volume hiring in a chaotic market. However, understandably, many high-volume hiring managers tend to think that automation comes at the cost of personalisation and human contact. If, for instance, you’re processing 5,000 prospects to fit 300 job openings, how do you ensure your candidates are met with the high-touch journey they expect? Is an automated Ai conversation, in the minds of candidates, not just as impersonal as older methods of qualification?

What ‘high-touch’ actually means, and its purpose

On the face of it, ‘high-touch’ implies an emphasis on person-to-person, face-to-face contact in your hiring process. If you can see your candidates, if you can greet them warmly and exalt your free-breakfast policy, you can make them feel special. Sending an email or a link to a form is impersonal, outmoded, and risks alienating the people you want to attract. 

What if, instead, high-touch is a stand-in for meaningful contact, instead of lots of contact? What if you could conduct a smooth, quick, and painless interview process that:

• Asked the best from candidates, and allowed them to provide thoughtful responses in their own time
• Explored the human aspects of their personality, and not just the line items on their CV
• Ignored, by design, the aspects of candidates prone to bias (such as appearance, ethnicity, age, and so on)

Is that not more effective than a by-the-book interview in which you smiled a lot, engaged in forgettable small talk, and discussed a laundry list of perks?

Woolworths, Australia’s largest private employer, adopted the smart-touch automated hiring approach, and won handsomely for it. They used our Chat Interview (chat-based) and Video Interview (video-based) solutions to assess nearly 9,000 candidates, achieving a candidate satisfaction score of 9.2 out of 10. We saved the hiring team time and money, helped give each of their candidates the fairest possible go, and best of all, helped them achieve their hiring targets. 

Woolworths wanted the equivalent of a high-touch candidate experience, and judging by these candidate testimonials, they certainly got it:

“The chat makes you feel like you’re in a safe space – it gives everyone an equal opportunity instead of an 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 to 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”.

There you have it: That is how a small hiring team can process nearly 10,000 candidates, using conversational Ai, and offer a truly high-touch candidate experience. But the benefits don’t stop there.

With a smart-touch automation solution, Talent Analytics can heighten your touch

When you entrust your hiring process to Smart Interviewer, our smart interviewer, you automate the process of meaningful data collection. That data is then transformed into actionable insights that help you improve your hiring processes. With TalentInsights, you could learn:

• Your average time to hire
• Estimated time saving in hours (incidentally, we’ve helped our customers save a total of 530,000 hours that would have been spent in cumbersome, high-touch interviews)
• The quality of your candidate pool overall, or by gender
• Overall candidate engagement scores

And much more. Suddenly, you have the numbers to back your wider hiring strategies, be they focussed on DEI, or fairness, or another goal. You can show your business that you are making real, quantifiable strides, and leading the way in efficiency and social responsibility.

The appetite for good, actionable data in HR is higher than it has ever been. Hiring managers are waking fast to the realities of the Great Resignation – that we just don’t know as much as we should about what constitutes good talent and candidate experience. In other words: We don’t really know why people are leaving, and we don’t really know why they do or don’t choose us in the first place.

According to a recent study by Madeline Laurano, founder of Aptitude Research, only 50% of the companies that invest in Talent Analytics actually trust the source of their data. When you consider that around 80 million American workers are hourly workers, one of the hardest-to-recruit employment segments of the moment, it becomes clear that the need for useful data is absolutely critical. 

What approach will you take? What kind of experience will you provide your candidates, before and after hiring? What kind of data will guide your decisions? Remember: The choice to do nothing is still a choice, and it has an indeterminate cost.

We’re taking a quick look behind us before we crack on with making hiring fairer for even more candidates in 2023.

Product Highlights

This year we built and upgraded 17 of our customers to our new secure platform, Edge 3; and released a host of features that have transformed our candidate and hiring team experience.

Candidate Experience

In the early part of the year we made a bunch of nifty design improvements to make Chat Interview even more intuitive. Then we added features like reminder emails, a progress bar, improved the experience of entering phone numbers for global candidates and introduced a planned delay in sending My Insights profiles.

In the world of video, we enabled customers to use standalone Video Interviews, and added some smaller changes like improving the compression of our video platform, and adding the ability for hiring teams to use pre-recorded videos to ask questions or play scenarios to candidates.

Hiring Team Experience

After we completely rebuilt our platform to make it more secure, user friendly and flexible; we continued to improve the experience for hiring teams with features like optimizing Talent Insights on mobile devices; improving ease of access while maintaining security with ‘remember this device’; and improving candidate search and management.

Insights

Alongside a number of additions to our people insights product, Discover Insights, our new Integrations dashboard taps into valuable data from ATS’s to give integrated customers a holistic view of candidate experience, efficiency and inclusivity along the hiring journey.

Partnerships & Integrations

Our Integration Warriors did us proud this year. We completed 7 new ATS integrations, enabling a seamless candidate and user experience for customers of SmartRecruiters, Workday, SuccessFactors, eArcu, Greenhouse, PageUp and Avature.

We were also accepted into the Crown Commercial Service Marketplace, making it easy for UK government departments to access our offering; and we continued to work with some of the largest RPO partners globally to help transform the hiring process of some incredible brands.

Security

Security and compliance are always a priority at Sapia. With Edge 3 came multi-region data hosting, more secure login features, and user hierarchies to ensure secure storage and access to candidate data.

And as a gift to round out the year, our auditor AssuranceLab completed our SOC 2 Type 2 surveillance, and we’re on track for successful accreditation, with a report available in Q1 2023.

Looking forward to 2023

Next year brings new challenges as we’ll continue to improve our offering while expanding our customer base globally.

On the horizon are some exciting improvements to Talent Insights; a host of new integrations including Workable, iCIMS, Oracle, Cornerstone, Bullhorn, Lever, Jobvite, JazzHR… and one release that we’re not quite ready to announce just yet.

Let’s just say it’ll be muy, muy grande, et très excitant!

Sapia is recognised as an Alconics Awards finalist in the ‘AI for Good’ category.

It’s AI that gives every candidate a fair chance of landing their dream job and gives candidates something of value back.

The AIconics Awards recognize the outstanding achievements of individuals, projects, teams and their organizations that are responsible for breakthrough innovations in the Artificial Intelligence for Business space.

These prestigious global awards create the ultimate showcase for the best and brightest people, projects and transformational innovations. The AIconics acknowledges the advances in technologies and disciplines being made, as we explore and push at the very definition of what can be accomplished by AI.

The AIconic Awards are being announced on 9th December 2020.

AWARD: AI FOR GOOD

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to help overcome humanity’s biggest challenges, there are a huge number of applications where AI will not only deliver value for businesses but also improve the world itself. This award applauds companies for utilising AI as a positive force for change; the innovations in research and product development that work to create a more sustainable and accessible world; and the AI pioneers that hold the values of leveraging AI for good at their core.

Why is Sapia a finalist in the “AI for Good” category?

Sapia’s Chat Interview gives every candidate a fair chance of landing their dream job.

Have you ever met a recruiter that is totally free from bias and discrimination, and truly embraces diversity and inclusion, and is fair and equitable for everyone? You have now! 

The interviews are a true blind assessment. This is the first step in the hiring process for organisations championing a positive culture change to realise their goals of embracing inclusion and celebrating diversity.

Ai is used to hire with heart. It’s making recruitment ‘human’ again. 

Applying for a job is notoriously a heart-wrenching and time-consuming experience. Right now, during C-19 times, the hardest job in the world is applying for a job. 

Organisations partner with Sapia to help them hire with heart. From the job advert candidates access a link to access their interview.

This means EVERY candidate gets an interview. The basic right of fairness and equality is available to every candidate, every time. 

It takes around 15-20 minutes to answer 5-7 questions. After that, candidates receive their personalised coaching tips. This means EVERY candidate also gets something of value back, something that motivates them and teaches something about themselves they didn’t know. A candidate experience that helps them get this job or the next job or just makes them feel good. 

For these reasons, candidate satisfaction is 99%.

Hiring with heart is good for business.

65% of candidates with a positive experience would be a customer again, even if they were not hired and 81% will share their positive experience with family, friends and peers. 

As consumers, we buy products while sitting on our computer or scrolling through our phone. Texting, messaging – it’s what we all do every day. To be candidate-centric means connecting with candidates the way they connect every day. The long-term payback to customers and employer brand is substantial and enduring. 

In the short-term AI can assess 100,000 people in 6 hours compared to what it would take a team of recruiters 476 days to do. It’s 600 times faster and 3 x cheaper.

No recruiter or team of recruiters can ever come close to the kind of efficiency of a smart AI system.

Using AI to augment decision making is fast becoming mainstream.

It certainly helps to reduce the impact of unconscious bias in hiring decisions. Testing for bias and removing it from algorithms is possible. Whereas for humans, it’s not.

 Bias can be removed with the right data. Algorithms and Ai learn according to the profile of the data we feed it. If the data it learns from is taken from a CV, it’s only going to amplify our existing biases. Only clean data, like the answers to specific job-related questions, can give us a true bias-free outcome.

We continuously test the data so that if ever the slightest bias is found, it can be corrected. These include all assumed biases that can be added to a suite of tests. Examples of tests include: Proportional Parity Test, Score Distribution Test and Fairness Test

Candidates say:

• 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.
• I love the personal feeling … It creates a safe environment to write freely and honestly.
• I don’t know how you gathered such accurate information about my personality from my responses.
• I feel that I’ve had a supportive counselling session. You know me so well!!
• This is amazingly accurate that I can’t even begin to express, I’m in tears!!
• It is fascinating how much our choice of words, our expressions, reveal about us.

CANDIDATE REVIEWS HERE >

Have you seen the Inclusive e-Book?

It offers a pathway to fairer hiring in 2021.

Get diversity and inclusion right whilst hiring on time and on budget.

In this Inclusivity e-Book, you’ll learn: 

• How to design an inclusive recruitment path. From discovery to offer and validation of the process.
• The hidden inclusion challenges that are holding your organisation back.
• How to tell if Ai technology is ethical.

Download Inclusivity Hiring e-Book Here >