Part of our job here in the workforce science team is to keep up to date with new research in Organisational Psychology. This might sound boring to some people – but we love it!

As massive nerds, we find nothing more exciting than seeing new progress in our field. This time, our knowledge-cravings took us all the way from Melbourne to Orlando, Florida, to this year’s SIOP conference.

The issue of Adverse Impact

An important issue within our field – and within the US in general – is adverse impact and hiring for diversity.

We are passionate about ensuring people are not discriminated against in selection methods, whether it is because of gender, age, ethnic background or sexual orientation.

(Actually, this is also one of the key values and driving forces behind why Paul, our CEO, founded Sapia.)

One key topic at this year’s conference was the combination of data science and behavioural science. Specifically, there were a lot of discussions around how these sciences can work together to minimise bias and discrimination in the hiring process.

The standard recruitment selection process

To give you some background as to why this is important, let’s explore what a standard selection process might look like today.

If you ever have applied for a job, it is likely you have gone through a process involving;

• your resume
• a cover letter
• a psychometric test (personality/intelligence)
• an interview
• reference checks

As mentioned, pretty standard. This is typically the different pieces of information that recruiters would use to assess your suitability for a role.

However, from an adverse impact perspective, this isn’t good enough.

The reason is that humans are biased (there are a plethora of studies out there proving this). And even if our biases (in most cases) are unconscious, we still base discriminatory decisions on them.

Does your name predict future performance?

A research study by The Ladders found that recruiters only spend about 6 seconds looking at a resume. Using gaze-tracking technology they identified that recruiters spend almost 80% of this time on only a few items:

• name
• current title/company
• previous title/company
• previous position start and end dates
• current position start and end dates
• education

To most people that would seem reasonable. Our previous professional and educational experience should be predictive of future performance, right?

If you agree, it might surprise you that past job experience only has a 0.13 validity when used to predict performance (and your name certainly has nothing to do with how you would perform).

So not only is the information recruiters look at not actually predictive of performance, but it also has the potential to adversely impact minorities.

An eye-opening example

In the 1970s, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra was composed of almost all white males. A few years later, they caught on to their diversity issue and decided to do something about it.

One initiative was to introduce ‘blind auditions’. Individuals would perform from behind a screen, making the assessors ‘blind’ to who was performing. This meant that the performance was in the center of the assessment, not the individual.

The result?

The proportion of women within the orchestra increased from 5% to 35%.

Individuals within racial minority groups are also discriminated against based on resumes.

Research found that applicants with ‘traditional’ english names received an interview for every 1/10 resumes sent out. This is in contrast to applicants with African-American names, who only got an interview for every 1/15 resumes.

As the resume is one of the most common determinators of whether an applicant progresses to the next stage – it is alarming that this method can adversely impact minority groups.

Luckily, some progress is definitely being made to combat this.

Different techniques, for example blind recruitment, are increasing in popularity. Some progressive businesses have leap-frogged and started using artificial intelligence (AI) driven algorithms as a first step in their assessment process.

Important to keep in mind with AI and Adverse Impact

When using AI, it is very important to understand that the data put into the algorithm is of great importance. AI is often touted as the solution to the biases inherent in our thinking, but if not executed properly, AI can also become biased.

This is because an AI algorithm is only ever as bias-free as the data we used to build it.

It can be difficult to make sure AI is increasing diversity, and at the same time maintaining its predictive power. The predictive power is basically how good a model is at predicting good performance – and weeding out those who wouldn’t do so well.

To ensure best chance of success it is crucial that the data we put into AI recruitment tools is bias free.

One way is to control what you put into your AI models. Big Data can for example be dangerous, as it looks at adding all possible data sources of information to predict performance.

This could mean that the AI model learns that ethnic background is a predictor for success, which we clearly want to avoid.

To combat this issue at Sapia, we make the following decisions:

Targeted variables:

• we only choose variables that minority groups do not answer differently to other groups

(if we did the model could learn to discriminate against these groups if the variable was considered predictive)

Test our predictors:

• Are they in fact adversely impacting anyone?
• Conduct adverse impact studies

When considering a new assessment tool, you should always ask your test provider the following;

How do you ensure the assessment isn’t biased against any gender, age or racial category, whilst remaining highly predictive of performance?

If they can’t give you a satisfying answer, it is definitely worthwhile considering another vendor.

Liked what you read? For further reading on how we minimise bias in our algorithms, head here.

To find out how to use Recruitment Automation to ‘hire with heart’, we also have a great eBook on recruitment automation with humanity.

Start with the end in mind – always hire for performance first  

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.

How do you hire for the values and behaviours that result in high-performance? 

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

Moving beyond the limitations of Myers-Briggs

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.

Instead of the standard 16 personality types, we directed the machine to group the data into 400 unique personality groupings.

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.

What does the talent review look like?

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.

Talent review improves business focus 

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: 

• What matters most to our organisation?
• What are our business objectives?
• Does our existing talent pool and policy align with business strategy?
• Are our managers reviewing performance and potential in the best way possible, without favour or bias?
• Are we doing enough to support our people’s learning, development and growth?
• Do we have the right continuous performance management process in place?
• Are we identifying and recruiting the talent at the early career stage with identified potential to be the leaders of the future?
• Is our business (or part of the business) at risk without appropriate successors?
• What needs to be done to mitigate any risk?
• Do we need to embed new values and improve culture?

Planning a talent review

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.

What matters most – agreeing your assessment criteria for hiring

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. 

How Sapia helps you get to the best talent (much faster) 

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.

Nurturing your talent culture

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:

• support continuous performance management
• deliver robust succession planning
• optimise talent performance
• support skills assessments and gaps analysis
• lift employee retention
• support talent development and career pathways
• drive employee engagement through career conversations
• inform talent planning and decisions with better data
• embed culture and values throughout your organisation

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%.  

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog!

You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now – here –  or leave us your details to get a personalised demo

To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.

Why recruitment automation combined with Ai, has become such a ‘big thing’?

Is your recruitment team overwhelmed by the sheer volume of job applications and CVs? Are you struggling to find the right candidates in a timely manner? Is administrative work taking up too much of your team’s time, leaving little room for building relationships or focusing on business growth?

If you answered “yes” to these common challenges faced by recruiters and hiring managers, recruitment automation can provide the solution you need. This is particularly relevant in a time of high unemployment when there is a larger pool of candidates actively seeking opportunities in various roles.

Recruitment automation processes can help increase productivity, expedite candidate selection, accelerate the hiring process, and reduce costs. Furthermore, it improves the candidate experience and enhances your organization’s talent profile and brand reputation. It’s no wonder that most recruiters and hiring managers have already integrated automation into their recruitment processes.

Recruitment automation systems, powered by AI, offer significant advantages. They streamline repetitive tasks, such as CV screening and initial candidate assessment, allowing your team to focus on more valuable activities. With the help of AI algorithms, these systems can quickly sift through a large number of applications, identifying the most qualified candidates based on predefined criteria. This significantly reduces manual effort and minimizes the risk of overlooking qualified individuals.

Additionally, recruitment automation systems improve the efficiency and speed of the hiring process. They facilitate seamless integration between various recruitment platforms, such as job boards and applicant tracking systems, consolidating data and eliminating the need for manual data entry and repetitive tasks. Automated workflows ensure that each step of the recruitment process is executed smoothly and consistently, from initial application to final hiring decision.

Moreover, recruitment automation systems enable better candidate engagement and communication. They support personalized and timely interactions, such as automated email responses and status updates, which enhance the candidate experience and maintain a positive employer brand image.

What is recruitment automation?

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.

The top 10 benefits of recruitment automation  

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:

1. Increase productivity – work smarter, not harder. Free your time (and headspace) to focus on higher value and more meaningful tasks. With automation, recruitment processes can be ‘always on’ and you can be open for business 24/7.
2. Fill roles faster – automated candidate pre-screening, nurturing, and assessing, can greatly reduce overall time to hire.
3. Lower costs per hire – depending on the scope and investment of your organisation’s recruitment automation, leading vendors should be able to model and demonstrate cost savings and pathways to RoI.
4. Hire better consistently – data-driven decisions can help improve the quality of hire.
5. Improve the candidate experience – candidates appreciate an engaging experience, faster responses and quicker hiring decisions.
6. Remove bias and build diversity – objective decision-making based on personality characteristics, skills and traits, helps build diverse workplace teams.
7. Beat the paperchase – streamline data collection, recording, storage and tracking. Different platforms and tools can be integrated to share data, updates, information, feedback and more.
8. Promote better collaboration – from early hiring planning right through to onboarding, technology enhances collaboration between all stakeholders
9. Build a better workplace culture – by starting with employees who are a better fit, improve metrics like tenure and retention, employee satisfaction and employer brand reputation.
10. Data, data, data – automation creates data that will enhance reporting, analytics and data insight that can help to constantly improve business and hiring processes.

Automated interviews – a popular place to start automation

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.

Here is the Ultimate Guide to Interview Automation

Sapia – leaders in automated pre-screening

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. 

Artificial intelligence can see what humans can’t

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 >

Blind-screening at its best

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:

• reduce recruiter time spent by 90%
• increase candidate satisfaction to 99%
• achieve interview completion rates of 90%
• reduce bias and support diversity goals
• enhance the candidate experience with personalised feedback and coaching tips.

It’s a far better candidate experience

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.

Did you see the FREE e-Book on Candidate Experience? Download the Candidate Experience Playbook Here > 

8 ways recruiting automation can work for you

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:

1. Candidate sourcing and engagement – use analysis of candidate data to identify and engage with potential future candidates. 
2. Always-on candidate nurturing – collect candidate data, build deeper talent pools, track candidates and measure recruitment success. Automate email communications to keep past candidates ‘warm’ or schedule upcoming events such as interviews. There are many ATS and CRM vendors with different features and functions. Some of them are automated job listing creation, career site integration, interview capabilities and more. 
3. Leverage social site recruiting – connect with candidates where they hang out – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Automate social media publishing and campaign strategies with bespoke scheduling and planning tools as well as many sites’ own business tools 
4. Job listings – more accurately target candidates all over the internet using programmatic job advertising. Automate budget management, job postings, branded content distribution and more. 
5. Candidate pre-screening – rank and grade candidates to qualify who moves forward in the firing process. Automate CV screening and top-of-funnel interviews using a platform like Sapia’s mobile-first, text-based solution. 
6. Skills and aptitude testing– there is a wide range of software platforms that can automate pre-employment testing. Some may focus on specific skills such as programming, data entry or language competency while many more measure ‘soft’ skills such as aptitude, personality traits, cognitive abilities. With its open-ended question format, Sapia assesses close to 100 traits or personality characteristics in ranking candidates. 
7. Interview scheduling – streamline the process with automated scheduling, confirmations and follow-up communications to candidates.
8. Background checking – automate background checks, police checks, reference checks, educational qualifications and more with a wide range of vendor solutions.

Here are 6 Reasons to Start Your Hiring With Interview Automation

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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 >