The HR Service Provider Awards 2020 hosted by HRD Mag sets out each year to find the best HR vendors in Australia.
Taken from the HRD website:
The winners are selected from a pool of submissions from vendors providing an overview of their business or product, insight into their point of difference in the industry, statistics around market share and growth over the past 12 months, and other relevant information such as industry accolades, client testimonials, and the like.
Finding a dependable service provider can be quite a daunting task for HR professionals. From an impressive array of vendors offering their expertise, HR professionals need to choose the one that suits their company’s unique needs.
To assist HR professionals with this challenging task, HRD’s annual Service Provider Awards recognises the industry’s top performers. The Sapia submission was judged by a panel of HR leaders who determined the top performers in this category.
Much faster: Candidates are assessed, scored and ranked using Ai, dramatically reducing recruiter time and effort. 90% recruiter time savings, against standard recruiting processes.
Improves candidate experience: An accessible, mobile-first familiar text experience that candidates enjoy with no confronting videos interviews or questionnaires. 99% candidate satisfaction and 90% completion rates.
Inclusive and fair: Blind screening at its best using Ai with the same structured behavioural interview for every candidate. Gender/Ethnicity/Indignity mixes preserved through recruitment stages due to Ai objectively assessing performance/personality, not their background.
You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to get a personalised demo
We agree with Katrina Collier: Recruitment isn’t broken, per se. It needs a bit of work, sure, but in the midst of the Great Resignation, dedicated talent acquisition managers all over the world are doing some of their best work. They’re finding top talent and helping businesses succeed.
Despite this, we can say that candidate experience is certifiably broken. Ghosting rates are up somewhere around 450% since the start of the pandemic. 65% people say they rarely receive notice of their application status (Lever), and 60% of people say they have bailed on a job application due to its length or complexity.
Many mid-to-large sized companies spend in excess of $200,000 per year on sourcing and advertising (assuming a hiring rate of fifty people per year). Few invest in candidate experience. We tend to overlook the fact that the candidate journey from application to offer (or rejection) is just as important for the health of a recruitment funnel, over the long term, as good ads or recruitment strategies.
Good candidate experience, put simply, is your best chance at securing the talent you want. In the wake of the Great Reshuffle, employees have the power to choose when and where they work, and they know it. If you can’t reach them and woo them in a reasonable time frame, you’re at a supreme competitive disadvantage. They’re here today, gone tomorrow. That means that multi-round interview funnels and tedious psychometric games aren’t going to cut it anymore. Today’s candidate wants speed, perks, and flexibility. Your experience should be designed with this in mind.
There are a lot of ways candidate experience might be improved – this article offers some tips, including advice on a term we like to call the Gucci principle.
One easy place to start is with your job ads.
Good job ads are concise and well-formatted. They put employee value proposition up front. They discuss the vision and purpose of a role, and not just day-to-day responsibilities. They avoid the term ‘competitive salary’ – in fact, they disclose salary ranges. They’re not necessarily short, either. Anyone who tells you that a job ad must be short to be good does not understand the anatomy of an advertisement.
Here are our top tips.
This seems like a minor point, but good spelling, grammar, and sentence structure is essential for your employer brand. It’s a matter of perception. Poor writing casts doubt on the legitimacy of your brand, and on your capabilities in general – after all, if you can’t write a clean job ad, how can the candidate be sure you can do other, more important things, correctly?
Have someone in your marketing team cast their eye over your ad before it goes out. Proof-reading should always be a part of your customer outreach. If you don’t have a marketer on which to rely, consider investing in editing software like Grammarly.
Funky company names are in vogue. Just look at ours. Because we’re called Sapia, we refer to our team (and even our customers) as Sapians. Therefore, we do the same with our job ads. It creates branding consistency, and works as an unconscious primer, suggesting to candidates that they’re joining a well-knit, stable, and purpose-oriented team.
The same goes for language. If you’ve adopted or created certain words to make your brand stand out, they should also be used to make your job ad stand out. Look at this example from Gong: They tell the candidate that they’ll be creating edu-taining content. That’s a lot more interesting than “you’ll be writing content that is both educational and entertaining.” Had they chosen the latter sentence, you’d doubt their credibility, because that sentence is not remotely entertaining.
Or take this example from one of our own job ads. You might say that using a curse word (oh dear me!) in a job ad is inappropriate, but we don’t. We’re Sapians, and that makes us passionate humans. We understand that writing the way you speak is the quickest way to build rapport. Tell us that you don’t get that impression from this paragraph.
A job ad doesn’t need to be short, but it should be formatted for scanning. Candidates should be able to easily read it, extract the main points, and make the call to apply, all within minutes. We like the following job ad section structure:
Each section can be as long as you need it to be (within reason), but it should also be set out in dot points. Easier to read, easier to digest. Many are the job ads that set out position duties and benefits in great big walls of text. Go with dot points, like Gong has, and you’ll stand out.
Depending on the platform you use, it can be difficult to control how candidates enter your funnel. Regardless, you can make it easier by clearly sign-posting the action you expect them to take. If it’s a LinkedIn EasyApply button, great – but don’t confuse candidates by asking them, at the bottom of the ad, to email their CVs to you. This happens a lot.
Make sure you have a single call-to-action, and make it clear. Add it to the top and bottom of your ad.
You know what they say about first impressions? That’s why it’s so critical to get your job ads right. Check out this post on LinkedIn for more tips on writing the perfect job ad.
New year, new job.
January is the most popular month for employees to look for new opportunities. But that doesn’t have to mean starting the year with an epidemic of departures.
People leave their jobs for all sorts of reasons.
Any thriving business will want to see a healthy level of turnover in its staff. But what if your people are leaving simply because their colleagues are leaving?
We call this the Turnover Contagion Effect (TCE) and it’s something that every business should care about.
You may have experienced Turnover Contagion yourself. It’s that growing sense that “everyone” in your team is job hunting, and it’s been around for as long as people have worked together.
Your colleagues may not have told you directly that they’re searching. But when there’s a sudden spate of funerals, urgent repair visits or caring for holidaying parents’ goats (all true stories) you may get a sense that something’s up.
Then there are the colleagues who are cagey about letting you see their screens. And of course the ones who quite blatantly tell the rest of the team that it’s only a matter of time before they leave.
However confident and secure you may feel in your role and the organisation, it’s only natural to begin to question your position.
Have your colleagues spotted some major flaw in the business that you’ve overlooked? Do they know something you don’t? Should you put some feelers out there, just in case?
But if you’re observing that disintegrating team from the Human Resources department, you’re probably asking rather different questions.
How did TCE start? Can you stop it spreading further? And how can you prevent it from happening in the first place?
Turnover contagion stems from co-workers sharing how they’re feeling and how they’re valued at work. When it’s positive it contributes to more productive working environments and more engaged workers. But when workers are looking around it breeds unrest – it becomes contagious. And once TCE starts it can be hard to stop.
And it seems to be getting worse nowadays, for a variety of reasons;
Add these together and you may also experience a fifth factor.
When your business starts to suffer from TCE you might think there’s an upside. A long-awaited clear out of rotten wood. A way to make savings on employee costs. A chance for re-organising a dysfunctional department. And yes, all those can be somewhat true.
But whenever you lose a team member there are costs, apart from the obvious ones of losing their production and having to recruit and train a replacement. And these costs far outweigh the benefits.
And as you lose more and more from a team you also risk the engagement and morale of all of their former colleagues. In fact, that’s the greatest risk of the Turnover Contagion Effect – that it spreads further.
As our recent White Paper says (2), “… failing to monitor and moderate turnover can result in leaver behaviour becoming a cultural mainstay of a particular role type, or an accepted norm in the business as a whole.”
Here are 11 Essential Things to Know About Employee Turnover
Like most infectious diseases, TCE is easier to prevent than it is to cure. But if you do find that you’re already suffering from TCE, there are a few dos and don’ts.
Reduce Social Communication
It’s certainly NOT effective to apply one commentator’s suggestion of trying to “…combat the social environment that stimulates turnover”.
That social side of work may be spreading the contagion, but it’s also the foundation of the strong sense of belonging to a business and a community that encourages people to stay.
Trying to move desks further apart, ban Tweets and Facebook posts or prevent canteen gossip will cause more problems than it solves.
Instead, it may be more productive to consider the root cause of the lack of organisational commitment.
You should be asking:
But as mentioned, it’s easier to prevent than cure, so better still is to start at the beginning.
Think about who you hire and how you look after them when they start work.
Are you hiring people who align well with your company culture and values? Are you hiring people with the personality and behavioural traits that make them more likely to stay and perform in your company?
If you’re unsure, that’s where you should start. Try to find out what makes people stay with your organisation. What do your long tenure employees have in common? With your newfound knowledge of your ideal candidate, identify the applicants that fit the bill and prioritise them in your shortlist.
This may sound like a difficult task, but nowadays there are even analytics and technology solutions that can do this for you.
Once you’ve found the right people you still need to look after them and help them commit to your organisation. Introducing each new hire to your company in a motivating induction
process, where they get to know other workers, will give them a strong start.
As they become truly embedded they’re your best hope for preventing future outbreaks of Turnover Contagion.
At Sapia, we help you find your shortlist of candidates who are more likely to stay in your specific business. We combine your data with our workforce and data science to scientifically screen your applicants and predict who is more likely to succeed. And that can also include how well those candidates will fit into your team, your organisation and your community.
References
(1) Felps et al. “TURNOVER CONTAGION: HOW COWORKERS’ JOB EMBEDDEDNESS AND JOB SEARCH BEHAVIORS INFLUENCE QUITTING” © Academy of Management Journal 2009, Vol. 52, No. 3, 545–561
You can try out Sapia’s FirstInterview right now, or leave us your details to book a personalised demo
In June 2022, we announced that, thanks to our partnership with AWS, we now have introduced regional data hosting. This means that customers and their candidates will have increased speed when they use the Sapia platform, and means companies using the platform can have confidence that candidate data is treated in line with data sovereignty legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Here is the full list of improvements to data security and sovereignty for Sapia customers.
World-leading protections
Sapia’s platform is built on AWS, and is protected by anti-virus, anti-malware, intrusion detection, intrusion protection, and anti-DDoS protocols. We comply with most major cybersecurity requirements, including ISO 27001, Soc 2 Type 1 (Type 2 in progress), and GDPR.
Scalablility
We use AWS’ serverless solution, which can automatically support billions of requests per day. Our sophisticated tech stack includes React.js, GraphQL, MongoDB, Node.js and Terraform.
Regional data hosting
Sapia offers regional data hosting via AWS. All data is processed within highly secure and fault-tolerant data centres, located in the same geography as the one in which the data is stored. All data is stored in and served from AWS data centres using industry standard encryption; both at rest and in while transit.
Availability and reliability
Sapia uses a purpose-built, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that replicates data six ways across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs), making it highly durable. Our storage system is automatic, features continuous data backup, and allows for point-in-time restore (PITR).