Getting your organisation’s candidate experience right is proving to be something we’ll hear about increasingly. This is as job applicants demand more from companies they interact with. A recent poll on LinkedIn by a recruitment specialist attracted almost 80,000 views and 1000’s of reactions. It revealed that 52% of the people polled (one assumes mostly recruiters) believe that a template email is good enough as a response to an application for a job.
When it comes to recruitment, responding to candidates has always been an area we know has been ripe for improvement. And it costs companies too, with a bad candidate experience said to have cost Virgin $5 million.
That’s not to say there aren’t historical reasons why recruiters have not been able to respond to the hundreds of applicants received for a job. Until now it’s not been something we can practically do with limited time and resources. This is where AI plays a fundamental role in moving our industry forward as it allows mass personalisation at scale.
This has never been more important than right now as we have had mass job losses across industries due to the impact of COVID-19. If you look at the Hospitality and Tourism industry across the globe, it’s hard to wrap your head around the sheer number of job losses with very little hope of returning to normal soon. If with every job application we were able to give each unsuccessful candidate feedback on where they could improve, imagine the impact we could have in activating the world economy.
This is entirely possible and every day we hear about the impact our technology is having on people’s lives when they get personalised feedback designed to steer them in the right direction.
81% of people who get personalised feedback from our platform said it was useful in identifying their strengths, 71% said it would help them better prepare for interviews and 59% said it would help them find a job that suited them.
And lastly, it’s not something we can quantify, but we do believe it’s important. What we’re giving so many people right now is hope. We think that’s something worth companies cultivating alongside us too.
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Have you seen the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook? Download it here.
This seems obvious but yet even today this is the key data source used in screening and hiring. For grad recruitment, your degree, your university and your uni results are key filters used in screening.
It’s already been four years since Ernst & Young removed university degree classification as an entry criterion as there is ‘no evidence’ it equals success. Students are savvy and they know how competitive it is to secure a top graduate job. In the UK, the Higher Education Degree Datacheck (Hedd) surveys students and graduates about degree fraud. The annual results are pretty consistent – about a third of people embellish or exaggerate their academic qualifications when applying for jobs. Read more here >
We analysed ~13,000 CVs, received over a 5 year period, all for similar roles for a large sales-led organisation. From this data set, 2660 were hired and around 9600 rejected. We wanted to test how meaningful the CV is as a data source for hiring decisions.
Look at these two word-clouds. One represents the words extracted from the CVs of those who were and the other from those who were rejected. Which would you pick?
A word cloud depicts the relative frequency of words appearing in the set of resumes by the size of the words in the word cloud, i.e. words in larger font size appears more than the ones in smaller font size. Given that the two word clouds show no significant differences in the words in larger or smaller font sizes means that the two groups are indistinguishable based on the words used within CV’s.
P.S If you had picked Group 2 you would have been right.
Josh Bersin, the premier topic expert in our space, articulates how hard it is to predict performance through traditional testing in this way .
“Managers and HR professionals use billions of dollars of assessment, tests, simulations, and games to hire people – yet many tell me they still get 30-40% of their candidates wrong.”
And now the definitive publication for all things HR, leadership etc. the Harvard Business Review, has shared research that prior experience is also a poor predictor of performance. Read more >
Whether their background is similar to yours or the person in your team who is a star? Whether they have played a competitive sport at a senior level (because that’s a good indicator of drive and resilience)? Or maybe whether they are a different ethnicity, gender, educational background to the rest of your team because, you know … diversity is meant to be good for business!
The list of performance ‘signals’ are as many as the number of people (interviewers) you have interviewing new hires. It’s a deeply personal decision like who you choose as a partner and we all feel like we know what to look for. But we don’t.
And no amount of interview or bias training or even interview experience is ever going to make us better at these decisions.
But experience does matter, but it’s a different type of experience. It’s the experience that comes from doing something 10 x, 10,000 times, a million times, with feedback on what worked, what didn’t, under what context etc. And of course, if one could remember all that.
Think of a different context- the grading of an exam. If you ask your teenager or university-aged son/daughter what would make them trust an exam result, they would likely say
1. Consistency
2. Anonymity
3. Data-driven, i.e some kind of formula for assessment, that assures consistency and fairness.
4. The experience of the assessor.
The fact is … just as no human driver will ever match the learning capability and velocity of a self-driving Tesla car, no assessor will ever be as good as a machine that’s done it a million times. The same applies for AI in recruitment.
No human recruiter will ever match the power, smarts and anonymity presented by a machine learning assessment algorithm.
We would love to see you join the conversation on LinkedIn!
Suggested Reading:
https://sapia.ai/blog/everybody-lies/
From automating initial candidate interviews to conducting online skills or personality testing, these tools help recruiters look beyond the CV to find the best candidates for every job.
In today’s competitive world of work, recruiters and hiring managers want to be sure that every decision is the right decision. As competition between companies for the very best talent has increased and as more candidates apply for fewer roles, just filling a role is no longer an option. Reviewing CVs and assessing candidates is time-consuming and costly, and recruiters need to be confident that they are delivering value to their clients in both costs and the quality of candidates.
That’s why recruiters and employers alike are seeking ways to take the guesswork out of the process in identifying talent who will be the best fit for the team, work most productively and stay in the role longer.
In this guide, Sapia explores the types of tools available, the insights they can provide and how they can benefit your business. We’ll also provide some guidelines for helping you to assess which tools could deliver the best return on your investment.
Talent assessment tools have been developed to help make that process easier, faster and more cost-effective. The tools leverage technology to more accurately identify the best talent for a role and predict their fit and performance in that organisation.
The benefits of candidate evaluation software can include:
The wide range of available talent assessment tools can be generally grouped into three areas of assessment: Work behaviours; Knowledge, skills and experience; Innate abilities and attributes.
Some tools may focus on a single attribute such as coding abilities or English competency while others can combine a range of tests and interview capabilities within one platform.
Once the requirements of a role are understood, the right tools can be chosen to assess those competencies.
1. Learnt knowledge, skills and experience assessments look at candidates’ specific job knowledge, qualifications and work experience. Assessed against the agreed capabilities required for the role, these assessments can be an extremely accurate and effective predictor of a candidate’s performance in the role. Some tools may focus on specific sectors and roles – eg sales, HR, health, hospitality, programming, engineering – while other platforms will cover a range of these with tests that can be customised to specific requirements
Some examples:
2. Innate abilities and attributes assessments focus on traits that are not job-specific such as personality, interests and cognitive abilities including problem-solving, logic skills, reading comprehension and learning ability. These universal human traits have proven to be effective indicators of job performance and cultural fit. Softskill testing: Tools can be used for talent evaluation across a range of qualities and personality traits such as teamwork, sales ability, good judgement, integrity, curiosity, impact, ownership and independence.
Some examples:
Saving time and money, filling roles with better quality candidates. That’s the key reason talent assessment tools are indispensable across the recruitment industry and in every employment sector. But with the plethora of tools available, how do you decide which ones are right for your organisation? Which talent assessment tools will best contribute to your success?
Before you invest, Sapia’s talent assessment tool checklist can help:
1) What do you need to know?
As an experienced recruiter, you can probably already recognise where your talent assessments sometimes fall short or you think they could be better. The data insight that can support your recruitment and hiring processes will be different for everyone and will vary according to:
When you know what you need to measure, you can start narrowing your search to identify the tools that can give you what you’re looking for.
2) How will the findings be presented?
Consider the format and depth of the feedback that different tools can provide. Is a numerical ranking of candidates sufficient or will in-depth analysis, comparisons and recommendations better serve your needs?
3) Do assessments support the hiring organisation’s brand values and strategy?
Consider whether the tools positively support an organisation’s employment policies and practices such as workplace diversity and inclusion, language or numeric competencies and minimum skills requirements.
4) Do tools remove bias from talent assessment?
Removing unconscious bias from the talent assessment process is a priority for organisations looking to improve workplace diversity and inclusion. While a text-based chat platform (such as Sapia) can effectively take bias out of the equation, video submissions bring the opportunity for bias front and centre of the process.
5) Do the tools support the interview process?
Few, if any, hiring decisions should ever be made solely on the basis of talent assessment tools rankings or findings. Make sure tools can provide meaningful data that will enhance the interview process. Many tools will help identify areas that should be explored further in the interview process and even suggest questions to help shape the interview.
6) How will the tool integrate with existing systems?
The best tools will integrate with your existing systems and processes and with other tools. You want to be sure that you can combine data from different tools to create meaningful reports and records. Tools that integrate with your existing ATS (Applicant Tracking System) are likely to deliver the best savings in time and effort.
7) What will candidates think?
Every candidate deserves a fair and positive experience, whether they are successful or not. Choose tools that are easy and engaging to use, appropriate for the role and tools that will enhance, not undermine, your employer brand.
The best tools also deliver value by allowing candidates to provide feedback on their engagement with tools after the assessment process.
https://sapia.ai/blog/predictivehire-is-named-candidate-experience-solution-of-the-year/
8) How do I find out what tools are best?
Ask your industry colleagues for recommendations and search the web for reviews and guides like this one that can help you navigate a very crowded market. When you think you’ve found the tools that will work best for you, your clients and your candidates, ask vendors to show you how their assessment tools can deliver with a personal demonstration or even a free trial.
9) Have you analysed the costs?
You want to be sure that your investment will pay its way. Take the time to consider the value of the candidate feedback or assessment of different tools will provide. Many vendors provide online calculators to help you estimate the return on your investment.
10) Do the tools support best practice?
Talent assessment tools can provide objective, measurable insights that other more traditional recruitment methods can’t provide. But technology has its limits too. Make sure that a positive candidate experience remains a priority – nobody wants to feel discriminated against or feel embarrassed or violated by intrusive personality testing.
Make sure also that in focusing on one key skill or trait, you’re not missing a candidate’s true strengths. In short, don’t use your talent assessment tools as the recruitment tool, use them in conjunction with all the other methods, tools and skills in your recruitment toolbox.
Leveraging objective data to augment decisions like who to hire and who to promote is critical if you are looking to minimise unconscious preferences and biases, which can surface even when those responsible have the best of intentions.
The greatest algorithm on earth is the one inside of our skull, but it is heavily biased. Human decision making is the ultimate black box.
Only with data, the right data alongside human judgment can we get any change happening. And clearly, what your employees and candidates are now looking for, is change. We hope that the debate over the value of diverse teams is now over. There is plenty of evidence that diverse teams lead to better decisions and therefore, business outcomes for any organisation.
This means that CHROs today are being charged with interrupting the bias in their people decisions and expected to manage bias as closely as the CFO manages the financials. But the use of Ai tools in hiring and promotion requires careful consideration to ensure the technology does not inadvertently introduce bias or amplify any existing biases. To assist HR decision-makers to navigate these decisions confidently, we invite you to consider these 8 critical questions when selecting your Ai technology. You will find not only the key questions to ask when testing the tools but why these are critical questions to ask and how to differentiate between the answers you are given.
This guide is presented by Sapia whose AI-powered, text chat talent assessment tool has a user satisfaction rate of 99%.
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