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 >

It’s now well established that a wider talent pool means more opportunities for recruiting diverse candidates and this results in higher returns, increased productivity, and creativity benefit companies with a diverse workforce. The issue isn’t that we need these thighs to be proven anymore, but rather that nothing we’ve been doing to create the change we need has worked. 

Though well-intentioned, DEI has not delivered. Companies have been motivated by the optics of their DEI programmes rather than taking consequential actions to bring about change. Unconscious bias training has been proven ineffective because it cannot address the systemic issues that lead to bias in the first place.

Companies have also spent large sums of money and resources improving their cultures that celebrate belonging, but neglecting their recruitment metrics because they excuse lack of diverse talent as a ‘pipeline problem’.

To address this we need to do something radical. Because what we are doing just isn’t working. 

This is where Ai is, where the power of technology can really have a positive impact on the world. 

You need to find undiscovered talent. 

What is undiscovered talent?

Undiscovered talent is the talent that you overlook when using traditional hiring practices that rely on CVs, which are limited in communicating real skills, and job interviews, which are beset with bias and limited in their insight. By using radical new talent intelligence that uncovers people for their job fit, based on science-backed insights, you start to uncover undiscovered talent. These are people who might have been dismissed because of things like age, past experience, ethnicity, gender or other preconceptions and biases that we have about who we think is a good fit for a job.

Our technology has uncovered some amazing talent for the companies that we work with, that they would have otherwise missed out on. This is a massive advantage when it comes to making an impact on this issue.

This is how we start to move the dial on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

Want to know if technology can give everyone a fair go?

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

Before COVID, the conversations I was having with HR executives were about how Sapia might help them with the volume of candidates they were receiving for job openings. For every job posted there were often over a thousand candidates, and it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to understand how overwhelmed many big organisations were. Our Ai was seen as the solution to automate dealing with candidate volume in a way that found the best people, but also touched base with everyone who applied as part of their brand building. In a nutshell, before the pandemic, efficiency was the key driver in looking for automated hiring solutions like ours. 

Now that we’re emerging from the disruption of COVID, no one is talking to me about needing help with the volume of candidates they receive. In fact, they are asking how we might help them get any candidates in the first place! All around the globe, and across multiple industries, there is a need for candidates. It’s certainly been an abrupt change that has left many scratching their heads, but there is almost no time to wrap your head around it if you want to stay in the game. This is a new war for talent unlike any we’ve seen before, and candidates have the upper hand. It’s created a need for a solution to solve two things: firstly, to identify skills in candidates that traditional ways of hiring failed to identify (I call this cohort “undiscovered talent”) and a strong candidate experience (you are the one being interviewed from the moment they hit “apply”). 

I thought it was worth looking at how the “war of talent” has evolved since it was first coined by Steven Hankin at McKinsey & Company in 1997. At that time there was a shift in the way that companies valued their talent, and it became seen as important to attract the best in order to have a successful organisation. It’s hard to think about this now, but at that time the whole idea of cultivating company cultures that aimed to elevate and value employees was new. At this stage though the “war” was largely for executive talent with recruiters focusing on building their brand by poaching star C-Suite talent off competitors, wooing them with big sign-up bonuses and lavish overtures like unexpected gifts and trips. 

As tech companies started to become the big players in the market, the focus turned from business acumen to the need for the best digital and technical talent. Recruiting became less about material perks (though many engineers still commanded high salaries) but also about giving talent things they wanted besides just money. Flexibility, free lunches, unlimited holidays and creating cultures that were about “working hard and having fun” were how the war for technical talent was won. This was really a time of culture wars between companies, but also meant that many companies hired only for culture-fit. This resulted in fairly homogenous teams that were largely white male techbros, and eventually many large tech companies were called out on it. Beyond tech, corporates were also waking up to the fact that they had some serious diversity issues that needed to be addressed. This led to a new war. The war for diverse talent.

Pre-COVID, hiring more diversely was a strong focus for companies to find the best talent. We all know that diverse teams result in better business outcomes and anyone who had a “pale, male and stale” executive team was seen as minted in the past. Coupled with Black Lives Matter, which became a global movement to address racial inequality from the C-suite down, finding more diverse talent through reducing bias in hiring, was where the war was being fought. This is not a won battle by the way, and remains a large focus for many companies that we work with and help. Importantly, finding diverse talent is still a key part of this new and emerging next phase of the “war on talent” … the one where workers have the upper hand. The one where candidates are in short supply, and people want jobs that suit them just as much as whether they are seen as just suited to the job. 

Recruiters have been forced to look at people differently – and this is not a bad thing. Factors like age, ethnicity, education, gender and even past experience that obscured our understanding of someone’s ability to do a job have all been cancelled as qualifying factors. Soft skills, or human skills, have become the focus on what we need to understand in order to assess someone’s suitability to do a job. Are they a team player? Do they like to problem solve? How aligned are they to our company values? Are they self-aware and in touch with their emotions? Can they put stress aside to achieve outcomes?

“What we recruit for” has significantly shifted for many already, but there is still some catching up to do on the “how we recruit”. To be blunt, CV’s and cover letters begging recruiters to “pick me!” serve no purpose in this new battle. They ask too much of candidates from the outset, serve no valuable purpose in the information they provide, confirm our biases and just create work on the HR manager’s side. 

We need to walk in a candidate’s shoes and make sure that our recruiting process puts them first, treats them fairly and without bias, meets them where they are at, and is both friendly and informative. And, HR teams need to do this all while working efficiently and fast. Speed is crucial when talent is in short supply.

Impossible? No, not at all. Recruiters need to understand that Ai platforms like ours exist to solve all these problems. We’re not a “technical” solution, but a human one, in that we can accurately identify soft skills immediately and engage with candidates in a one-on-one way, at scale. 

You cannot win this war on talent without chat-driven Ai technology. Technology like ours is the only way you can quickly understand the real human skills that every candidate brings to the table, without dismissing anyone upfront. 

I can’t help but think that these issues we’re facing as recruiters and HR managers right now, where workers have the upper hand, while unchartered territory, will only serve our industry for the better. It’s a chance to give everyone a fair go, truly understand them, treat them with the dignity they deserve … and still hire better teams. 

Maybe it’s not a battle after all. Maybe it’s a win-win. 

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For more on how to improve candidate experience using recruitment automation, we have a great eBook on candidate experience.