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Written by Laura Belfield

Sapia Release Notes July ’22

Right now, you’re probably focussing on how to get more of the best talent into your funnel as the global talent shortage squeezes hiring teams. 

That’s why we’ve made some small (but significant) improvements to our experience, to make it even easier to access and use our platform, both for candidates and hiring teams. 

 

New features

 

Standalone Video Interview

Last year we created a world-first frictionless hiring experience, enabling incredible speed and immediate efficiency gains for our customers. An automated workflow that interviews every candidate using Ai over chat, and auto progresses the shortlist to a non-Ai Video Interview.

Our customers want to empower Hiring Managers to make the final hiring decision while eliminating wasted time that manual screening processes create, and giving every single candidate an empowering experience with their brand.

The results have blown us away. When combined with Chat Interview, Video Interview has achieved the following outcomes for our customers, across 30k candidates:

  • 9/10 Candidate Happiness Score 
  • 77% Completion Rate 
  • 39-hour avg. time to offer 

“This interview was really great since I had 5 chances to record my responses, and that I had time to prepare my answer. The interview was not rushed and I was able to say everything I had to say”

“I like that this system gives people the opportunity to express how they really feel, and streamlines the interviewing process.”​

Given the market demand for asynchronous video solutions, we’re delighted to announce that Video Interview is now available as a standalone solution.

We remain committed to hiring that minimizes human bias and always recommend using our Ai Chat Interview as the first step in your main recruitment process. It’s fair, engaging, and the most efficient way to assess your candidate pool.

However, this development suits the following scenarios:

  • Hiring in a non-English speaking country or encouraging non-English speakers to apply for a role; and
  • Offering Video Interview as a reasonable accommodation for users with disabilities that prevent them from providing written responses.

In both of these scenarios, candidates can still have an engaging experience with your brand by completing a Video Interview for your hiring team to review, in their own time.

For customers wanting to interview non-English speakers, or provide reasonable accommodations for candidates unable to provide written responses, you can now offer Video Interview as a standalone assessment stage. 

To be clear: we always advocate for our Ai Chat Interview to be used as the main assessment stage in your standard hiring process. It’s faster, fairer, and a more engaging candidate experience at the top of the funnel. 

However, for scenarios where it doesn’t work to use an English language written interview, now you can offer Video Interview on its own. 

Learn how

Improvements ✨

 

Ethnicity & Gender Source visible in DiscoverInsights  

To be able to measure diversity through the funnel, and help you to pinpoint bias across your business, we report on the ethnicity and gender of candidates. 

The source of this data comes from two places: 

  • Self-reported, when customers ask candidates to disclose this information as part of their interview 
  • Predicted – using our proprietary technology that infers gender & ethnicity from a candidate’s name. 

Now you’ll be able to see the percentage breakdown between these two sources, to better understand the overall accuracy with which these data points are reported. 

Ask questions using video in Video Interview

To create an even more engaging Video Interview experience, customers can now pre-record the questions asked in video format, so your candidates have more of a ‘conversation’ and get to know your team. 

Our Customer Success team manages this process, so if you want to use this feature, just get in touch.

Edge 3 MFA token timeout increased

We take security at Sapia seriously. The use of MFA is key to keeping our customer’s data safe, however, some customers were having some issues with the 5 min token timeout. 

To address this, we’ve increased the time limit to enter your MFA code from 5 to 10 minutes, to make it easier to log in to our platform, and to give some slower email delivery systems time to get your code to you. 

Planned delay in sending My Insights reports ⏰

Our Ai is fast.. Some could say, too fast! 

To set a more human cadence of communication, we’ve introduced a planned delay of around an hour in sending My Insights reports to candidates after they’ve submitted their Chat Interview responses. 

All in the spirit of creating a human, intuitive experience with our Smart Interviewer. 


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Creating a truly inclusive interview process

A job interview is often an intimidating experience for a candidate, but it needn’t be this way. There are ways that companies can make interviews a comfortable process for the candidate, more effective at getting the right data to make decisions, and reduce biases that can disadvantage members of under-represented groups.

Interviews need to be structured and ask the same standard questions of everyone, making them applicable to the type of role you’re filling. Questions need to be open-ended that permit more than one answer, providing an opportunity to see how candidates think through problems and solutions. Questions shouldn’t be written to be as “gotchas,” but rather give people an opportunity to be themselves.

We’ve talked at length about bias when doing initial screening, but this is something that traditional style face-to-face first interviews also don’t solve for. It is possible for interviews to be ‘blind’ and free from bias as well.

This requires removing visual biases – those based on what we see – from an interview process. This is made possible through the use of text-chat as the preferred method of interview. It’s something that many successful companies like Automattic (the makers of WordPress) have done for years.

Texting is something that most people are familiar with. Ai-enabled text chat feels very similar to texting a friend. Text chat is how we truly communicate asynchronously – we all do it every day with our friends and family. It needs no acting; we all know how to chat. Empowered by the right AI, text chat can be human and real, it is blind, reduces bias, evens the playing field by giving everyone a fair go and gives them all personalised feedback at scale. It can harness the true power of language to understand the candidate’s personality, language skills, critical thinking and much more.

We know we can get this right because at Sapia where we use chat-enabled Ai we send every candidate who uses our platform feedback on their interview, identify their strengths and weaknesses and help them understand what they might improve on. Thousands of messages a day confirm we are accurate (98%) of the time.

An inclusive interview process doesn’t exclude anyone from having an interview. This is something we are able to offer at Sapia. Everybody gets a chance at interviewing for the job. Everyone gets a fair go.

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

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When unconscious bias becomes a conscious bias

unconscious bias

A perfect example of unconscious bias manifesting in a conscious and damaging way.

At Sapia we are attuned to research and stories around bias – for most of us, it’s the reason we work here.

Our team has observed the speed with which the blame for Coronavirus has targeted an entire ethnicity.

In this case, I’ve heard some say, “it’s not racism, people are genuinely scared of the spread of the virus. It’s a deadly virus. As it originated in China people naturally worry about anyone from China”.

Unfortunately, this is the very definition of bias.

A flawed logic that seems sensible on the surface, nothing but pure stereotyping underneath. Simply, everyone who looks Chinese are not recent travels from China.

Australia is home to 1.2mil Chinese origin Australians according to the 2016 Census. Should we worry about all of them? Bias has no place in fighting any problem, even when it is a deadly virus. It only creates stress and disharmony.

The irony is this: the virus is a true fair operator. It has no racial preferences.  

At the beginning of this week, one of our team who had come down with a cold shared he would work from home, to keep the team safe from his contagion.

We laughed at the time about him being a carrier of Coronavirus.  By the end of the week, members of our team with holidays booked to visit family and travel in China during the Easter break had cancelled their trip.

They did this before Qantas stopped their direct flights and before the Australian government announced that Chinese people won’t be allowed back into Australia.

The team member who had a cold this week is Sri Lankan by birth. I guess that means we would have all been safe if he turned up to work as he is the ‘right’ ethnicity.

We are on a mission: To solve issues of bias in hiring

As a white immigrant myself, I don’t experience those prejudices. I have had career and life opportunities beyond my dreams, unfettered by racial bias.

Building a technology that gives equivalence to such career opportunities is why we work for our company. Some of our team have been screened out of job openings. Maybe they had the wrong name, went to the wrong school or just didn’t look like a cultural fit?

Unfortunately, AI hiring tools can be biased 

Not all AI is equal. HireVue, an AI-driven recruitment company, has recently been taken to the US Federal Trade Commission with a prominent rights group claiming unfair and deceptive trade practices in HireVue’s use of face-scanning technology to assess job candidates’ “employability.”

Using video is an obvious problem as a data source for reasons around race and gender and their associated biases, but you might be surprised to know that CV’s can be just as flawed and are in much broader use as a first parse for algorithms.

How does AI solve the issues of discrimination and bias in recruitment?

At Sapia, we rely on a simple open, transparent interview via a text conversation to evaluate someone for a role. No visuals, no CV data. No voice data as that too carries the risk of bias. Neither do we take data from Facebook. Using nothing that the candidate does not know about.

Bottom line, testing for bias and removing it from algorithms is possible. Whereas for humans, it’s not.

If you want to learn more about how we test for bias and why bias testing is critical to an AI screening tool get in touch here.

No amount of bias training will make you less biased.  Maybe that’s one reason why using machines to augment and challenge decisions is fast becoming mainstream.

It certainly helps to reduce the impact of unconscious bias in hiring decisions.

 

 

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AI in Talent: why every recruiter needs to care

Last week I had two conversations, one with my partner, the other with Barb Hyman, Sapia’s new CEO.

Both wanted me share my story. To tell you and anyone else who might be interested, or care, about a journey that took me from being a recruiter to working in a business at the cutting edge of a technology, science and people triumvirate.

They wanted me to share my journey of discovery that every single recruiter is going to experience sooner, rather than later.

To begin, we first need to acknowledge that we humans are odd folk. How often do we see examples of people ignoring evidence in favour of something that instead reinforces their pre-set opinions?

AI in HR and Recruitment, it’ll never catch on

I’ve been doing this job for 10 years, I don’t need a machine to tell me how to recruit

I just don’t believe it, to be honest

These are just a few of the comments / opinions I’ve received from Talent professionals when discussing Recruitment AI. (I should also acknowledge that there are many folk who are genuinely curious or are already embracing the technology).

A while ago a recruitment manager posted on LinkedIn, asking their network for advice on Sapia solutions. A contact of mine figured I could help and tagged me.

Someone else in the Rec Manager’s network provided this advice:

“use a common-sense approach to recruitment… software misses the point… Imagine if your Dr used this sort of software to see if you are ‘likely to….’”

I refrained from posting something akin to this BBC article discussing AI accurately identifying skin cancers. As for “common sense recruiting”… well, i’ll come to that in a subsequent post.

Many people have already formed an opinion on AI. They’ve decided it won’t make a difference, it’s not for them nor will it help their company.

Let me tell you why I think they’re ever so wrong.

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