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Written by Nathan Hewitt

Losing talent? Audit talent acquisition with this template

The following is an excerpt from our Talent Acquisition Transformation Guide, a comprehensive playbook to help you audit and improve your recruitment strategy.

Winning more talent means getting your team in ship shape. In many organizations, the Talent Acquisition business operates in an isolated camp – no one sees or hears from you unless you have good or bad news about a particular candidate or role vacancy. 

Efficiency in recruitment requires absolute alignment. Your people leaders and your executive team must be in alignment with your new strategy, because they are equally responsible for executing it. Gone are the days when, for example, marketing managers could pass a job description for a copywriter to a Talent Acquisition specialist and wash their hands of the prospecting dirty work. Now, more than ever, the hiring manager and the specialist must form a partnership, sharing the duties of advertising, promoting, vetting, interviewing and assessing. After all, candidates for said copywriter role will expect it.

To get cooperation and buy-in from your people leaders, you need to form a visible, purposeful A-team.

Step 1: Create your recruitment A-team

Your crack recruitment task force should comprise:

  • Your chiefest people leader (be it a CPO, CHRO, or Head of Talent Acquisition)
  • Talent Acquisition specialists and representatives (obviously)
  • Representatives from each department in the organization
  • Importantly, a representative from the marketing team

Once your team is formed, you need to complete a basic audit to see where your recruitment pipeline is at – and the roadblocks stopping you from securing the talent you need.

Step 2: Fill out this Talent Requirements Matrix

This step sounds obvious on the face of it, but it actually requires some speculation and problem-solving. Consider this simple matrix, filled in with examples – it’s a good starting point on getting alignment with the A-team on your hiring needs.

Role Critical skills Priority Existing org. strength Applicants/candidate declined Advertised salary Market salary Notes/suggestions
Head of marketing
  • Team leader
  • Responsible for strategy
  • Budget management
Very high Low (no marketing leadership) 40/38 $150k p/a $190k p/a
  • Losing on salary
  • Candidates don’t like lack of existing team strength
Software engineer
  • OOD
  • C/C+
  • Ruby
Low High (replacing a team of 20) 10/10 $120k p/a $130k p/a
  • Losing on salary, perks
  • 50% of applicants said our tech stack was outdated
Office manager
  • Managing customer database
  • Implementing new admin system
High Low (no office manager for ~3 months) 0/0 $100k p/a $100k p/a
  • Suggest reviewing job ad – the JD is a little dry

Once you’ve filled out your Talent Requirements Matrix, the next step is effective triage. Almost everyone in the A-team will already be aware of your highest hiring priorities, but by filling out this matrix, you can focus talent acquisition efforts on coming up with weird and wonderful ideas for attracting the right candidates. Times like these require outside-the-box thinking!


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Cornerstone + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

Our colleagues at Cornerstone are wizards at recruitment. They help organisations streamline hiring, so they can find the best people.  Now, you can take Cornerstone ATS further and get ahead by adding Sapia’s interview automation for even faster, fairer and better hiring results.

Remove hiring complexity

There’s a lot expected of recruiters these days and it isn’t easy! From attracting candidates from diverse backgrounds to delivering an exceptional candidate experience, all whilst selecting from thousands of candidates.

The fantastic news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful Cornerstone ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates truly enjoy.

You can now: 

  • Reduce your screening time by up to 90%
  • Increase your candidate satisfaction to near 100%
  • Achieve interview completion rates over 90%
  • And reduce screening bias for good

Sapia + Cornerstone

Gone are the days of screening CVs, followed by phone screens to find the best talent. The number of people applying for each job has grown 5-10 times in size recently. Reading each CV is simply no longer an option. In any case, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.

You can now streamline your Cornerstone process by integrating Sapia’s interview automation with Lumesse.

We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.

  1. Create a vacancy in Cornerstone, and a Sapia interview link will be created. 
  2. Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
  3. See results as soon as candidates complete their interview. Each candidate’s scores, rank, personality assessment, role-based traits and communication skills are available as soon as they complete the interview. Every candidate will receive automated, personalised feedback.

By sending out one simple interview link, you nail speed, quality and candidate experience in one hit.

Integrate Cornerstone and get ahead

Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai is available to all Cornerstone users. You can automate interviewing, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort! Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

Experience the Sapia Chat Interview for yourself

The interview that all candidates love

As unemployment rates rise, it’s more important than ever to show empathy for candidates and add value when we can. Using Sapia, every single candidate gets a FirstInterview through an engaging text experience on their mobile device, whenever it suits them. Every candidate receives personalised MyInsights feedback, with helpful coaching tips which candidates love.

Together, Sapia and Cornerstone deliver an approach that is: 

  • Relevant—move beyond the CV to the attributes that matter most to you: grit, curiosity, accountability, critical thinking, agility and communication skills
  • Respectful—give every single person an interview and never ghost a candidate again
  • Dignified—show you value people’s time by providing every single applicant personal feedback
  • Fair—avoid video in the first round interviews and take an approach that’s 100% blind to gender, age, ethnicity and other irrelevant attributes
  • Familiar—text chat interviewing is not only highly efficient, it’s also familiar to people of all ages  

There are thousands of comments just like this …

“I have never had an interview like this in my life and it was really good to be able to speak without fear of judgment and have the freedom to do so.

The feedback is also great. This is a great way to interview people as it helps an individual to be themselves.

The response back is written with a good sense of understanding and compassion.

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.”

Take it for a 2-minute test drive here > 

Recruiters love using artificial intelligence in hiring

Recruiters love the TalentInsights Sapia surface in Lumesse as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and Cornerstone deliver an approach that is: 

  • Fast—Ai-powered scores and rankings make shortlisting candidates quicker
  • Insightful—Deep dive into the unique personality and other traits of each candidate 
  • Fair—Candidates are scored and ranked on their responses. The system is blind to other attributes and regularly checked for bias.
  • Streamlined—Our stand-alone LiveInterview mobile app makes arranging assessment centres easy. Automated record-keeping reduces paperwork and ensures everyone is fairly assessed.
  • Time-saving—Automating the first interview screening process and second-round scheduling delivers 90% time savings against a standard recruiting process.

Don’t believe us? Read the reviews! 

See Recruiter Reviews here > 

HR Directors and CHROs love reliable bias tracking

Well-intentioned organisations have been trying to shift the needle on the bias that impacts diversity and inclusion for many years, without significant results. 

Together, Sapia and Cornerstone deliver an approach that is: 

  • Measurable—DiscoverInsights, our operations dashboard that provides clear reporting on recruitment, including pipeline shortlisting, candidate experience and bias tracking.
  • Competitive—The Sapia and Cornerstone experience is loved by candidates, ensuring you’ll attract the best candidates, and hire faster than competitors.
  • Scalable—Whether you’re hiring one hundred people, or one thousand, you can hire the best person for the job, on time, every time.
  • Best-in-class—Sapia easily integrates with Cornerstone to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack. 

Getting started is easy

Let’s chat about getting you started – book a time here > 

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Did unconscious bias cost these recruiters £3m?

A story from a recruiter

I spent 13 years working as an agency recruitment consultant but my customer-facing jobs started a lot sooner – at the age of 12, collecting monthly charity raffle contributions for the local hospital. Paper rounds and retail jobs through school were followed by contact centres and bar work at uni, where I first learned about recruitment. It just seemed to fit with my previous experiences as well as my mindset so I figured that’s what I’d do when I graduated.

Actually, that’s a lie. It’s what I decided to do once I’d graduated and decided I hated the idea of being an employee number within a grad scheme but knew it was about time to lock in a career.

I remember my first round of recruitment interviews – I just couldn’t understand why recruiters didn’t understand that when I said “this is what I want to do” i really meant it. I explained I’d done my research. I knew that if I worked harder, longer and smarter than my competitors I would find the best candidates, I’d place them and I’d be rewarded for doing my job

But I just couldn’t get past those infernal recruitment industry group balloon debates/assessment days of the early 2000s that principally involved a white male in his early 20s talking more loudly than the rest despite not really having any substance to his bellowing. I couldn’t understand why Timmy from Surrey’s slightly shouty, verging on passive-aggressive bullying tone always got him progressed to the next stage while the more insightful, reflective comments from others around the table went unnoticed?

I persevered nonetheless and I eventually joined a recruitment process that involved one-on-one interviews followed by a group presentation from the MD. No fake debates, no pitting people against each other – just truth and honesty from the company owner.

I called my recruiter as I walked out the door to tell him I really wanted to work there. And I did, for 8 years.

Now I wonder how much more quickly I could have found a job if those balloon debating sessions had instead been replaced by a tool that helped the recruiters understand my propensity to succeed within recruitment, leveraging my personality and behaviours, my competitive nature, my desire and drive to succeed and then the recruiters combined that with my demonstrable passion for technology…

I’m pretty confident I articulated them during my interviews and backed up my answers with my life experience (at the ripe age of 22!). Alongside my early start in the world of work, I was in the first team for all sports for my entirety of senior school (I even gave Fives ago but it really wasn’t for me). I started played the piano at 4, violin at 7 and self-taught the saxophone as a teenager. I’m a classical pianist (seeing as you didn’t really ask, Shostakovich’s 2nd piano concerto with the school orchestra was my proudest musical moment) and finally I graduated with a 2:1 from a Redbrick University.

An outstanding childhood? No, I don’t think so. But I know I was well above the average for a candidate applying for a graduate recruitment career. I know there was enough about my school and working history to show my commitment to learning, dedication to working hard individually and collectively and displaying a consistent understanding of work = reward. And until those recruitment interviews I had a 100% interview to job-offer ratio. And so I wonder, how many of those companies said “no” to me because they weren’t aware of their biases?

Well, those biases cost them the very thing they all said recruiters they should care about: money.
Despite starting my career in 2002, joining a global market still recovering from the dot com crash, 9/11, the Enron / WorldCom bankruptcies and working through a recession and a global financial crash, I generated nearly £3m in revenues for my first employer over 8 years.

And look, I get it. There were no AI crystal balls back then. Recruiters had to make judgement calls on candidates without the benefit of technology tools to guide them towards the right talent. But I wonder how many of those money-hungry agencies would have paid more attention to candidates like me if a recruitment tool had helped them look beyond their biases and told them I was an applicant worthy of closer attention?

My guess is pretty much all of them.

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Here’s where to start with improving your employer brand

In this jobs market, the secret to success is not necessarily a huge job ad budget or a top-range salary and perks package. You don’t even need to be the biggest, or the best known – many are the top-notch candidates that have been ghosted by the world’s most sought-after companies.

How to improve your employer brand | Sapia.ai employer brand software
If you want to improve your employer brand, a mix of consistency, technology, and marketing nous is required.

You do, however, have to invest in employer brand. Most of us know this, of course, but few companies have made the appropriate investment in long-term brand building. It’s a marketing play, fundamentally, and it’s difficult to do right, but the benefits can be huge for your business.

Why should you care about employer branding?

It’s your best long-term approach to recruiting. If you give every candidate a caring, consistent, and memorable experience, you will dramatically increase your fill rate AND your talent network. People talk about good experiences – in fact, according to our own data, a single good experience while applying for a job makes candidates 77% more likely to recommend you as an employer of choice.

The good news is, too, that the impact of an employer brand can be easily measured, according to Dr John Sullivan: By the number of job applications you receive each year. Now, don’t confuse this point with the opening sentence of this post – there’s a difference between a company’s brand and its employer brand. You might be a Fortune 100 company with a household name, but if your job application process is terrible, people will know you and remember you for that. 

(And, if you’re not careful, a poor employer brand will end up affecting your wider brand.)

Where do you start with improving employer branding?

Your employer brand touches everything. You have seconds to introduce yourself to candidates, show off your best features, and get them to apply. That doesn’t mean, however, that you need to throw everything out and start again. Start with some easy wins, and then take a wider focus to include things like your technology and feedback processes.

Stodgy artwork, pixelated logos, spelling errors, outdated information, broken links… these will break your recruitment strategy before it has had the chance to work. So start here.

Employer brand audit checklist

Channel Items
Website Is our ‘About us’ section up to date?
Do we have a ‘careers’ or hiring information page?
Do both sections, along with the rest of our website, adequately reflect our values?
Social media platforms Is our ‘About us’ section up to date?
Do we include correct contact information, including to our website?
Does our imagery and content reflect our brand values?
Are our job postings attractive and adequately promoted on the page?
Recruiting portals (Seek, Indeed) Is all of our information up to date?
Are our visual branding touchpoints (logo, header/banner images) of sufficient quality?
Is all of our information up to date?
Third-party recommendation apps (e.g. Glassdoor, Productreview.com) What is the average star/quality rating of our reviews (mostly negative, positive, mostly positive)?
Have we made an effort to visibly address customer/employee feedback on the platform?

 

It’s important to note that the branding and visual appeal of your organization is not primarily your responsibility – maintaining it is a team effort. But portals and third-party apps are often overlooked over time, as a brand develops and organization information changes. It’s never a bad idea to champion the task of regular housekeeping, and get your best marketing minds to help.

Improving employer brand with technology

With our Ai Smart Interviewer on your team, you’ll give every single candidate an engaging, empowering experience with your brand, boosting its value from the moment they click ‘apply’.

You can have offers out to the best candidates in just 24 hours. This is an incredible value proposition for candidates who are applying for 5, 10, maybe even 20 jobs at a time and usually don’t expect to hear anything back.

Here’s how it works:

  • Every candidate interviews with our Ai over chat (and in return, gets personalised insights and tips – another tick for your employer brand and EVP)
  • Shortlisted candidates auto-progress to a non-Ai Video Interview (which, candidates rate 9/10)
  • Hiring managers review the video responses and pick the best with the help of our Talent Insights profile.

Our customers have cracked the candidate experience code, enjoying application completion rates in excess of 80%, and candidate satisfaction scores of more than 90%. Everyone gets an interview, and no one is ghosted.

Remember: There’s no space in this market to be slow.

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