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. 

Restructures happen and there is a correct way to right-size

In my career, I have been involved in either leading or managing countless restructures. The driving force behind these restructures ranged from offshoring capability to migrating to new or emerging skill requirements, right-sizing a particular function, or the basic need to reduce operating cost.

While each of these projects delivered on their outcomes, I would argue they had varying levels of success in preserving the organisational talent and corporate memory required.

Why?

This is in large part due to the lack of data informing the choices made by the organisation.

More often than not, organisations will work towards a target – this could be FTE, Headcount, or Cost Reduction for example. Choices to achieve this target are often made in isolation of critical information. 

I have seen situations where the people who kept their jobs vs lost their jobs was made on relationship merit, not on skills, capability or cultural alignment. I have also seen examples where it is a numbers game. Here, the end goal is purely to achieve the target. This leaves some organisations scrambling for contractors and consultants to backfill their critical skill gaps.  

With the world in economic freefall (cue the dramatic music) we are going to see more and more organisations looking to right-size their workforce in-line with consumer confidence and spending. 

When skills are no longer in shortage, what differentiates the good from great performers in your organisation? 

Personality and behaviour. 

So, with this in mind, how can an organisation make choices which are informed by data, unpinned by fairness, while still being efficient?

Personality and behavioural assessments have long been used in the recruitment and promotion of individuals. However, they are rarely used when right-sizing or restricting an organisation. This seems like a glaring and obvious opportunity. In right-sizing, you are effectively making hiring and promotion decision within your existing workforce. 

When comparing the apples with apples, personality and behavioural assessments allow you to focus on the attributes which will differentiate your workforce for the next phase of your organisational journey . Then depending on what this journey is, you have the opportunity to codify the critical capabilities required.

Sapia has been partnering with many organisations locally and globally. Together we not only re-imagine how our partners use personality and behavioural assessments in recruitment, but also its application to the entirety of the HR lifecycle.

Unlike traditional personality & behavioural profiling, Sapia is powered by AI, utilising conversational text to assess individuals. Not capturing any protected attributes, this process removes the opportunity of bias creeping in. Thus, it allows you to make informed, a data-driven decision about your future workforce on culture & values alignment.

The future is chat and AI!

Yes, personality is widely accepted as an indicator of job performance.

Until now, the only way to accurately measure personality was through long and repetitive personality tests. The Sapia team breaks new ground disrupting decades of assessment practice. This is done by showing that answers to standard interview questions, through a text-based mobile interview can be used to reliably infer personality traits.

Get the published research here

Join the movement

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog!

You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details here to get a personalised demo.

On 26th August, our CEO Barb Hyman facilitated a webinar on “Hiring with Heart” in collaboration with The Recruitment Events Network.

To our surprise, Jeff Uden who is the Head of Talent and L&D for Iceland Foods also joined the webinar.

During the session, Jeff offered some wonderful comments. We took a transcript of Jeff’s input and have jotted it here. It offers insights on dealing with enormous volumes of candidates, offering positive candidate experience and communicating culture from a candidate’s first experience with a brand.

Thanks for your insights, Jeff. Incredibly valuable.

 In conversation with Jeff Uden Head of Talent, Iceland Group & Sapia

At Iceland Foods, we have started working with Sapia. That was as a result of a couple of things. One was the element of the mass recruitment that we were doing. Just to put it in perspective, in the first four months of this year, we received over five hundred thousand applications.

We wanted to find a way that delivered a level of fairness, a level of consistency around how we sift those applications that then enabled store managers to reduce that amount of time that they are spending on doing the recruitment.

The other thing that we wanted to do was significantly enhance our candidate experience. One of the challenges that I had around the experiences that we had within the business is that it felt like it was really standard. It felt like it was cold; it felt like it came from a computer. We wanted to change how we did that and more importantly give something back to the candidates.

Often nowadays people apply for jobs, and there’s the standard ‘bulk’ response that says if you haven’t heard anything from us in two weeks take it that you haven’t been successful.

As big companies or companies of any size we have a duty to help those individuals to understand why they haven’t been successful and to help them to be successful in the next role for which they apply.

The fact that they won’t be hired into your business is probably the right decision because they wouldn’t have been the right fit given the testing that they have gone through. However, that doesn’t mean they are a bad individual. What we need to do is to help them to understand where their strengths are and where their development needs are, and certainly, that was a massive appeal of working with Sapia.

Going through and reading some of the feedback that we’ve had from the candidates, it’s having a huge effect on the candidate experience.

I just had a very quick look at our figures with Sapia, we’ve got a 100% positive experience from our candidates. Bearing in mind 49,000 candidates have gone through Sapia. To have that figure is a superb figure.

We had a swift implementation planned. But probably one of the lengthiest parts of it was about actually getting the questions right and getting the language right. We really did spend a decent period doing that.

I just had a quick look at one of the pieces of feedback here, and this is completely unedited:

“I enjoyed the interview. It makes me believe Iceland as a company are people carers and their staff are more than just employees”.

That’s what’s coming over from the way in which we put the language across within the questions.

We are genuinely really chuffed about how they are engaging far more with us as a brand and how they are feeling like they are getting something back. They genuinely don’t feel like this is a computer process in any way whatsoever; they genuinely feel like they are talking to people. 

Join the movement

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog!

You can try out Sapia’s FirstInterview right now, or leave us your details here to get a personalised demo.

Have you seen the 2020 Candidate Experience Playbook?

If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.

Download it here