The Royal Commission has brought about a lot of scrutiny on the banks, and for good reason. But we have to give them credit where it’s due.

Compared to HR teams across the country, banks know a thing or two when it comes to managing risk. Which is funny, as I’d argue that hiring a staff member is a much riskier proposition for a business than a bank having one of its customers default on a loan.
Imagine if your bank lent you money with the same process that your average recruiter used to hire for a role.
They would ask you to load your all of your personal financial information into an exhaustive application form. Your salary, your weekly spend, your financial commitments. All of it.

The same form would include a lot of probing questions, such as: Will you pay this money back on time? When have you borrowed in the past and paid back on time? Describe a time that you struggled to repay a loan and what you did about it?

Then, assuming your form piqued their interest, they would bring you in for one on one meeting with the bank manager. That manager would grill you with a stern look, asking the same questions. This time though, they will be closely watching your eye movement to see if you were lying when you answered.

In each part of the process you get a score, and then if that number is above a certain threshold, you get the loan.
It’s almost laughable, right?

Banks wouldn’t have any customers if they used that approach. Only people who desperately need money would put themselves through that process. And they’re likely not the best loan candidates.

Banks work hard to attain incredibly high accuracy levels in assessing loan risk.

Meanwhile in HR, if you use turnover as a measure of hiring accuracy its as low as 30–50% per cent in some sectors. If you combine both turnover and performance data (how many people who get hired really raise a company’s performance), it might be even lower than that.

Banks wouldn’t exist if their risk accuracy was anywhere close to those numbers.

Well, that’s how most recruitment currently works — just usually involving more people.

There’s more parallels here than you think.

Just like a bank manager, every recruiter wants to get it right and make the best decisions for the sake of their employer. As everyone in HR knows, hiring is one of the greatest risks a business can take on.

But they are making the highest risk decision for an organisation based on a set of hypotheses, assumptions and lots of imperfect data.

So, let’s flip the thought experiment.

What if a bank’s risk management department was running recruitment? What would the risk assessment look like?

Well, the process wouldn’t involve scanning CVs, a 10 minute phone call, a face to face interview and then a decision.
That would be way too expensive given exponentially more people apply for jobs than apply for loans each year. Not to mention the process itself is too subjective.

I suspect they would want objective proof points on what traits make a candidate successful in a role, data that matches the candidate against those proof points and finally, further cross validation with other external sources.

They wouldn’t really care if you were white, Asian, gay female. How could you possibly generalise about someone’s gender, sexuality or ethnicity and use it as a lead indicator of hiring risk. (Yet, in HR this is still how we do it.)

Finally, they’d apply a layer of technology to the process. They would make it a positive customer experience for the candidates and with mobile-first design. Much like a loan, you’ll lose your best customers if the funnel is long and exhaustive.

I’m not saying that banks are a beacon of business. The Royal Commission definitely showed otherwise. But for the most part, they have gotten with the times and upgraded their processes to better manage their risk. It’s time HR do the same.

To find out how to interpret bias in recruitment, we also have a great eBook on inclusive hiring.

What is workplace diversity?

While workplace diversity might once have been considered a ‘nice to have’, today it’s a ‘must-have’ for employers who recognise the value it brings to their organisation.

The idea of workplace diversity is that the people in any organisation’s team should reflect the society in which we live – that is people of different genders, different ages and different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. That seems logical and simple enough, yet achieving diversity is still a struggle for many. 

What does diversity look like?

Today, workplace diversity is not just about increasing female representation and employing team members from different cultural backgrounds. While these are great goals, true diversity is about so much more.

Diversity can be broadly sorted into two categories:

Inherent – effectively the defining traits and characteristics we are born with – gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, socio-economic background, religious and cultural backgrounds.

Acquired – reflecting our experience of the world around us and covering things like education, life knowledge, learned values and skills, socio-economic mobility, political beliefs.  These are developed, earned or achieved over time.

It’s the combination of inherent and acquired traits that make people and societies diverse. This holistic view of culture, background, life experience, education, values and perspectives is a top priority for recruiters and employers alike.

What is diversity hiring?

Diversity hiring simply describes the processes of recruiting that supports diversity in the workplace.

Diversity hiring is not about increasing workplace diversity for the sake of diversity. Diversity hiring is all about giving every candidate an equal opportunity, regardless of their background. It’s about identifying and removing any steps in sourcing, screening and shortlisting candidates that may allow discrimination against candidates and personal characteristics that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job such as gender, age, religion, sexual orientation and so on.

By removing biases against individuals or groups of candidates, the process of finding the best candidates to be considered for the role can be based on merit and all the qualities identified as essential for the role and the organisation.

A fairer path to recruitment considers the experience of the candidate at every single step.

From discovering an opportunity through to offer. It addresses bias, inclusivity and fairness. And ideally, it makes recruiters’ lives easier. This is explored in the Inclusive Hiring e-Book here > 

Why do you need diversity? 

Diversity is embraced by companies who understand the value it brings to their business.

In their 2018 report Delivering through Diversity, McKinsey&Company found that:

• Companies in the top-quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform on profitability and 27% more likely to have superior value creation. 
• Beyond gender, companies in the top-quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams were 33% more likely to have industry-leading profitability. This diversity included traits such as age and generation, international experience and LGBTQIA+ representation.

While McKinsey’s study was focused on US global companies, their findings are reflected in other studies, white papers and shared experiences of organisations all around the world.

They confirm that workplace diversity impacts a wide range of business metrics:

• better performance and productivity
• business growth
• improved problem-solving abilities
• increased creativity and innovation 
• a sense of belonging that  boosts employees’ health and wellbeing 
• fewer incidents of discrimination or harassment in the workplace
• improved employee retention and tenure
• enhanced reputation as an employer 

It’s what employees want too

Unsurprisingly, diversity in the workplace can be a deal maker or breaker for millennial and GenZ job seekers. Deloitte found that 83% of millennials are more engaged when they can know a company fosters an inclusive culture. 

But it’s not just the next generations. A recent survey by Glassdoor found that 67% of all candidates say it’s an important factor when considering employment opportunities while more than 50% of current employees want their workplace to do more to increase diversity.

Diversity hiring laws

While there’s no doubt that diversity hiring is good for business, for any organisation that doesn’t embrace diversity, the opposite can also be true. Apart from missing out on the benefits that diversity brings to productivity, employee satisfaction and business reputation, employers also risk breaking the law.

Within Australia, diversity is supported by national and state laws that cover equal employment opportunity, human rights, and anti-discrimination in the workplace. It’s essential that all employers understand their own responsibilities and the rights of employees or job candidates. The cost of non-compliance can be severe while the damage to an organisation’s reputation could be matched by irreparable damage to sales, business contracts and their employer brand. 

In Australia, it is unlawful to disadvantage employees and job seekers in any way because of their:

• race
• colour
• gender
• sexual orientation
• age
• physical or mental disability
• marital status
• family or carer’s responsibilities
• pregnancy
• religion
• political opinion
• national extraction (place of birth or ancestry)
• social origin (class, caste or socio-occupational category)
• industrial activities (such as belonging to a trade union)

Unconscious bias  – it’s a human condition

Whether innate or learned, everybody is capable of unconscious bias. Reinforced by our own personal experiences, cultural background, beliefs and world view, bias is how we feel about something – a person or group of people, an idea, a thing – and how we use those feelings to make judgements and decisions about those people or things, often instantaneously. 

Psychologists and researchers have identified over 150 types of bias that impact the way we engage, assess and interact with others. In the recruitment process that’s 150 ways that otherwise suitably qualified candidates can be overlooked, ignored, put aside or deliberately discounted. You can read more about unconscious bias in our article here.

Algorithms do the job humans can’t

Because unconscious bias is a universal and inherently human condition, it’s a problem that can’t be solved by any amount of bias training or awareness.

So if humans can’t solve the very human problem, what can be done? Sapia has solved the issue of unconscious bias in hiring by taking humans out of the process for top-of-funnel interview screening through an Artificial Intelligence enabled chat interview platform. It’s an easy way to implement data-driven decision-making with a structured and automated process that provides a level playing field for all candidates.

Six more ways to build your diversity hiring capabilities

Adopting Sapia Ai-enabled decision-making to remove bias from the early interview process is one of the easiest ways to get diversity hiring working for you. Here are some further ideas from Sapia’s team to help increase diversity in candidate sourcing, screening and, ultimately, hiring.

1. Agree your diversity priorities and goals

More female graduates in technical roles? A better cultural spread across the organisation? More women in middle management? Without understanding how diversity hiring supports your business plans, how would you ever know you’re making progress? Diversity hiring strategies and initiatives should be agreed by your leadership team, documented in HR plans and socialised among all stakeholders.

2. Develop your employer brand and policies that support diversity

Developing a reputation as an employer who values and nurtures diversity starts with your own people. Talk to your people to hear what’s important to them and understand if they think any policies (or attitudes) are holding diversity back. Talk to your team about diversity and the benefits it can bring.

Think about policies that may support more diversity in your workplace. Beyond hiring, it may be providing extra time off for community events or religious festivals, or simply providing workplace flexibility and freedom for employees to be comfortable being themselves.

The more your team buy into policies that support, value and celebrate diversity, the more your reputation as a diversity employer will organically grow. And the more it grows, the easier diversity hiring will become… as candidates who value diversity will be lining up to work with you.

3. Use your ATS to build diverse talent pools

Sapia’s automated interview platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with leading Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Even before the interview process, use screening tools in the ATS to filter and sort candidates on skills, qualifications or experience alone. This blind screening to identify candidates with the best potential adds an additional layer of bias-free screening to your diversity hiring.

4. Mind your language and rethink your screening factors for diversity

Undertaking a review of past job ads can help you see where bias may have crept into your recruiting process. Is your language inclusive? Would all candidates feel they could apply regardless of age, gender or cultural background? While being careful not to actually be biased, your words can talk more directly to the candidates you want to attract and explain why they’d be a great fit for your team.

While you’re reviewing the way you reach out to candidates, also consider whether you’re screening or interviewing for the qualities you actually value most or you’re unconsciously guiding the process towards certain types or profiles. Sometimes you need to ask others to check your own bias.

5. Add some diversity into your candidate sourcing

Is it time to fish for candidates in a different talent pool? If you’re relying on the same sources and same screening factors, you’re likely to keep cultivating the same type of candidate.  Think about where and how you can connect with a more diverse candidate pool.

If you are targeting more women in specific roles, for example, find relevant interest or networking groups online or within platforms such as LinkedIn and talk to candidates directly. Ask your female employees to recommend their own connections or former colleagues and share job leads. The same principle applies to reaching out to any particular demographic or skill set and employees appreciate having their opinions and recommendations heard and valued.

6. Consider some affirmative action

Especially when you’re starting your diversity hiring journey, you may want to help things along with specific diversity programs that could offer an internship or traineeship to candidates of specific backgrounds. Consider working with local schools, colleges or community groups to make connections and target the appropriate up and coming candidates. It can also be a great way to engage and motivate your own team in supporting diversity hiring goals.

Sapia: Blind screening at its best

Sapia solves bias by screening and evaluating candidates with a simple open, transparent interview via a text conversation. 

Candidates know text and trust text and questions can be tailored to suit the requirements of the role and the organisation’s brand values. Unlike competitors, Sapia has no video hookups, visual content or voice data. No CVs and no data extracted from social channels. All of which can be triggers for bias– unconscious or otherwise.  

Sapia’s solution is designed to provide every candidate with a great experience that respects and recognises them as the individual they are. People are more than their CV and candidates appreciate the opportunity to tell their story in their own words, in their own time. Sapia is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback. You can read more about blind screening in our article here.  

Find out more about Sapia’s AI-powered interview automation platform and how we can support your diversity hiring goals.  

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

Last week, our smart interviewer technology was featured in a glowing piece by the Australian Financial Review. The story was picked up by LinkedIn News Australia, who conducted a poll asking users if they were “comfortable being interviewed by a bot”. 

The poll garnered more than 6,500 responses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 50% of respondents selected the response “No – it’s a job for humans.” Just under a third of LinkedIn users said that they believe chatbot interviewing is “the future”, while 21% said that it’s appropriate only for certain roles.

When you have over 6,500 responses, you can do some meaningful analysis. In this case, “It’s just for humans” was the prevailing opinion. But, in the comments section attached to the poll, we discovered more about how people feel toward Ai, both as a technological construct and as a tool for recruitment. We bucketed the comments into five recurring themes:

1. We can’t trust the people that make Ai
2. Ai can never remove bias
3. Ai aims to replace humans
4. Ai is dangerous
5. People don’t like chatbots, because they aren’t human

Ai hasn’t made a good name for itself lately – take Amazon’s recent facial recognition debacle as a good example – so it’s easy to see why people are resistant to the prospect of Ai moving into a space historically handled by humans. Take a bird’s eye view, and the notion certainly looks preposterous: How could a machine, asking just five questions, ever hope to recreate the capabilities of a seasoned recruiter or talent acquisition specialist?

That is the problem, though: The more ‘human’ aspects of the recruitment process are ruining the game. Ghosting is rampant, both for candidates and recruiters. Ineradicable biases are creating unfairnesses that permeate organisations from top to bottom. The Great Resignation is putting immense pressure on hirers to move quickly, excluding thousands of applicants based on arbitrary criteria that shift from month to month. Consider, too, these sobering statistics:

• According to a recent global survey by CoderPad, 65% of tech recruiters believe their hiring process is biased
• Mentions of ‘ghosting’ in Glassdoor interview reviews is up 450% since the start of the pandemic (Business Insider, 2021)
• A toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more likely to predict employee churn than compensation (the point here being that hiring poorly decimates an organisation in no time flat)
• 78% of job seekers have admitted to lying on their CVs

Ai is held to an impossible standard

For Ai to qualify as a useable, reliable tool, we expect it to be perfect. We compare it, unfairly, against some ultimate human ideal: The chirpy, well-rested recruiter on their best day. The kind of recruiter who has never ghosted anyone, who has no biases whatsoever, and who finds the right person for the right job, no matter what. Here’s the issue with this comparison: That kind of human doesn’t exist.

For Ai to be a valid and useful tool, and an everyday part of the human recruiter’s toolset, it doesn’t need to be perfect, flawless; it only needs to be better than the alternative. Can’t be done? For one example, Smart Interviewer, eliminates the problem of ghosting completely: Each of your candidates gets an interview, and every single person receives feedback. Even better? 98% of the candidates who use our platform find that feedback useful. 

(That is to say nothing of the way it removes bias, as if that weren’t enough on its own.)

We need to make recruitment ‘trustless’

Ai has a way to go before it will earn the trust of the majority. Again, this is totally understandable. We believe that there is a better, and quicker, way to get there.

To borrow a concept commonly associated with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, we want to create a trustless environment for our Ai and its activities. Not an environment without trust, but one in which trust is a foregone conclusion. In a trustless environment, dishonesty, either by admission or omission, is impossible. Just as you cannot forge blockchain entries, you cannot hide the workings and algorithms that make our Ai what it is.

That is the essence of our FAIR Framework. For hiring managers and organisations, this document provides an assurance as well as a template to query fairness related metrics of Ai recruitment tools. For candidates, FAIR ensures that they are using a system built with fairness as a key performance metric. For us, transparency on fairness is standard operating procedure.

Finally, think about this: When we say we want a ‘human’ recruitment process, what are we really saying? That we want something fallible, prone to biases, subject to the decisions of people who have bad days? What if a trustless Ai companion could help remove all that, without replacing the person? Is that not more human?