How Stellar went beyond the resume & gained 24/7 access to their candidates

These days we have advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), yet why is the recruitment industry still so focused on black and white text on a piece of paper?

This isn’t the 1900s anymore. It is time to do things in a better way.  It is time to go beyond the resume.

Modern day resumes are static, user generated and unsuitable for an agile society like today. They focus too much on experience over skills and are a weak indicator of a candidate’s real ability and cultural fit to a role.

Here’s a fun fact – Prospective employers only spend on average just 7.4 seconds on a resume, meaning there is a high chance for quality candidates to be overlooked and screened out only to be scouted by your competitor.

With the beginning of industry 4.0, there are numerous opportunities available for employers to do just that!

We call this, HR tech – the future of recruiting. Some companies have begun to look for AI-powered solutions to get ahead of the game, and one of them is Stellar.

Stellar is a leading customer experience organisation, operating across Australia, Asia, North America and Africa. They deliver solutions anchored around delivery of exceptional customer experiences through customer management, consulting and intelligent automation businesses.

They were looking to improve after-hours access to their candidates that would help increase candidate engagement and response times.

“Human recruiters are good at assessing capability in nuanced human scenarios, identifying culture fit, articulating and ensuring the employee experience” says Rik Johnson, General Manager at Stellar.

“However, they find getting to candidates who are only available for screening after hours challenging,” she adds.

The company started looking at resume screening and video screening technologies that would help to solve this problem but none of them felt right because so much of their communication with customers is “faceless”.

“We are words on a screen; we are voices on the line; we are actions behind the scenes. So, when we found a voice-only screening solution, available 24 hours a day, we were interested. When we found out that it analysed what candidates said for behavioural attributes and preferences, we knew we had to test it for ourselves,” Rik says.

The team at Stellar partnered with Curious Thing to set up their digital recruiter, Ella. Ella sounds engaging but digital and she is great at listening to what candidates say in standard screening calls – rather than the way they say it; interpreting how people like to work.

Ella also captures important data points that give Stellar a great starting point to identify people who are likely to thrive in their open book, metric driven, highly structured work environments. This information helps them prioritize the next interview stage, and tailor their human recruiter interviews to help tease out underlying preferences to ensure they are setting people up for success when they join the business. 

The process remains human-led, with Curious Thing’s AI-powered natural language processing engines providing better data to help the Rik and her team make better decisions in a more efficient way.

The resulting effect was great and Stellar’s primary issue around accessing candidates disappeared, with 100 percent of applicants given the opportunity to complete a screening call at a time that suited them and 31 percent completing their screening with Ella after hours and on the weekend.

Other benefits include a reduction in screening costs by 65 percent and hiring rate from the shortlisted candidates increased by five percent. Their human recruiters are also able to apply the insights provided by the technology to identify better candidates.

Candidates also reported a good experience with Ella, with many commenting on how speaking to a robot made it easier for them to express their true feelings without fear as there was no emotion when they answered the questions. Others commented on how the questions were very well thought through and had a specific purpose.

So what can YOU do to improve access to your candidates?

Have a look at your own recruitment process and put yourself in the shoes of a candidate. Would I enjoy this process? Am I getting a fair go? Is the company treating me right?

If the answer is no, then it is time to change.

The agile workplace doesn’t have room for stragglers, slow down and you will lose talented candidates to competitors!

It is time to see your candidates as more than a piece of paper. 

Dig deeper. Go beyond the resume!

Cover image: Stellar

This article is contributed by Curious Thing.