It’s an understatement to say that recruiters and talent acquisition managers have had it tough over the last four-odd years. The pressures have compounded like a line of falling dominoes: First it was the COVID-19 pandemic; then came the mass talent migration; then the advent of new concepts like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘acting your wage’, which, like them or not, seem to be the manifestations of a tired and existentially anxious workforce.
Now, in 2024, it’s likely that we’ll have to contend with a global recession.
Hiring is tougher. Candidates are wary and they expect more. Duh.
So do companies and their CEOs. However – and somewhat counter-productively – many companies have sought to cut recruitment budgets, lay off recruiters and talent acquisition managers en masse, and deprioritize long-term recruitment marketing strategies. We’re facing troubled times, and recruitment (and perhaps HR, more generally) is being treated as a cost center.
This misunderstanding of HR as a money sink is nothing new. It happens during every trough in the market. But, if we don’t make efforts to change this perception, 2024 will be a particularly painful valley to climb out of.
Why is recruitment treated as a cost center?
CEOs have been keen on talent strategy for years, but are struggling to quantify the effects of recruitment and talent acquisition activities. They cannot see the A to B journey, the action and its result. When the market is good, talent is in abundance, and you’re hiring effectively, nobody cares. But when times are hard, nebulous processes are put under harsh light.
Relatedly, recruitment and talent acquisition leaders are struggling to prove that the outcomes of their work are driving revenue. This is primarily an issue of data capture and analysis, in our experience: When companies come to us to help with hiring quality talent, the number one issue they have is to do with metrics and KPIs. Most do not know how to reliably measure quality of hire, nor time-to-hire, nor the effectiveness of their recruitment marketing channels. Many know that their processes are plagued with inefficiencies, but are not sure how to go about fixing them.
(To be clear, totally understandable. This stuff is hard.)
The big and unmanageable HR tech stack
Where recruitment is concerned, a HR tech stack tends to look like this: an unwieldy ATS, often coupled with a conversational AI or scheduling tool.
These technologies cost big money. As a result, the question CFOs and CEOs will be constantly asking of HR is this: Is it adding real value? Can you prove it? Or are we simply stuck to a system that tackles old problems with insufficient solutions?
The bottom line is this: Enterprise companies are overstacked, overworked, and need to adopt different solutions to old problems. It doesn’t mean less tech, necessarily, although it can; it means the right tech.
Focus first on areas of lost productivity.
Easier, perhaps, than it sounds. It’s always better to iterate than to completely restructure your hiring function. So get your team together and examine your processes. How much time is spent:
- Sourcing and reviewing candidates (including, importantly, reading through resumes and cover letters)?
- Screening?
- Scheduling, rescheduling, and conducting interviews?
- Organizing and corralling hiring managers?
- Gathering, collating, and providing feedback to candidates?
- Communicating with candidates, more generally?
- Onboarding?
Ideally, you have baseline data in your ATS to help you arrive at some indicative numbers. But let’s assume that you don’t: calculating rough person-hours is enough to see where time may be spent more effectively.
In our experience, sourcing and screening are the stages in which quick wins might be gotten. As time-honored research (and our Smart Interviewer product) shows, resumes and cover letters are not useful indicators of candidate quality or potential. They can be easily falsified. What’s more, Sapia and Aptitude research from 2022 discovered that 22% of candidates drop out at the application stage and 24% at the screening stage.
The biggest companies are starting to focus more on this. According to the Wall Street Journal, employers like Google, Delta and IBM are combatting the tight labor market by easing strict needs for college degrees.
Interviews are another huge cause of inefficiency. Structured interviews are the best explainer (at 26%) of an employee’s performance, but many companies allow recruiters and hiring managers to conduct interviews haphazardly, causing a misidentification and loss of talent that can be hard (if not impossible) to measure. If you’re interviewing badly, how can you know if you’re capable of finding good candidates? What’s the associated cost of such a problem?
It’s no surprise, then, that according to our research, 50% of companies say they’ve lost talent due to the way they interview. Big costs involved there.
Next, focus on measurable metrics
Don’t worry: We’re not going to lay out a massive and exhaustive list of metrics you should be tracking. Not feasible; you’re overworked as it is.
Instead, we’ll prescribe three good places to start, including links to helpful blog posts explaining how you measure them effectively:
- Candidate abandonment rate
- Candidate source attribution (or where candidates actually come from)
- Candidate experience baseline
Each of these metrics can help you improve efficiencies, and in turn, start to prove that your recruitment function is having a positive effect on business outcomes.
Layer on tech that can help you drastically improve hiring efficiency, while giving you time to focus on big picture stuff
At a certain point, we must realize that force-multiplying technology is the only way to win in the unfolding ‘now’ of work. We’re spending way too much time with processes that can be repeated and automated – often out of some sense of duty to uphold 1:1 human connection (as if technology completely removes that, which it doesn’t).
And, because we do this, we weaken our position at an executive level: CEOs care about what is scalable, and the average recruitment function, traditionally speaking, does not.
In a recent episode of our Pink Squirrels! podcast, Sapia CEO and founder Barb Hyman had a chat with expert HR change management leader, Kyle Lagunas, about this very topic.
The one foolproof way to elevate recruitment in your company
We exist to help you hire better, faster, and with fewer headaches. Our Smart Interviewer takes care of the scheduling, interviewing, and assessment stages of your process – saving upwards of 2,000 recruitment hours (av.) per month, and enabling you to offer jobs to candidates within 24 hours of application.
It’s delivered in a chat-based format (hello, Gen Z!), and candidate responses are assessed according to science-backed personality models. This means you can be sure you’re getting top talent, and you can prove it with measurable, repeatable data.
That’s not all: Our tech is blind, which means it natively disrupts bias and maximizes the size of your talent pool. Everyone gets an interview, and everyone gets personalized coaching tips whether or not they get the job. Our application completion rate, for all customers, sits at around 85% on average; our candidate satisfaction rate is well over 90%!
(And, if you need a second stage interview, you can use our Video Interview tool.)
Everything you do with our platform is pulled through to comprehensive data dashboards, allowing you to see hiring efficiency, quality, time, diversity, and other metrics. CEOs love this kind of transparency.
There you go: time saved NOT having to screen, review resumes and cover letters, compile candidate feedback, communicate with candidates, or improve hiring manager interview techniques.
When you’re saving that much time and money, your recruitment (or HR) function has more bandwidth to focus on long-term talent acquisition and people initiatives.
Don’t struggle in 2024 – speak to our team today about how we can solve your hiring challenges.
Related
Blog
The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?
Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels.
As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?
At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020.
Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.
The Rise of GPT
When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’).
Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans.
That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.
Full Transparency with Candidates
Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it.
This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses.
The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data…
We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers.
The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again.
The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.
Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups
We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.
However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right.
Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers.
We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.
However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward.
It’s a mix of perspectives.
Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes.
This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build.
Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇
Research Paper Download: AI Generated Content in Online Text-based Structured Interviews
Blog
Joe & the Juice Partners with Sapia.ai, Scaling an Exceptional Candidate Experience and Cutting Time to Hire
Read the full press release about the partnership here.
Joe & the Juice, the trailblazing global juice bar and coffee concept, is renowned for its vibrant culture and commitment to cultivating talent. With humble roots from one store in Copenhagen, now with a presence in 17 markets, Joe & The Juice has built a culture that fosters growth and celebrates individuality.
But, as their footprint expands, so does the challenge of finding and hiring the right talent to embody their unique culture. With over 300,000 applications annually, the traditional hiring process using CVs was falling short – leaving candidates waiting and creating inefficiencies for the recruitment team. To address this, Joe & The Juice turned to Sapia.ai, a pioneer in ethical AI hiring solutions.
A Fresh Approach to Hiring
Through this partnership, Joe & The Juice has transformed its hiring process into an inclusive, efficient, and brand-aligned experience. Instead of faceless CVs, candidates now engage in an innovative chat-based interview that reflects the brand’s energy and ethos. Available in multiple languages, the AI-driven interview screens for alignment with the “Juicer DNA” and the brand’s core values, ensuring that every candidate feels seen and valued.
Candidates receive an engaging and fair interview experience as well as personality insights and coaching tips as part of their journey. In fact, 93% of candidates have found these insights useful, helping to deliver a world-class experience to candidates who are also potential guests of the brand.
“Every candidate interaction reflects our brand,” Sebastian Jeppesen, Global Head of Recruitment, shared. “Sapia.ai makes our recruitment process fair, enriching, and culture-driven.”
Results That Matter
For Joe & The Juice, the collaboration has yielded impressive results:
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33% Reduction in Screening Time: Pre-vetted shortlists from Sapia.ai’s platform ensure that recruiters can focus on top candidates, getting them behind the bar faster.
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Improved Candidate Satisfaction: With a 9/10 satisfaction score from over 55,000 interviews, candidates appreciate the fairness and transparency of the process.
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Bias-Free Hiring: By eliminating CVs and integrating blind AI that prioritizes fairness, Joe & The Juice ensures their hiring reflects the diverse communities they serve.
Frederik Rosenstand, Group Director of People & Development at Joe & The Juice, highlighted the transformative impact: “Our juicers are our future leaders, so using ethical AI to find the people who belong at Joe is critical to our long-term success. And now we do that with a fair, unbiased experience that aligns directly with our brand.”
Trailblazing for the hospitality industry
In an industry so wholly centred on people, Joe & the Juice is paving the way for similar brands to adopt technology that enables inclusive, human-first experiences that can reflect a brand’s core values.
If you’re curious about how Sapia.ai can transform your hiring process, check out our full case study on Joe & The Juice here.
Blog
Sapia.ai Wrapped 2024
It’s been a year of Big Moves at Sapia.ai. From welcoming groundbreaking brands to achieving incredible milestones in our product innovation and scale, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in hiring.
And we’re just getting started 🚀
Take a look at the highlights of 2024
All-in-one hiring platform
This year, with the addition of Live Interview, we’re proud to say our platform now covers screening, assessing and scheduling.
It’s an all-in-one volume hiring platform that enables our customers to deliver a world-leading experience from application through to offer.
Supercharging hiring efficiency
Every 15 seconds, a candidate is interviewed with Sapia.ai.
This year, we’ve saved hiring managers and recruiters hours of precious time that can now be used for higher-value tasks.
Giving candidates the best experience
Our platform allows candidates to be their best selves, so our customers can find the people that truly belong with them. They’re proud to use a technology that’s changing hiring, for good.
Leading the way in AI for hiring
We’ve continued to push the boundaries in leveraging ethical AI for hiring, with new products on the way for Coaching, Internal Mobility & Interview Builders.