Sapia.ai’s platform launches eight new languages to fuel further global expansion

When I was leading the People & Culture team at the REA Group, my new CEO was passionate about Values, and the central role they play in defining your culture. Following a successful change program to evolve new Values that mirrored the desired Culture, one that would set the business up for continued growth and as a talent magnet, she asked me how we were going to embed those Values through our people processes – who we hire, who we promote, who we reward etc.

It couldn’t be a screen saver pop up or posters on a wall. The values had to be really heard and felt. At the same time, we also had a business that was hiring in the hundreds each year so scaling culture means getting this right.

These are two distinct notions when it comes to hiring: hiring for values and for culture.

One should stay pretty fixed, and the other should be dynamic as your business context is always changing. If a company’s values are its bedrock, then a company’s culture is the shifting landscape on top of it. Hiring purely for culture is a recipe for self-reinforcing hiring, aka hiring that is biased. As we all know, innovation comes from diversity of background/thought/etc, so by hiring only for culture you can decrease, or even stifle innovation.

Celebrate that just as your product is always evolving, so will your culture. That means people who were great when you were a team of 50 may not be the right person for when you get to 500.

At Sapia we work with our customers to ensure their values are embedded right from the first interview.

This takes many forms, including:

• Use the language of our customers when we are configuring the interview questions. From ‘team’ to ‘crew’ or ‘family, we use your language to build rapport with candidates
• Ask questions that specifically talk to your Values. For example, safety is paramount for our airline and FMCG customers. We ask questions to gauge awareness of safety risks, such as “Drawing on your own experience, how would you make sure everyone in our store – our customers and your team members – are safe?”
• Learning from every person who joins or leaves the business. For everyone we work with, we know who sticks around in the role and who doesn’t. This will generally be either because they weren’t the right fit and they self-selected out, or the business made a decision to exit them for behavioural reasons. Taking that performance data and using it to refine the benchmark for future hiring means every candidate recommended after using Sapia as your 1st interview is a better Values fit than the last one.

And that’s why machine learning is the holy grail of smarter hiring. No recruiter could ever get that feedback data at the scale and speed to improve their recruitment process. But using Sapia we make a hard decision easier, meaning you can focus on hiring the right people to grow your business, at scale, without sacrificing the candidate experience. And if the VP for a global business focused on connecting people to opportunity can’t recognise bias, it’s a sure sign we need to pay more attention to who, and how, we hire.

“Talent is really distributed very evenly in the world, and opportunity is not.”

So, what do you think? Is your hiring values-driven, or based on the ever-intangible ‘culture-fit’? How do you scale hiring based on values? And how can we in HR, Talent Acquisition and Recruitment support hiring managers to grow innovative, diverse teams?

It is widely thought that Thomas Edison invented the concept of the job interview back in the early 1900s. To screen candidates, he would ask them to join him at a restaurant and eat a bowl of soup while he watched. He could pick out the losing candidates by their tendency to season their soup before eating it. According to Edison, premature salt-and-peppering speaks to a person’s over-reliance on assumptions. If you’re a true visionary, he posited, you leap into your soup face-first.

The soup test is definitely out there. And, given what we now know about psychology and candidate experience, it is not, strictly speaking, scientifically valid. But this exercise was first tested more than 100 years ago, so maybe we can forgive Edison for filling the holes in his data with social experiments. 

Funnily enough, though, things haven’t changed much since Edison souped up his hiring game. Initial face-to-face job interviews remain the predominant tool of hiring managers. There are benefits to in-person interviews, but the deficits certainly outweigh the benefits. Simply put, the practice is infused with all manner of biases, unfairnesses, inefficiencies, and oddities. In the early 1900s, we had soup – now we have inscrutable corporate-isms, and bizarre group tasks with arbitrary scoring criteria.

We’re naming names: The ‘pen-drop’ test

Let’s say you’re looking to fill a position where quick thinking and adaptability are the two most important skills. You want your candidates to think fast, and think smart, especially when faced with sudden adversity. How do you find these people?

There is no perfect answer. People are people, after all. But there are far better ways to find out than dropping a pen in the middle of an interview to see whether or not a candidate picks it up for you. The ‘pen-drop’ test assumes that the quickest candidates are the most adaptable, and are the highest in empathy. But we have more reliable predictors for these, predictors subject to far fewer variables. The quickest pen picker-upper on a given day may not be the best lateral thinker, or the most open – they may have merely been the shortest candidate, or the most flexible candidate, or the candidate closest to the pen. Because you don’t have a control, or any way to account for variables such as these, can you really trust the findings?

Yes, the pen-drop test is an extreme example of a screening exercise that is only tenuously related to its desired outcome. But we have all, at some point in our working lives, participated in strange tasks and odd jobs during interviews. The greater point is this: Even the best-planned exercises are not a viable substitute for sound scientific measurement. 

The fairest way to conduct job interviews AND get candidate data you can trust

The HEXACO personality inventory has at least three major dimensions relating to the test of a quick-thinking, empathic person: Extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. If you can assess a candidate using the HEXACO inventory, you might learn that the candidate is:

1. High in trait extraversion, which makes them more likely to take the lead in social situations, and interpret social cues
2. Low in trait conscientiousness, which makes them more likely to go with the flow, and adapt to unexpected situations
3. High in trait agreeableness, which suggests they are more ‘willing to compromise and cooperate with others’.

And that’s only the start of what you might learn. By using an Ai-based recruitment or hiring tool, with a HEXACO personality modelling function, you have a simple, trustworthy, accurate, and fair way to sort your quick thinkers from your leaders, your leaders from your long-term planners, and so on. 

That’s the essence of what a smart interviewer can do, and why we developed the world’s first smart interviewer. You no longer need to think up some strange post-interview exercise where you pull unsuspecting candidates into an impromptu indoor hockey game. You can simply:

• Entrust your first interviews to Smart Interviewer, our quick-learning Ai smart interviewer
• Receive a full report on each candidate, including their responses and where they sit on the HEXACO personality scale
• Instantly match candidates against the values you desire most (for example, ‘quick-thinking’ or ‘adaptable’.)

(We’re not the fun police, of course. If your approach to offering first-rate candidate experience involves a blind-folded three-legged race, count us in. Just make sure you have a smart interview waiting at the finish line. Fun, then statistical validity. Best of both worlds.)

We all want a world filled with better, fairer, simpler interviews. How will you go about it? Data, or gut-feel? Soup, or science?

By Barb Hyman

I was prompted to write this after reading a piece by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in HBR who asked this same question in the context of consumer companies. I want to challenge everyone who is hiring to ask themselves the same question in that context.

My answer of course is unequivocally yes. It’s the right thing to do. It will boost trust in your hiring process big time, and it will be a boost to your employer brand.

Here’s some objective data: Aptitude Research interviewed more than 300 HR leaders in 2022 to find out, among other things, the benefits of giving candidates feedback. It improves quality of hire, candidate experience, AND first-year retention.

Imagine what the world would look like if everyone had better self-awareness. Today, not knowing yourself carries an even greater cost. How can you make good decisions about what career you pursue if you don’t actually know what career suits your personality? Imagine the careers you may be missing out on because you don’t have that self-knowledge.

When people ask me what our innovation has achieved in the world – I respond with, “We are raising the collective self-awareness of humanity.”

Unlike GPT-3, 4, or whatever comes next, Sapia’s AI-driven insights can enhance a person’s self-knowledge and agency. That’s the journey in life we’re all on – to understand who we are. “To know oneself is to have mastery over one’s destiny.”

Our AI-powered smart chat technology is aimed at helping candidates better understand themselves and even offers personalized coaching tips. It’s an innovation in recruitment that, as far as I know, no other company comes close to. It challenges the power balance in recruitment and empowers candidates to make the right decision for them.

Just look at these data: 

• 83.69% of the people who interviewed with Sapia said, ‘It has helped me become aware of my own strengths and improvement opportunities.’
• 48.18% said, ‘It’s given me more confidence.’
• Only 16% said that it wasn’t useful for them.

In conclusion, sharing AI-driven candidate insights with your candidates is not only beneficial for them, but can also be a game-changer for your organization. If there’s any doubt about this within your team, feel free to pass this post around.