Written by Nathan Hewitt
Why you need to treat your candidates as you would your customers
If a new customer entered your store and was keen on buying something, you would never dream of ignoring them.
Even if they’re just browsing, you would not let them leave without trying to make a good impression on them. You’d try and win them over for next time they are looking to buy. You’d respect and thank them for thinking about you, and share knowledge with them about products you have, so that they leave better informed consumers. Maybe they’ll remember you the next time they have a purchase to make.
This same philosophy needs to apply to candidates who apply for jobs at your organisation.
Yet, everyday we don’t … and it’s damaging. It’s damaging to both brands and to the people who apply to them.
You need to treat your candidates as you do your customers. You need to treat them with respect, give them an interview experience that makes them feel comfortable, familiar and convenient, is fast, and dignifies the effort they have made in applying. Go further and give them feedback and insights about their strengths and weaknesses that they can use when looking at other jobs, it’s likely they will think of you in the future, and recommend you to their friends.
What Qantas did right
As Michael Eizenberg, Head of Qantas Group Talent, Digital & Analytics told us: “We care deeply about two things when it comes to hiring. Firstly, diversity and inclusivity, and secondly the experience of everyone who comes into contact with the Qantas brand. Our goal is to treat every candidate like we would a customer.”
Qantas metrics prove the value of treating candidates as customers.
- Application completion is at 93%, a phenomenal outcome. (Completion rate of the video interview previously used was 50%.)
- 98% of candidates report the feedback they are provided is helpful and accurate.
What to look out for
The idea of creating positive candidate experiences is not new, but the global talent shortage has empowered candidates in a way that companies are no longer the ones wielding the power.
You’re not doing the choosing. Candidates are. They are assessing you at every step of the way in a recruitment process.
We need to treat candidates not just as ‘prospective employees’, but put on the best show as “prospective employers”. We need to roll out the red carpet and listen to their needs – from the first moment they interact with us.
We’ve heard about the great resignation across the globe as people have reassessed their lives and decided they want more from their job than just a steady paycheck.
People looking for jobs not only have more choices, but they also possess more information about companies thanks to technology like Glassdoor. They will likely do research on your company before they apply.
Much like shopping has changed the way people buy things, making online comparisons and reading reviews, the internet has created a similar opportunity for job seekers who are looking for the best place to work.
Organisations need to not only consciously articulate and promote the value they offer and why people should consider working for them – they actually have to prove it through their recruitment process.
The candidate is a consumer of your “product’ (your workplace and everything you stand for), or at least you need to think of them as one.
This means making people feel valued by your company even before they work there.
You can read how Qantas’ approach to treat candidates as customers has improved the quality and retention on their candidates here.
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Ai that gives you back your human agency
Recommendations by algorithms
Tristan Harris, the ex-Googler, now an evangelist for humane Ai and featured in The Social Dilemma shares the stunning fact that 70% of the videos we watch on YouTube, on average 60 minutes a day, come from the recommendation of algorithms.
His point? That choice is illusory.
When a machine can understand you better than you can understand yourself you lose your power. You also loose choice.
The now-famous historian Yuval Noah Harari has written and spoken about the threat to humanity from the type of artificial intelligence that knows us better than we know ourselves.
This is the worst kind of Ai.
When you think that you are in control of those choices, but you can’t see it to even know it’s happening. Google and Facebook and many other Silicon Valley behemoths have mastered this. They own this space.
Not all Ai can be weaponised against you.
The predictive technology that underpins tools like Spotify, Netflix do enrich peoples’ enjoyment in music and movies.
What if Ai existed to serve you, the individual, the human?
Not to weaponize your choices. Not to be used against you.
We, humans, move from being hacked to hacking ourselves.
Finally, Ai that gives you back your human agency.
300,000 candidates for jobs ranging from retail, sales, call centres, carers, graduates, HR managers, … this is how they feel about the use of Ai that is designed for their benefit.
‘To know oneself is to have mastery over one’s destiny’
Imagine what the world would look like if the whole world had better self-awareness.
Today not knowing yourself carries an even greater cost.
Join the conversation
To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with Ai” subscribe to our blog!
Finally, you can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to get a personalised demo
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Sage Advice: How AI and Smarter Hiring Can Boost Your Business
In case you missed it: The other week, Sage CEO, Stephen Kelly, sat down with Sapia’s Steven John, number 45 on the Sage Top 100 list for 2017, and asked him his thoughts on AI and just how important he feels it is to get it right.
Stephen Kelly: “I’m really pleased to be engaging today with Steven John… an absolute expert in recruitment and people development.”
“So, Steven, tell us a bit about what you’ve done. You’ve got a massive following, 18,000 followers on Twitter. You’re a renowned expert. Tell us a bit about that.”
Steven John: “Well, my background is technology and recruitment. As a lot of recruiters do, I kind of fell out of university with no real idea of a career path and landed in tech recruitment. I spent 13 years as a recruiter and then more recently had the opportunity to take my professional skills that I learned in recruitment and bring them into a business that’s using AI to help businesses make smarter hires.
“I’m a customer success manager for an AI business called Sapia.
“In terms of what we do, we use predictive models to help businesses make smarter hires so they can identify who might be a better or more likely to be a better salesperson or deliver a better customer service experience to their customers.
“Whatever the metrics or the KPIs that their business is using to understand how its people are operating, our solution can help you understand, from the candidate market, who should we be spending our time with, who should the human beings within our talent team be spending time talking to.
“Because of the model, the algorithm has helped us sift through quite a large number of candidates. I’m sure you guys get hundreds of thousands of candidates here. So how do we identify those shiny pins in the haystack? So that’s what our models do.”
Smarter hiring using AI
SK: “Well, I think that’s brilliant, Steven. And obviously, kind of the relevance and gems of this Facebook Live session is to bring it down to all the entrepreneurs out there who are thinking about growing their business, living their dreams, pursuing their passions, and we all know the fuel of that is talented people.
“You mentioned artificial intelligence – AI, machine learning, predictive analytics aimed to make smarter hiring decisions that will really boost your business forward. What is your current experience of where we are on that journey?”
SJ: “I think a lot of businesses are ready. I think more businesses are ready than they probably realise. If I think about the numerous engagements that I’ve had with numbers of businesses, prospects and current clients, the things that strike me as quite interesting are the amount of data that businesses have.
“Surprisingly, some of the businesses who I would have thought would be incredibly data-heavy, will have a lot of data on their people, haven’t been quite so. But the good news for those businesses and even the smaller businesses is that there are solutions available in the market that can help many companies get started on that journey.
“Sometimes I am surprised by how other businesses or some businesses invest their time, money and effort in technology solutions, in buildings, in lots of infrastructure and pieces of kit. But what they don’t necessarily do is invest as much money in their people.
“The encouraging thing is there are now lots of solutions available to businesses of all shapes and descriptions that will really help them start to make smarter decisions for their hiring processes.
“The people are the lifeline of the company. The cost of people is probably one of the most.”
SK: “It’s worth noting most of our customers who are in the services business, about 70% to 80% of their cost base is the people they hire and manage. And we believe in people science.
“So certainly, when they’re here, we want to be pretty scientific, but the recruitment of them could be as scientific as that so we get the right person with the right skills, the right attitude, and the right competence to be successful.”
Sage Advice: How AI and Smarter Hiring Can Boost Your Business
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.
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. If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for the thousands that are looking for work, that time is now.
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PeopleScout + Sapia = Faster, fairer hiring
Supercharge your hiring by integrating PeopleScout and Sapia. With the click of a button you can be hiring faster, fairer and better than ever before.
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. Integrating Sapia artificial intelligence technology with the powerful People 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 + PeopleScout
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.
We’ve created a quick, easy and fair hiring process that candidates love.
- Create a vacancy in PeopleScout, and a Sapia interview link will be created.
- Include the link in your advertising. Every candidate will have an opportunity to complete a FirstInterview via chat.
- 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.
Experience the Sapia Chat Interview for yourself
Integrate PeopleScout and get ahead
Get ahead of your competitors with Sapia’s award-winning chat Ai available for all PeopleScout 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. 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 PeopleScout 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 PeopleScout as soon as each candidate finishes their interview.
Together, Sapia and PeopleScout 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 PeopleScout 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 PeopleScout 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 PeopleScout to provide you with a best-in-class AI-enabled HRTech stack.