Hello HR Tech – Recruiting is so much easier!

Last week I made a promise to share a journey that brought me to be working in the business at the cutting edge of technology and science within the People/Talent sector.

In my previous post, I shared some of the thinking of people within my sector. This is what I learned about hard work during my 13 years working in tech recruitment.

I was 22 years old when I became a recruiter. I was competitive, driven and hungry to succeed. Not only in financial terms, like many other recruiters, but also my professional status and standing. I wanted to be one of the best at my job and to be respected for the work I did.

And I know there are thousands of recruiters out there whose hard work often goes unrecognised by clients, candidates, managers and colleagues alike. I no longer know exactly what it’s like to be a recruiter in 2018 but back in 2005-2010 if you joined one, my teams, we’d have had conversations that went something like this:

There is no shortcut in recruitment

It requires a lot of hard work and skill with a splash of good luck.

The hard work is the time commitment needed to consistently deliver for your clients and candidates.

You need the skill to learn the difference between C# and C++ and how technologies stack together.

Eventually, your business development efforts will combine with good luck when that client answers your call and confirms they are indeed looking to hire someone within your vertical specialism. Happy days!!

You agree to terms for the customer’s key role, you pat yourself on the back and then you go again – back to the hard work because now you’ve got to find suitable candidates.

Good recruiters already have a network of great candidates – you go to them first, qualify/rule out and you’ve got a shortlist inside an hour or two. Then, more hard work.

When the other unknown recruiters working at unknown agencies also trying to fill the same role, clock off at 6 pm to enjoy their evening plans, you’re still in the office.

If you’re anything like I was you’ll still be in the office until 9 pm when the contractors start to get a little irate.

“Sorry for ringing so late in your evening but I’m trying to fill a key role for an important customer.”

Most of them appreciate your hard work and candour. Some even sound impressed with your commitment.

A few get grumpy but them’s the rubs – it’s water off a duck’s back for a driven, professional recruiter who wants to do their best for their customer and won’t mind, professionally, ruffling the feathers of a few early-to-beders to ensure they keep on top of their game, delivering great candidates to their clients.

Eventually, your hard work pays off and you place the successful candidate (probably after at least one candidate did an interview no-show following the death of a distant relative/hospital appointment/dog vs homework / insert obscure excuse)

Meet Tom & Sally to get a sense of what I was filling – I was definitely ‘Tom’! 

That was my early recruitment career. Because I knew there were no shortcuts to success. I needed to graft, sacrifice my evening socialising (don’t worry, I made up for it at the weekends!) to ensure I found the best candidates for my clients.

I was a recruiter and I really, really loved my job. I genuinely hope today’s recruiters love their jobs as much as I did but the recruitment world I knew is no longer. And that’s because Talent AI has created a shortcut!

Not a corner-cutting shortcut. But an evidence-based, efficiency-creating, quicker, faster, more accurate shortcut.

AI can now rapidly identify suitable talent and create a shortlist of candidates for a human recruiter to then engage with.

A shortcut that also helps remove bias from talent workflows.

In fact, it’s such a clever shortcut that it should have its own name. I have a suggestion. Let’s call it…Recruitment!

Because recruitment was still recruitment when ATS providers rolled out filters and keyword identification tools which were quickly gamed by candidates – writing retail on a CV pushed it up the results list but that didn’t make the candidate more knowledgeable in retail.

It’s still recruitment – just done heaps better

Recruitment was still recruitment when talent attraction projects were created. Recruitment is still recruitment throughout the modern-day careers day (which I hope has evolved from my experiences back in the early 2000s)!

It’s still recruitment if you bring in video interviews (disclaimer: I hate the idea of video interviews; I think they simply shift bias to a different stage in the recruitment process).

Recruitment will still be recruitment with AI, it’ll just be better for candidates, clients and recruiters alike.

Suggested reading:

https://sapia.ai/7-tips-to-making…stment-decisions/

Has the time it takes to fill a role genuinely improved?

I think back to my days as a recruiter, you filled jobs by posting adverts. That was 15 years ago. The saying was: “Post and pray” because you never knew what would come back.

The average time to fill a role, as we advised the business, was 30 days.

Even then, there was flexibility on that because of the ‘war on talent’. It was hard to find people. Skilled people. The ‘right’ talent. When we needed to find talent fast than from time-to-time, we would engage a 3rd party recruiting agency to help us. However, that was costly.

So, even with the proper sourcing tools in hand – the business just needed to wait. Here were the reasons that recruiters gave for not delivering quickly: 

• We’ve had a really low response rate 
• The calibre of applications aren’t quite right 
• Our salaries aren’t fitting with what the market demands

Sound familiar?

Reasons, and perhaps excuses. And the business just had to wait. 

Fast forward 15 years, and from my observations, we are still seeing similar time-to-fill projections. 

According to a Job Vite – time to fill remains anywhere between 25 (retail) or 48 (hospitality) days (when I read this, I nearly fell off my chair!). This is surprising since technology has come such a long way since then. 

Why are hiring managers waiting this long for these high-volume skills? And the wait will undoubtedly be increased due to the volumes of applications – thanks to C-19. What is the cost associated with waiting? A straightforward formula I found published by Hudson (for non-revenue generating employees) is: 

(Total Company Annual Revenue) ÷ (Number of Employees) ÷ 365 = Daily Lost Revenue

Here’s a working example. Let’s take a retailer. They generate 2.9 billion in revenues and have 11,000 employees. This means that their daily lost revenue PER vacant position is $722. 

If it takes 25 days to fill this position, then it costs the business $18,057 in lost revenue. The time it is taking to fill roles is costing the business too much.  Speed is of the essence.

Volume recruiting and time-to-fill considerations:

I’ve observed talent teams who recruit in high volume scenarios; spending hours screening thousands of CV’s – with inherent bias’s creeping in by the 13th CV. Then fatigue sets in. And by the 135th CV, unconscious biases have turned into bold conscious judgements; 

• Their CV is not long enough – “reject”
• Their CV is too short – “reject”
• The layout of their CV wasn’t professional enough – “reject”
• Don’t put education at the back,  have it at the front – “reject”
• They are not descriptive enough – “reject”
• They do not enough retail experience – “reject”. And what even is this arbitrary requirement of years of experience? If you have hit the two-year mark within a profession, how does that automatically make you qualified?

Keeping your process consistent and fair is a challenge and the quality of the screening process diminishes. 

If it takes 6 seconds to review a CV, that’s 1.6 hours to get through 1000.

Then there is the phone screen. If you only took 30 into this stage and spoke to them for 10 minutes each, then it will take the recruiter five hours. 

And time is not concentrated nor time-bound to one session – it elapses. You aren’t sitting for 1.6 hours at a time nor can you schedule back-to-back phone screens, so the realistic time frame for this is about a week. 

From there, it’s coordinating Hiring Manager interviews, conducting their interviews, getting feedback, making decisions, giving offers, taking reference checks and finalising compliance steps to make the hire. This is where it ends up being a long and drawn-out process. 

By automating the first pre-screening steps recruiters can seriously slash the time it takes to fill.

Plus they can drive a far better process. How? By getting a trustworthy understanding of the candidate and their personality modelled against the organisations’ success DNA (the “Success DNA” is the profile of what success looks like in your organisation).  

When candidates apply their first step is an automated interview.

It takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and all candidates receive a personality assessment based on what they wrote (which they love).  

Personality can be deduced from the text that candidates write (scientifically proven) and then there is also the feedback from thousands of candidates talking to the accuracy of these personality assessments. 

Here’s a tiny sample of all the feedback >>

What took weeks to get to the interview stage can now be done in minutes following an application.

For Talent Acquisition to build its credibility in the business, it needs to demonstrate its impact on the bottom line and provide tangible solutions to address this need for speed. Tools like Sapia can help with solving for these speed and cost challenges, and the benefits of providing a consistent, bias-free candidate experience are just the icing on the cake. 

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An average time-to-hire of 40 days. Hiring costs in excess of $2,000 per candidate. An average turnover rate of 60-70%.

The challenges of hourly recruitment in the retail industry have been well-documented.

Despite this, many of the largest companies persist with old-school recruitment processes.

Given the break-neck pace and scale of the industry, it’s hard to diagnose and fix the problem.

Understandably, many HR leaders have been quick to layer on technology solutions that seem to make things easier; in actuality, these tech solutions have added complexity, making efficiency gains difficult and actionable insights hard to find.

The big and unmanageable HR tech stack

Where recruitment is concerned, a HR tech stack tends to look like this: an unwieldy ATS, often coupled with a conversational AI or scheduling tool.

This stack is implemented across a decentralized system – hundreds of stores across the country – resulting in a situation where hiring managers are forced to use systems they don’t understand and don’t like.

The bottom line is this: Retail companies are overstacked, overworked, and need to adopt different solutions to old problems.

1. Solve high turnover through soft skill and personality trait matching

One of the biggest challenges with recruitment at major retail companies is high turnover rates. Retail staff members move fast and often, and have a high likelihood of migrating to competing businesses.

This is partially a nature-of-the-beast problem, but if we better understand what makes people tick, we can better match them to the roles at which they’re likely to succeed, and therefore keep them longer.

For example, we know that the best retail cashiers are high in extraversion. They’re energized by being around people, have good interpersonal skills, and have a lower likelihood of experiencing negative emotion while on the job.

It makes sense, then, to prioritize extraversion when matching candidates to the role of cashier. That’s a personality trait – with attendant soft skills – that will predict success for that role.

When people are matched to the job for which they are best suited, they’ll experience higher levels of purpose and satisfaction. It’s obvious why – the daily activities will invigorate rather than drain them. People who have purpose stay longer.

Therefore, if you accurately match soft skills to roles, you’ll reduce churn. Our AI Smart Chat Interviewer is really good at this: Across the board, our skill-matching power reduces non-regrettable churn by a minimum of 25%.

Side note: HEXACO is your secret weapon

If you’re keen to get started measuring soft skills, download our HEXACO job interview rubric. It features more than 20 interview questions designed by our personality psychologists to assess the skills of candidates that come your way. It will even help you figure out what soft skills are best for you based on the needs and values of your organization.

2. Reduce competition from other employees through smart employer branding

Chances are, when your employees or candidates leave, they’re probably staying within the industry – and that means they’re likely going to your competitors. It’s 2023, and the stock-standard advice would be to offer higher wages and perks.

That’s not always feasible, and besides, there’s no guarantee that doing so will markedly reduce the threat of poaching and abandonment. Money is important, but it doesn’t trump purpose and belonging.

The key to better employer branding is a system for active listening. Find out what your people, be they employees or candidates, think. Ask them often. It’s important to do this at the onboarding stage, but it should continue through to the point of highest churn – the six-month mark.

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

An NPS (Net Performer Score) framework is a good place to start. How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

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 employee engagement. Once you’ve got the number, you can start to make small changes and see how that affects the overall number.

3. Increase your talent pool by limiting candidate abandonment

We hear it all the time: Sourcing is a big problem. When we ask customers about their current processes, however, a common problem emerges: We don’t really know how many people we’re losing from our recruitment funnel, and why.

This presents a great opportunity: Often, improving an application process means removing things, rather than adding them.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the longer your application and interview process goes on, the higher your dropout rate will be. But that’s a generalized issue – it tells you nothing about how to fix the problem, beyond simply making it shorter. You need specific, localized data to diagnose and fix your leakage spots.

Data from a 2022 Aptitude Research report on key interviewing trends found that candidates tend to drop out at the following stages, in the following proportions:

• 22% of candidates drop out at the application stage
• 24% at the screening stage
• 25% at the interview stage
• 18% at the assessment stage
• 9% at the offer stage

Let’s say that you had 100 visitors to your careers (or job ad) page, and 20 of them completed the first-step application form on that page. You’ve lost 80% of your possible pool right there. Not great, but at least you know – now you can examine that page to uncover possible issues preventing conversion.

Is the page too long? Does it have too much text? Is the ‘apply’ button clearly shown? Is the form too long, requiring too much information to fill out? Are your perks/EVP attributes clearly displayed?

We’ve got an in-depth guide for measuring and improving your abandonment rate here.