This Bias Can Kill Your Recruitment Process. Here’s How To Fix It.

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This Bias Can Kill Your Recruitment Process. Here’s How To Fix It.

Aida Fazylova
Nov 12, 2019 4:15:00 PM

Savvy recruiters know to watch out for hiring biases as they seek out the best candidates. Unconscious partialities like the halo effect can derail good recruitment by overemphasizing character traits that have no relevance.

While we’ve come a long way in diminishing the effects of stereotypes and other prejudices, one subtle bias still seeps in at even the most forward-thinking companies. The like-me bias — also known as the ‘similar-to-me’ effect — has been a particularly persistent thorn in every ethical recruiter’s side.

As its name implies, the like-me bias encourages individuals to seek out people similar to themselves. This partiality can exist in terms of educational background, race, gender, as well as more intangible characteristics like work ethic, likes and dislikes, or personality.

While you’ll always want to find candidates with certain similarities — for example, every employee should agree with your company values — reducing the effects of the like-me bias in recruiting is essential.

Spotting (And Stopping) Like Me Bias

One of the most famous studies on like-me bias was conducted across several American orchestras, where a mere 6% of musicians were female. Wanting to improve these poor numbers, the conductors implemented a blind-hiring policy, whereby the identity and gender of the applicants were hidden — literally, behind an opaque screen — as they auditioned.

The results were clear and immediate: 30% more women were hired after blind-hiring was implemented. By negating the effects of like-me bias, the orchestra was able to grow closer to gender parity and improve the quality of their performances.

These kinds of results bode well for companies as well, especially since companies with gender parity at the executive level achieve 21% more revenue. Yet companies aren’t orchestras, and a resume isn’t a performance piece. The art of hiring the best candidates without bias needs more than just anonymity to thrive.

The Chatbot Difference

One interesting yet somewhat disheartening addendum to the blind orchestra study came later on, when jurors realized the sounds of a candidate’s footsteps could give away their gender. Applicants were eventually asked to remove their shoes prior to auditioning to counteract this.

The lesson here is simple: Even when you reduce possible biases in a way that works, the potential for weaknesses in the system remain. Resolving this issue can be a seemingly insurmountable challenge when the right techniques aren’t in place.

This is why recruitment must be an iterative process, one that reduces the likelihood of human bias while consistently updating expectations based on need.

Luckily, HR departments have cutting-edge tools to help them not only improve the hiring process, but also find flaws and highlight improvements to be made. One way this process succeeds is through data collection with AI. In-depth reporting during the candidate screening process shows recruiters who’s applying from where. These kinds of insights help improve campaigns over time, thereby making bias reduction a continual process — one that can lead to greatly improved results.

For more tips on reducing bias in hiring, be sure to check out our free ebook to learn how AI can help attract more diverse candidates.

A bias-free workplace

Reducing bias in hiring leads to a more diverse workplace, which in and of itself has its own benefits. Teams that come from a variety of backgrounds have a greater depth and breadth of original ideas — not to mention the higher profits coming from more diverse companies.

Even with AI chatbots in place, recruitment is still a human-led process. The potential for unconscious errors remains, however companies with a strategy in place to create improvements are the ones that will attract the best possible pool of candidates. It may start with blind hiring, but insightful data can show hiring managers the next step — if they have the right AI tools to find the way forward.If you’d like to apply these data-driven solutions to your company’s hiring, contact us for a free demo today, and see how XOR can make the difference in your next recruitment drive.

Ready to learn more? Get the Complete How-To Guide on Recruitment Chatbots Here

Tags: Automation, Recruitment, recruiting automation

AI Recruiting in 2020: What To Watch Out For

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AI Recruiting in 2020: What To Watch Out For

Aida Fazylova
Nov 19, 2019 5:56:33 PM

2020 is shaping up to be recruiting’s most transformative year yet — and its most challenging. With job growth expected to increase throughout 2020, a tight labor market will require HR departments across the globe to get creative.

Luckily, there are a number of ways intelligent recruiters can leverage new tech to improve the hiring process. New methods of recruitment can both speed up and improve hiring, for both recruitment managers and prospective employees.

Here are a few of the latest trends to watch out for going into the new year. It’s best to start implementing these processes now to ensure 2020 will be your best hiring year yet. By keeping current, you’ll ensure your company doesn’t get left behind.

Social Recruiting

70% of the hirable workforce are passive candidates, meaning people who are gainfully employed and not actively seeking a new job. To entice these potential great hires, recruiters must look beyond Indeed and Monster and into the online world we all inhabit.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and (increasingly) niche social media channels like Tik Tok are now fair game when it comes to recruitment. This isn’t just about expanding the talent pool; social hiring has other advantages as well. For example, communicating on a more relaxed platform is a great way to assess soft skills, which 89% of managers consider lacking in a bad hire.

Social recruiting relies more on building trust and warmth over time before moving onto a CV or resume review. Chatbots can be one major part in this process, allowing recruiters to handle more candidates in less time, drawing down the talent pool until you’ve found the best hire possible.

Collaborative Hiring

HR managers have been saying it for years: The whole company needs to be involved in the hiring process. Collaborative hiring means having a candidate speak with or interview with several current employees, creating a more refined view of the business before onboarding.

Of course, this kind of hiring process increases the amount of time needed. Collaboration doesn’t just have to mean working alongside other employees. AI-tech, which will likely be implemented in over 55% hiring by 2025, can perfectly mesh with current hiring practices while iterating on outdated processes.

It may seem too good to be true, but by using a candidate pre-screening process, along with advanced interview scheduling, the collaborative hiring process can actually be faster than single-interviewer methods. Implementing these methods takes less start-up time than you might imagine; it’s perfectly possible to have collaborative hiring ready to go by the time the new year bells chime.

Wider Talent Pools

It’s not just who applies. Employee referrals, sourced candidates, and warm leads can all be added to the overall talent pool — provided your company’s expanding intelligently.

One concurrent trend is the rise in diversity, as 47% of millennials actively look for diverse companies when applying. Since more diverse companies achieve 95% higher profits, creating a wider pool of talent should be a priority for companies in 2020. It’s here once again that AI can help recruiters improve their hiring.

Xor’s chatbots speak 103 languages, making them a key asset when hiring from abroad. Furthermore, our AI tech can review your job postings for non-inclusive language that may deter candidates. When coupled with the automation and screening technologies mentioned earlier, the breadth of recruitment widenns remarkably.

Recruiters will certainly be kept busy throughout the 2020s as they adapt to these changes. Successful HR departments can get a jump start on the oncoming AI hiring revolution by implementing these practices now for better hiring in the future.

Get a jump start on 2020 by contacting us today to see how XOR can change your hiring process for long-term success.

Tags: Recruitment, AI trends, recruiting help

Support for Employee Communication During COVID-19

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Support for Employee Communication During COVID-19

Aida Fazylova
Mar 23, 2020 8:41:26 PM

The rapid rise and spread of COVID-19 is hurting millions of people around the world, and we feel it speaking with our clients, partners and own team here at XOR. To help support the people we love to work with, XOR will be offering select Employee Communication solutions, including a COVID-19 employee checkup survey and employee alerts and updates, for free during this time.

You can take advantage of this offer by scheduling time on our team’s calendar here.

Why Employee Communication?

As shelter-in-place policies take effect and more people begin to work remotely in response to the coronavirus, the need for instant, on-demand employee communication is becoming more critical. HR teams will need to:

Share new policies, closures, and other key updates that impact employees ability to perform their job;
Survey employees to check on their health, morale, and engagement levels to prepare for any changes to their workforce capacity;
Onboard employees remotely to help them feel comfortable, earn their commitment, and help them start producing and contributing; and
Draw actionable insights from this large amount of communication data, so that they can take the appropriate actions to mitigate risk.

What if you could send personalized text messages to your employees at a moment’s notice for instant updates, create pulse surveys that can be configured to collect any type of information, onboard employees through engaging chat and video sequences, and then analyze the results through a real-time dashboard?

That way you can focus on what your employees need to know, what information you need from them, and how to best prepare your workforce, without worrying about how you will reach them.

Let us know how we can help your team.

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Tags: Remote Recruiting, Virtual Recruiting

Call Candidates And Transcribe Your Conversations With XOR

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Call Candidates And Transcribe Your Conversations With XOR

Alvaro Tijero
Jun 17, 2020 10:11:08 PM

Phone calls are one of the best ways to communicate with qualified candidates, but unlike email, texting, and WhatsApp, you can’t go back and see what was said. Taking notes in the middle of an interview can be distracting, ideas can get lost, and it’s easy to forget to log your calls in your CRM or ATS.

That’s why we added Calling and Transcribing to XOR.

This new feature enables you to call candidates directly from XOR, get a recording instantly, and have a complete transcription of your phone conversation right in your inbox.

First, log into your XOR account. Then, choose the candidate you want to call and click the green “Dial” button.

During the call, the recording will be transcribed in real-time and added to the conversation with the candidate along with your emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages. After the call ends, a link with the recording will be added as well. The image below shows the XOR mobile view with the transcribed call.

Calling and Transcribing will allow you to create and capture every candidate touchpoint right in your XOR Inbox, so you can focus on making the best hire.

Recruiting teams will also have the option to use this feature to track the quality of phone conversations and coach fellow team members. For instance, managers and recruiters will be able to revisit which questions were asked, who spoke most during the conversation, word choice, and other parts of your phone calls.

Calling and Transcribing will allow you to recruit more efficiently, save you and your team, and help you create a great candidate experience. Learn more by signing up for a XOR demo here.

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Tags: Automation, Product Update

XOR Emerges Victorious in the Chad and Cheese Death Match

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XOR Emerges Victorious in the Chad and Cheese Death Match

Birch Faber
Jun 25, 2020 8:42:44 PM

We had the honor of competing against other recruiting technology companies in a Death Match hosted by The Chad & Cheese Podcast.

If you haven’t heard of these events, the hosts, Chad and Joel pit four HR software companies against each other in a competition to see which has the most promising tech. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are recruiting industry veterans, and like to ask hard-hitting questions in their interviews to more honestly examine companies and their teams.

In this specific event, we were matched against the recruiting technology companies Applichat, Rectxt, and TalVista. After all Death Match pitches and interviews were completed, XOR was crowned the 2020 North American Digital Grand Champion. The judges were impressed with our CEO Aida’s answers to their toughest questions and awarded us the championship.

During the pitch, Aida covered topics such as XOR’s integration advantages, our unique and globally inclusive AI, and the promising new features within our products like voice calling and transcribing. I highly recommend you listen to the full interview, which can be found below.

Tags: Automation, Recruitment, chadcheese

Track Your Recruiting Communication With Reports and Dashboards

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Track Your Recruiting Communication With Reports and Dashboards

Irina Ialovenco
Jun 30, 2020 5:20:15 AM

An essential part of any successful recruitment strategy is the ability to track results, measure performance, and see what works. That is why we added Dashboards and Reports to XOR. This new feature will allow you to see real-time campaign performance for each stage your candidates move through

Let’s say you want to see the report for one of your campaigns.

First, log into your XOR account. Then, go to “Dashboard” and choose the needed filters: the owner, a single or multiple job openings, and the channel, which can be Email, SMS, or WhatsApp. You can also choose the desired date range and the type of conversation with the candidates, which can be either manual or automated with a chatbot. Once you have adjusted the filters, a chart will appear based on the selected criteria.

On the chart, you can see the performance of the campaigns: how many invitations were sent, how many candidates clicked on them, started the conversation, were scored, were qualified, and scheduled.

Let’s dive deeper into each of the metrics to get the most of it.

“Sent” means the total number of messages sent to candidates. This includes all the channels you selected. The more messages you send, the more chances you get to find the right person.

“Clicked” means the number of candidates who clicked on the link in your message. If not many candidates who received your message actually clicked the link, consider adding a more direct call to action to follow the link and state the reason that you are reaching out more clearly.

“Started” means the number of candidates who started the conversation when they received a message. This number can be increased by creating an appealing first message that makes the candidate interested in learning more about the job offer.

“Scored” means the number of candidates that had been scored by the chatbot. If not a lot of candidates are getting scored, consider shortening your qualification process so that it takes no more than three minutes to complete.

“Qualified” means the number of candidates that had been qualified for the opened position. In order to get the right qualified candidates, strive to choose clear and concise questions, and consider letting the candidate know that there are just a few more steps more to being finished.

“Scheduled” means the number of candidates that had passed the chatbot and got scheduled onto the recruiter or HR’s calendar. In order to follow up with candidates that were qualified and did not schedule for some reason, consider using follow-up reminders.

Besides that, you can export and save the dashboard directly to your files as an image, so you can quickly use it for any report or presentation.

On the lower chart, there is a performance summary as a percentage for each stage your candidates are passing through. This dashboard will help you analyze how many candidates were disqualified at each stage and how many were scheduled for interviews or meetings.

More than that, you will be able to build customized dashboards to see all your reports in one place.

Let’s summarize all the functionality you will get:

Standard funnel reports, which are stage by stage
Custom reports based on events and candidates’ answers
SMS/Email campaign report
Channel Analytics (SMS/Email/Offline)
Chatbot tuning report, that shows conversion step by step

Building reports and creating dashboards in XOR will allow you to analyze each of the recruiting stages and improve your performance. This will help you understand how you are getting the most qualified candidates and then make the necessary adjustments for your team to recruit more efficiently. Learn more by signing up for a XOR demo here.

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Tags: Automation, Product Update