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Written by Nathan Hewitt

Meet SmartInterviewer: the algorithm that seeks to prevent discrimination and predict job-hopping

In an ideal world, the hiring process is discrimination-free and those who are hired stick with whatever company hires them for a long time.

Sadly, neither notion holds particularly true. Discrimination is still very much alive. And new employees continue to leave their companies at an alarming rate. A hiring firm seeks to eliminate both issues — through AI-based tech. 

From the outside looking in, Sapia’s promises nearly sound too good to be true. Founded in Melbourne Australia in 2013, they describe themselves as a combined effort of data scientists, engineers, HR professionals, programmers — and rock climbers. They have based their business around the idea of empowerment of all parties — all for the greater good of fair decisions. “We believe that using data, and ideally actual performance data, is the best way to deliver fairness and better decision-making”, they say.

“Smart Interviewer is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback.”

Their ideas come together in their newest invention: a chatbot called Smart. Rather than you spending countless of hours on initial candidate interviews, Smart Interviewer will do the top-of-funnel interviews for you. According to Smart Interviewer’s parents, it is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback. Moreover, the company reports a 95% completion rate. 

Unconscious bias

It’s no surprise that humans are prone to unconscious bias, and that’s what the company wants to tackle with Smart Interviewer. “When a recruiter first screens a resume, they do so for +/- 6 seconds. So what is it that they are seeking?”, they ask. Their answer to the unconscious bias is simple: data. “Only clean data, like the answers to specific job-related questions, can give us a true bias-free outcome.”

Job hopping

While Sapia has been shortlisted for several tech and AI-based awards, there have been some critical notes too. MIT Technology Review writer Karen Hao labelled the hiring firm’s initiatives as ‘misleading’, ‘troubling’ and ‘causing greater scrutiny for their tools’ labour issues beyond discrimination’.

“Job hopping, or the threat of job hopping is one of the main things that workers are able to increase their income.”

Hao quotes Solon Barocas, an assistant professor at Cornell University and principal researcher at Microsoft ResearchBarocas, an expert at algorithmic fairness and accountability, does raise a valid point in Hao’s article. The fact that Smart Interviewer asks job hopping-related questions, isn’t a good thing for candidates. “Job hopping or the threat of job-hopping is one of the main things that workers are able to increase their income.” 

AI bias

While AI-based systems are designed to eliminate bias, there have been multiple cases where bias can actually creep into algorithms. Amazon stopped using a hiring algorithm after finding out it favoured applicants based on words such as ‘executed’ and ‘captured’, which were far more common in men’s resumes. It proves that even though when gender, race or sexual orientation are no longer part of the process, there are still ways for AI systems to discriminate.

The answer may lie in mandated transparency, according to Barocas. “If firms were more forthcoming about their practices and submitted their tools for such validation, it could help hold them accountable”, he says. 

At the end of the day, and we’ve got ourselves to thank for this: AI bias may be an easier fix than human bias.

Meanwhile, it’s easy to forget why Sapia came up with Smart Interviewer in the first place. The same way it is easy to be overly critical of organisations who are trying their best to really bridge a gap when it comes to discrimination in the forms of a lack of diversity and inclusion with regards to hiring. At the end of the day, and we’ve got ourselves to thank for this: AI bias may be an easier fix than human bias. 

By Jasper Spanjaart, ToTalent, 29/07/2020

To get the Research Paper:

Assessing Job-Hopping Attitudes From Chat Interview

 


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

Finally, you can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details here to get a personalised demo.


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Kallidus and Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

An ‘unfair’ advantage is obtained for Recruiters by adding Sapia’s interview automation to Kallidus 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. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful Kallidus ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.

Now is the time to:

  • optimise recruiter time spent by 90%
  • increase candidate satisfaction to 99%
  • achieve interview completion (the equivalent of application fill) rates of 90%
  • reduce bias

Your advantage: Sapia + Kallidus

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 Kallidus, 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.

Read: The Ultimate Guide to Interview Automation

To see it in action

Watch this 2 minute video to see how Sapia works inside Kallidus for Iceland Foods.

Start today

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

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. Else you can leave us your details to get a personalised demo

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COVID career anxiety is creating hiring bias!

We know that the global pandemic has caused a disruption in global workforces. Much has already been said about the Great Resignation, and how it has morphed into the Great Reshuffle, a period in which many are looking to reinvent themselves in the light of new jobs and careers. No industries or role types have been spared, either, it seems – even recruiters are leaving positions in the tens of thousands.

With a reshuffle, however, comes uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety. The war on talent may have benefited some, but the path to career reinvention is by no means guaranteed. Consider the following factors, factors job-hunters must face every day:

  • Bias in recruitment. According to a recent survey, 65% of tech recruiters believe their hiring process is biased. You may not get a fair shake, and you may not ever know why.
  • Ghosting. According to CandE research, In 2020, 33% of candidates in North America who completed job applications had still not received a response more than two months later.
  • Unfair competition. 78% of people admit to misrepresenting themselves on their resume.
  • Threats to longevity and progression. According to Harvard Business Review, almost two thirds of the tasks that a manager currently does may be automated by as soon as 2025.
  • Changes to the very nature of work. Noted future-of-work columnist Dror Poleg said it best: “It is not just where or when we work that is changing; it is the nature of work itself. For a growing number of people, work is becoming indistinguishable from leisure. In some cases, the workers don’t even know they are working. In others, workers think they are working while they are, in fact, resting. In the emerging world of work, video gamers are getting paid to play games, and fans are paid to listen to music.”

It’s little wonder that some Great Reshufflers, especially emerging adults (ages 18-24), are experiencing anxiety about working in the post-COVID world. Instability is the only constant. Consider, too, that some people are better at dealing with uncertainty – or, in technical terms, they are higher-than-average in the HEXACO personality traits Flexibility (or Adaptability, as it’s sometimes known).

This hypothesis is supported by at least one study, published last year in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry. It suggested that, “…due to the outbreak of ‘Fear of COVID-19’, people are becoming depressed and anxious about their future career, which is creating a long-term negative effect on human psychology.”

How this translates to good (or not-so-good) candidate experience

The traditional face-to-face interview is typified by stilted small talk and a general air of nervousness. If a candidate is low in Extraversion, high in Agreeableness, or high in the Anxiety and Fearfulness scales of the Emotionality personality domain, their experience of walking into a blind interview is likely to be worsened by the additional stressors left by COVID-19. 

Consider, as is likely to be the case, that the candidate might possess a combination of all three traits, in the proportions laid out above. These people, especially if they are young, may not even bother to apply for a job in today’s climate. 

The ramifications of this are obvious: You risk, at best, filling your workforce with open, disagreeable, type-A employees. At worst, you risk baking unfairnesses or bias into your recruitment process, at the cost of good candidates who don’t shine in awkward face-to-face situations.

How good candidate experience data, and talent analytics, can help you ease gender biases at the top of your hiring funnel

Take this small data visualisation from our TalentInsights dashboard as a key example. Please note here that the following results apply to the outcomes of the hiring process, and not Smart Interviewer’s recommendations.

HEXACO personality data in recruitment | Sapia recruitment Ai software

It presents an assessment of candidate hiring outcomes according to key HEXACO personality traits. The red dots represent female candidates, the blue dots male. Immediately, we can see that when it comes to Conscientiousness – one of the best predictors of workplace success – females and males are more or less identical.

The main differences between the two genders occur, however, in the domains of Agreeableness and Emotionality. Combined, these two traits are good predictors of anxiety and/or aversion to fear. As you can see, females tend to be higher in Agreeableness and Emotionality than males. 

Though the difference is not incredibly significant, it is still present – and it may require a slight change to the way you bring female candidates into your hiring process. The data proves, of course, that your best candidates are just as likely to be female as male – but your recruitment tactics may be producing outcomes that favour males.

How to account for fear, anxiety, and Agreeableness in your recruitment process

We’ve said it before, and it’s the whole reason we exist: A blind, text-based Chat Interview with a clever, machine-learning Ai. Smart Interviewer is our smart interviewer, and it has now analysed more than 500 million candidate words to arrive at the kinds of data points you see above. It helps you combat bias at the top of your funnel, and gives you the Talent Analytics you need at the bottom.

And it works. Take it from the candidates high in Agreeableness:

“I have never had an interview like this online in my life… able to speak without fear or judgement. The feedback is also great to reflect on. I feel this is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves and at the same time the responses back to me are written with a good sense of understanding and compassion also. 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.”

– Graduate Candidate A

“[It was] approachable, rather than daunting. I found the process to be comprehensive and easy to complete. I also enjoyed that the range of questions were different than those commonly asked. The visual aspects of the survey makes the task seem approachable rather than daunting and thus easier to complete.”

– Graduate Candidate B

The future of work is uncertain. But with a fair and unbiased assessment tool, you can prevent the best talent from being lost under the dust of the Great Reshuffle – and save a lot of time and money doing it.

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The ROI of Hope | Candidate Experience

Getting your organisation’s candidate experience right is proving to be something we’ll hear about increasingly. This is as job applicants demand more from companies they interact with. A recent poll on LinkedIn by a recruitment specialist attracted almost 80,000 views and 1000’s of reactions. It revealed that 52% of the people polled (one assumes mostly recruiters) believe that a template email is good enough as a response to an application for a job.

When it comes to recruitment, responding to candidates has always been an area we know has been ripe for improvement. And it costs companies too, with a bad candidate experience said to have cost Virgin $5 million.

That’s not to say there aren’t historical reasons why recruiters have not been able to respond to the hundreds of applicants received for a job. Until now it’s not been something we can practically do with limited time and resources. This is where AI plays a fundamental role in moving our industry forward as it allows mass personalisation at scale.

Hiring With Heart

This has never been more important than right now as we have had mass job losses across industries due to the impact of COVID-19. If you look at the Hospitality and Tourism industry across the globe, it’s hard to wrap your head around the sheer number of job losses with very little hope of returning to normal soon. If with every job application we were able to give each unsuccessful candidate feedback on where they could improve, imagine the impact we could have in activating the world economy.

This is entirely possible and every day we hear about the impact our technology is having on people’s lives when they get personalised feedback designed to steer them in the right direction.

81% of people who get personalised feedback from our platform said it was useful in identifying their strengths, 71% said it would help them better prepare for interviews and 59% said it would help them find a job that suited them.

And lastly, it’s not something we can quantify, but we do believe it’s important. What we’re giving so many people right now is hope. We think that’s something worth companies cultivating alongside us too.


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

Finally, you can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to get a personalised demo


Have you seen the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook? Download it here.

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