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Written by Nathan Hewitt

Why text conversations work better for graduate assessment

Text is central to our everyday lives.

Texting, emailing, writing, all of this is done in natural language. The revolution in natural language processing is changing the way organisations understand, and make use of text. Using text data as the assessment data is compelling when you consider the facts about texting in our everyday lives.

95% of graduates in advanced economies own a mobile phone. Research from Google has shown that Generation Z prefers texting to all other forms of communication. This includes messaging apps and meeting in-person. This is reflected in open rates being an order of magnitude higher for text messages – 90%. Compare that to email open rates (18%) and response rates (8%).

We have candidates completing our text-based FirstInterview assessment every 2 minutes somewhere in the world. Through this we see data the trend towards mobile-first assessment experiences.

Analysing the behaviour of 41,314 candidates from March 2019 to March 2020, more than one third completed their assessment on mobile,  with applicants saving 40% or more on time to complete it on a mobile vs a desktop.

 

The Power of Language to Assess Values and Traits

In graduate recruitment and with growing unemployment as a result of COVID-19, humanising your recruitment means using assessments that feel human, that are empathetic and respectful to the candidate’s time and effort, that mirror how we live and work every day.

  • Having a text conversation on a mobile phone.
  • Asking typical interview questions to which graduates can relate, e.g ‘which of our values do you connect with and why?’
  • Asking 5 or 6 questions, that respect every applicant as unique and empowers them to share who they are, in their language, sharing their personal stories.
  • Receiving for your eyes only, personalised and constructive feedback within minutes that deepens your self-awareness

These aspects of the experience enhance trust and engagement leading to a 99% positive sentiment rating.

See for yourself why:  Try it Here > 

Answering 5 open-ended questions generate at least 75 different data points about a person. Even 200 words is enough to reveal your true character and personality.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

It is the combination of NLP (a branch of AI), our unique machine-learning models and our proprietary dataset (containing 25 million words) that form the foundation of our text-based assessment.

Curious to know the science behind the technology? Get in touch with us here


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Workday + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring

Want to find out more about how our Workday integration works? Reach out!

An ‘unfair’ advantage is obtained for Recruiters by adding Sapia’s interview automation to Workday with faster, fairer and better hiring results.

Make a difference

As the first gate to employment, the hiring team has a huge influence on candidate experience, diversity and inclusion and overall business success. The way you hire can make someone’s day. It can set your business up to overtake the competition. It can be one step towards designing a fairer world for everyone. 

Hiring is more complex than ever

There’s a lot expected of recruiters these days. Attracting candidates from diverse backgrounds and delivering exceptional candidate care whilst selecting from thousands of candidates isn’t easy.  

Recruiters are expected to:

  • Find the right people, ensuring a diversity of candidates
  • Fill roles quickly and efficiently
  • Interrupt bias in hiring and promotion
  • Ensure every person hired amplifies the organisation’s values
  • Create a candidate experience that is engaging and rewarding

Technology is more powerful than ever

The good news is that technology has advanced to support recruiters. Additionally, integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful Workday ATS facilitates a fast, fair, efficient recruitment process that candidates love.

Are you ready to: 

  • 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

Your advantage: Sapia + Workday

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. Thus, the attributes that are markers of a high performer often aren’t in CVs and the risk of increasing bias is high.

Steps to integrate Sapia Workday

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

  1. Create a vacancy in Workday, 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 Workday and get ahead

Get ahead of your competitors with Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai available for all Workday users. Automate interview, screening, ranking and more, with a minimum of effort. Save time, reduce bias and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

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. Also 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 Workday 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 surfaces in Workday as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.

Together, Sapia and Workday 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.

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 Workday 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 Workday 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 Workday to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack.

Getting started is easy

Lastly, let’s chat about getting you started – book a time here > 

 

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Hire Better People Faster

Do you wish you could harness the very best attributes of your people and just hire more of them, quickly, without bias? Do you spend more time recruiting than you would like? Have you ever gone against your better judgement and hired hastily only to discover the whole process has cost your business greatly?

The fact is, in retail, staff turnover is a whopping 2.5x higher than that of other industries. And if every bad hire costs your business 1.5x their annual salary, the costs mount up. Not to mention the lost sales from not having a full team on the store floor every day … bad hire costs, add up – fast.

Know which staff will fit, perform and stay – before you hire them!

You’ll love this. Built on robust psychological and data science, PredictiveHire’s technology compares tens of thousands of data points specifically attained from retail staff based around the world.

Your applicants will be compared to this powerful data to predict their likelihood to stay with you – creating really powerful candidate shortlists. The results speak for themselves.

Superdry are already experiencing the value today

Simon Amesbury, Superdry’s Resourcing Manager sums it up by saying:

“PredictiveHire ticked all the boxes: Cost savings. Time efficiencies throughout the process – less time on screening, sifting, interviewing, assessing, the list continues. A simpler life for store managers by speeding up shortlisting. And a way to boost the number of long-lasting, productive staff.”

Simon says: “Start now. The savings are there to be taken and the benefits are yours to gain!”

To get started and experience smarter hiring with no upfront costs, contact us for a discussion on how PredictiveHire can help you resolve your retail hiring issues.


Suggested Reading

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How to reduce candidate dropout by measuring and boosting candidate experience

How to measure candidate experience | Sapia Ai candidate experience software

Candidate experience: Everybody’s talking about it, few companies are actively investing in it.

According to a Sapia-sponsored Aptitude Research report from earlier this year, 68% of companies admit they have no plans to address the interview portion of their candidate experience throughout 2022 and 2023. Despite this, 50% of these companies know they’re losing talent due to their application and interview processes. What’s more, according to Forbes, companies that prioritize candidate experience can see their average quality-of-hire improve by 70%.

Why the unwillingness to address such an important facet of recruitment? In most cases, the teams responsible for enacting change to candidate experience are steeped in the everyday throes of talent acquisition, and don’t have time right now to examine their processes. Statistically speaking, this is probably where you’re at. Totally understandable; the 2023 labor market is tough. If your house is on fire, you’re probably not focussed on how well you treat the visitors at your doorstep.

Recently, on our Pink Squirrels! podcast, we sat down with Lars van Wieren, CEO at Starred, a candidate experience measurement tool. Lars offered some practical tips on getting started with candidate experience: Benchmarking it, measuring it at different stages of the process, and setting your business up to review and act on the findings.

Step 1: Benchmark your candidate experience

As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets managed. Lars recommends starting with a basic benchmark for your candidate experience. This need not be difficult, and you don’t necessarily need a fancy tool to start gathering these data.

Simply ask your candidates: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? This is, in essence, a Net Performer Score (NPS) question, and the scale (1 to 10) should reflect that.

The impact of useful candidate experience | Sapia.ai candidate experience software

Ideally, you should be gathering feedback on your candidate experience at each stage of the application process, but to begin with, ask the question at the very end. And to get the best, least-biased data, you need to ask all applicants whether or not they’ve been shortlisted or hired – if you only ask those who have been shortlisted, or the few people who have been successful, you’re likely to get magnanimous results that don’t reflect your true candidate experience.

The NPS tracking question is easily configurable and embeddable into automated emails, meaning it can be set up through your ATS with little additional work.

When you begin to analyze the data, keep things simple: Dump the data into a spreadsheet, and look at your average numbers. If your score is below 0, you’ve got work to do – if it’s 0 to +30, you’re doing well. 30+ and over, well done!

(If you’re reading this, it’s probably not likely that you’ll get a 30+ score on the first go-round. That’s okay – the goal is to find out how much work you’ve got to do.)

The benefit of benchmarking NPS is that it gives your business a single, easy-to-understand proxy for the health of your candidate experience. Once you’ve got the number, you can start to make small changes to your application experience and see how that affects the overall number.

For example, you might consider making the following changes to improve your candidate experience:

  • Maybe we don’t need to ask for cover letters. Most candidates don’t like writing them (statistically speaking), and they’re a time-suck for our team.
  • Maybe we can shorten the content on our careers page. It’s long, and difficult to navigate.
  • Maybe we should consider using Easy Apply functionality.
  • Maybe we are running too many interviews in our process. Let’s do fewer, and see how that works.

At the same time, you might consider looking at your candidate abandonment rate – we’ve got a post on measuring and improving it here. Candidate experience scores and abandonment rates are almost always linked. Improve one, you improve the other.

Step 2: Gather more data on each step of your job application process

Our joint report with Aptitude Research uncovered some interesting data on the importance of two-way feedback between candidates and employers.

Gathering and acting on mutual feedback:

  • Boosts quality of hire from 36 to 58%, on average
  • Boosts candidate experience from 34 to 44%, on average
  • Improves first-year retention from 35 to 50%, on average

Feedback is critical. And, to make it as accurate and indicative as possible, your feedback should ideally be gathered at each stage of the application process: Application, screening, interviewing, assessment, offer, and rejection.

By doing this, you’ll know exactly where your candidate experience is lacking – and you can make fast, effective changes.

Multi-step candidate experience feedback may not be easy to do with your current setup, but it is relatively simple to configure if your ATS/chosen software solution has the capability.

Step 3: Get your team around the candidate experience data

Generally speaking, the task of improving candidate experience is that of your entire talent acquisition or recruitment team. But it’s a good idea to appoint an internal candidate experience champion – someone who is responsible for collating the benchmark data and regularly reporting on it.

What’s the reporting cadence? Depends on the amount of applications you have, and the length of your application process. A monthly score update check-in works best for most. Monthly measurement will likely give you an insightful trendline.

While the task of improving candidate experience is never done, it needn’t require an overhaul to your entire recruitment business. Start small, make iterative improvements over time, and focus on making at least one more candidate smile.

(P.S. Candidate experience is a natural benefit of using our Ai Smart Interviewer – in fact, more than 90% of the 2 million candidates we’ve interviewed have loved our process, and 84% of them are highly likely to recommend you to a friend or family member. Reach out to us here to find out more.)

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