HireVue Horizon 2018 Recap Day 1

The first day of HireVue Horizon just came to a close. If you missed anything, catch up here with our daily recap.

Table of Contents:

1. Humanizing the Talent Process with Technology: Kevin Parker, CEO & Chairman of the Board, HireVue
2. Design for the Disappointed: Jennifer Carpenter, VP - Global Talent Acquisition, Delta Airlines
3. Reinventing Leadership for the Age of Machine Intelligence: Mike Walsh, CEO of Tomorrow
4. Contemporizing Recruiting: How Bank of America Implemented a High Tech / High Touch Candidate Experience: Elizabeth Schoentube, Head of Campus Recruiting and Program Management, Bank of America; Christie Gragnani-Woods, Consumer and Preferred Small Business Talent Acquisition Executive
5. Veteran Hiring Strategies: Turning Vetted Heroes into Viable Corporate Candidates: Chris Montoya, Veteran Hiring Initiative, Interstate Batteries; Jennifer Tracy, VP, Recruiting Solutions, Spectrum; Todd Frey, Talent Acquisition Recruitment Lead, Operations/Military Recruiting Program Manager
6. Shaping a Vibrant Economy: Drawing Candidates into a Purpose-Driven Corporate Culture: Richard Waite, Resourcing Lead, Grant Thornton UK
7. Transforming a Business Model: How JP Morgan Chase is using AI-Driven Assessments to Shift their Talent Pool: Connie Geiger, Managing Director, Head of Consumer and Community Bank Recruiting, JP Morgan Chase
8. Where Does AI Fit in Hiring? From High Volume to High Impact with Hilton: Carolyn Shuster, Director, Corporate Recruitment, Hilton; Amber Weaver, Director of High Volume Corporate Recruitment, Hilton
9. High Volume Global Hiring: How IKEA Transformed Recruiting in 30 Markets Using Video Interviewing: Göran Berg, Recruitment Manager, IKEA; Sushma Schwerdt, Recruitment Operations Manager, IKEA
10. The Secret to Reinventing Recruiting: Amber Grewal, Corporate Vice President, Head of Global TA, IBM

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Humanizing the Talent Process with Technology

Kevin Parker, CEO & Chairman of the Board, HireVue

Kevin Parker kicked off HireVue Horizon with a surprising statistic. At our last conference, HireVue had just completed 4 million interviews. Last week, HireVue passed the 8 million mark.

He continued with another statistic: up to 70% of the hiring funnel is filled with candidates who are entirely unqualified for the job. The result? We need to take shortcuts. In the name of efficiency we’re filtering out candidates based on subpar information. Where a candidate went to school, their GPA, or their college major are all very imperfect proxies for how they’ll perform on the job. But they’re better than nothing: they are imperfect shortcuts.

Enter Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI is to create a new division of labor, just like the first ERPs 25 years ago eliminated the need for paper-based record-keeping. AI can make connections that we can’t and make objective predictions. Using on-demand video interviews as a medium, AI can predict how well a candidate will perform on the job based on objective, consistent criteria.

We’re already seeing this new division of labor play out in the medical field, where radiologists and AI combined can identify cancer with more accuracy than alone.

Just like in medicine, the capabilities of humans and AI are complementary. Humans are better at making social connections, building relationships, and making the final judgment based on the unique context of their organization. Artificial intelligence is quicker, more objective, and can evaluate large numbers of candidates. The combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence to make better, quicker, more objective hiring decisions is Hiring Intelligence.

Since decisions can be made quickly and consistently, the process improves for everyone. Candidates quickly learn where they stand in the hiring process, no more “application black holes.” TA professionals can spend their time finding the perfect fit, rather than sorting through candidates with imperfect shortcuts.

Kevin concluded his keynote with the introduction of HireVue Game-Based Assessments. Game-based assessments are challenges in the form of games that measure cognitive traits - they are the perfect compliment to the behavioral aspect of interviews. Even better, they can be combined with on-demand video interviews to provide a single, engaging assessment experience.

Design for the Disappointed

Jennifer Carpenter, VP - Global Talent Acquisition, Delta Airlines

In this fireside chat, Jennifer Carpenter was joined by HireVue CEO Kevin Parker. As the Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Carpenter describes her role as bringing, “delightful disruption” to a company about to celebrate its 90th birthday.

"We as recruiters are sometimes the angles of disappointment," Carpenter says, “99% of all Delta candidates are ultimately rejected.” Carpenter’s remarks, titled, “Design for The Disappointed” address exactly what talent acquisition professionals ought to do about letting down the vast majority of their candidate pool. Carpenter shared five of Delta’s key principles that allow them to recenter their hiring process around the candidate experience and ultimately keep the good graces of those they turn away.

1. Behind Every Resume Is a Person with a Story to Tell

In 2017, 300,000 candidates applied to Delta. Carpenter remarked, with such a high volume of applicants, it’s easy to fall into complacency and see your candidates only as a resume. Carpenter says, “HireVue affords us the opportunity to hear their stories.” She also added, “We ask them, ‘Why do you want to be a flight attendant?’ or ‘Tell us a story about when you helped someone.’ Carpenter emphasized that bringing technology to your hiring process does not have to make it less human.

2. We Believe in Conversation Starters, Not Deal Breakers

Speaking about how organizations often under-provide information about their hiring process, Carpenter asserted, “We put up roadblocks that dissuade the curious.” Carpenter shared how omitting information like how long it takes to interview or how long the hiring process takes does more for you when it’s disclosed rather than hidden from the candidate.

3. An Informed Candidate is the Best Candidate

“We need to stop withdrawing from the candidate karma bank,” said Carpenter. Being transparent with your candidates about things that, traditionally, we may think will dissuade them are actually helpful to a candidate, and they appreciate knowing what they’re getting into. Carpenter shared that informing your candidates about what they’re going to do in the hiring process and how long it’s going to take more often enables them, not discourages them.

4. Transparency Creates Trust

The key difference about this tenant from it’s previous two, is Delta’s emphasis on being transparent quickly. Carpenter says Delta believes in letting the candidate know what’s happening as fast as possible. Pointing out that candidates are typically weighing other options, the best experience for them is knowing their status in your hiring process at the same time you know it.

5. To Move Forward You Have to Give Back

Carpenter says Delta follows this virtue to the point of pain, literally—according to Carpenter Delta donates more blood to the American Cross foundation than any other organization. Carpenter shares how Delta is working on rolling out processes that will bring better feedback to candidates during and after the hiring process. She shared how during an assessment, we learn a lot about a candidate and there is no reason we shouldn’t be sharing that information with a candidate that could benefit from it.

Reinventing Leadership for the Age of Machine Intelligence

Mike Walsh, CEO of Tomorrow

The world of 2030 will be drastically different. In this “algorithmic” age, where the majority of the workforce grew up with algorithmically tailored experiences, how will leadership change?

The children of today will, effectively, be the first children raised by AI. What will the 21st century organization look like? It won’t be remote, according to Mike Walsh. The most creative organizations are those where teams all work closely in-house. Remote work improves productivity, but it does not improve innovation. Key Skills for Leaders in the Age of Machine Intelligence:

1. Decisions in Ambiguity. AI works great within a constrained system. Humans thrive when things are ambiguous.
2. Digital Ethics. Regulation will never keep up with technology. It’s up to today’s organizations to set ethical standards as new innovations come along.
3. Work Design. When AI can perform many of the tasks we do today, it means we can work to design work, rather than be chained to it.

At the end of the day, it will be people that drive innovation and create a situation where organizations succeed. Automation can do some things, but throughout history we’ve seen that it creates more jobs than it destroys. Even more than that, it almost always frees up people to live up to their potential as people, focusing on the uniquely human tasks that we enjoy most.

Contemporizing Recruiting: How Bank of America Implemented a High Tech / High Touch Candidate Experience

Elizabeth Schoentube, Head of Campus Recruiting and Program Management, Bank of America; Christie Gragnani-Woods, Consumer and Preferred Small Business Talent Acquisition Executive

Lead by Elizabeth Schoentube, Head of Campus Recruiting and Program Management and Christie Gragnani-Woods the Consumer and Preferred Small Business Talent Acquisition Executive, Bank of America presented how, despite economic and regulatory pressures, they manage to prioritize their candidate experience.

Bank of America works in a highly-regulated industry with extreme obligations to risk management. Despite the tendency to stay conservative with new technology, Bank of America has developed a mantra that has enabled them to embrace technology like HireVue that elevates the hiring process while staying safe legally.

Bank of America’s Talent Acquisition Mantra: From a process centered on our internal needs… to one where the candidate experience is put first.

Bank of America’s efforts to improve the candidate experience starts with a simple thank you. Prior to interviewing, candidates are thanked for choosing to interview with Bank of America. Paraphrasing, Christie Gragnani-Woods says, “We wanted our candidates to know that we know they have options.”

Elizabeth Schoentube added that Bank of America mandates that Hiring Managers, not recruiters select which candidates will move forward in the hiring process after their initial video interview. Schoentube mentions that this process provides a touch point between hiree and Hiring Manager that enables a better working relationship while improving quality of hire.

Schoentube and Gragnani-Woods continued, sharing that their emphasis on candidate experience combined with HireVue’s OnDemand Video Interviewing Platform has dramatically increased their campus hiring efforts:

In 2018, Bank of America has:

• Reduced their hiring related travel expenses by 200K.
• Seen a 100% increase in daily recruiter productivity (Tasks that took 6 hours/day are completed in 3 hours/day)
• Has Increased the number of qualified first round interviewees by 19%.
• Maintained an 80% offer and 85% acceptance rate

Veteran Hiring Strategies: Turning Vetted Heroes into Viable Corporate Candidates

Chris Montoya, Veteran Hiring Initiative, Interstate Batteries; Jennifer Tracy, VP, Recruiting Solutions, Spectrum; Todd Frey, Talent Acquisition Recruitment Lead, Operations/Military Recruiting Program Manager

In this panel, three TA leaders shared their experiences attracting veterans and helping them transition to the corporate job search.

Where are you finding veteran talent?

Jennifer from Spectrum explored how to find veterans pre-separation and post-separation. In Spectrum’s organization of 100,000 employees, over 11,000 have military experience. Pre-separation involves visiting active duty members where they are (in Spectrum’s case, Fort Bragg); post-separation, they leverage RecruitMilitary career fair events to identify great talent.

How do you sell hiring managers on recruiting veterans?

Interstate Batteries holds roundtables with hiring managers to set expectations and help them understand the gap-bridging that needs to happen to hire veterans. They partnered with their marketing, branding, and communication team to create content and share success stories to drive organic engagement.

How do you create an intake for veterans?

Equinix leverages HireVue to give all veterans the opportunity to “introduce themselves” with a video interview. In the interview, veterans explain their skills, passions, and identify career fields that they are interested in. This tunes the hiring manager in to what a veteran has done in their career. If need be, they can turn qualified veterans over to a different, more relevant recruiting team if their skills are a better fit for a different area of the organization. With this system, Equinix has seen the percentage of veteran hires in their operations team jump from 5% to 30%. Jennifer from Spectrum agreed with this approach. When veterans receive the traditional “checklist” of jobs they would be interested in, they almost always check them all - they want a job. In an introductory video interview, they can explain their passions and skills, and recruiters can direct them to the best-fit opportunities.

What about military skills translator programs?

The general consensus was that civilian-created “military skills translator” software does not adequately help veterans translate their military skills to civilian skills. Jennifer from Spectrum indicated that most veterans tend to get screened out of highly relevant jobs with them, and veterans tend to get lost. Chris from Interstate Batteries explained that most “translator” software was geared toward security, and what a veteran did vs. what they want to do. Todd from Equinix explained that no one on the civilian side really understands what the military does; even a tool created by Google was subpar. Each branch of the military has their own “skills” translator, use that instead.

Shaping a Vibrant Economy: Drawing Candidates into a Purpose-Driven Corporate Culture

Richard Waite, Resourcing Lead, Grant Thornton UK

Most organizations have some sort of “key values” that make them unique. At Grant Thornton UK, they’ve infused their new “purpose-led” approach - an overarching business strategy that guides the type of work they do and who they work with - into their recruiting.

What does it mean to “shape a vibrant economy”?

For Grant Thornton, business has a critical role to play in creating the type of world we want to be a part of. Economic inequality in the UK is the worst it’s been in generations. Compounded with Brexit - which 80% of citizens aged 18-24 voted against - there’s a feeling of frustration. Top quality graduates aren’t just looking for a paycheck anymore, they’re looking to make a difference. In other words, Grant Thornton’s motto to do well by doing good is a perfect fit today’s top graduates. So how can that translate over into the recruiting side of things?

The Candidate Journey Review

To align its recruiting with its purpose, Grant Thornton conducted a full audit of its hiring process, from pre-application to onboarding. Nothing was wrong, per se - there were no glaring issues to fix, but it was far from distinctive, and failed to show what made working there unique.

They addressed every step of their hiring process:

• Pre-application. Grant Thornton worked with their marketing team to identify their employee value proposition - Shape More Than Just Your Career - and create case studies, blogs, and stories around the people at Grant Thornton doing just that.
• Application. They cut their application from 1+ hours to minutes. Questions focus on how candidates have worked to create a “vibrant economy” in the past.
• Online tests. Grant Thornton worked with assessment provider CAPP to design an immersive situational judgment assessment.
• HireVue OnDemand. Grant Thornton ran focus groups with last year’s candidates to explore how they could make the OnDemand interview experience stand out. The result? Moving the case study - a question type previously used only in live situations - from their final “assessment day” to the video interview.
• Experience day. They reoriented their “assessment day” to focus on the experience of Grant Thornton’s “appreciative inquiry” approach to client interactions. Even candidates who do not receive offers leave that day leaving more inspired and galvanized about what they can to do shape a vibrant economy.
• Pre-joiner engagement. Most of Grant Thornton’s offers are delivered 10-12 months before the candidate graduates: the perfect opportunity for their larger competitors to poach them. To combat this and keep new hires engaged, they created an online candidate community where new hires could meet and connect. The community also features current trainees and hiring managers blogging & sharing what they were up to on a daily basis.

Thus far, Grant Thornton UK has seen some incredible results from their reimagined hiring process. Their purpose-driven application approach means fewer job seekers apply - instead, top candidates “opt in.”

Their new experience day has seen a 50% increase in conversion rate (from ~40% to 73%), due largely to the robustness of the screening steps prior. All in all the increased efficiencies have saved 950 chargeable hours of hiring manager time (~£1,000,000) and decreased yearly operational expenses by £249,000. The time savings also means that Grant Thornton recruiters can spend more time elevating their brand internally, and focus on coaching hiring managers and providing candidates a more personalized experience.

Transforming a Business Model: How JP Morgan Chase is using AI-Driven Assessments to Shift their Talent Pool

Connie Geiger, Managing Director, Head of Consumer and Community Bank Recruiting, JP Morgan Chase

JPMC receives over 2.3m total applications per year, only 85k of which become job offers. They’re reimagining recruiting on multiple levels to align their recruiting with their vision for the bank of the future.

Building the Bank of the Future

Half of American households have a Chase product. As consumer needs change, JPMC’s goal is to be the easiest bank to do business with. Fundamentally, this means providing the digital and physical channels so customers can engage when and where they want to. For example: when someone applies for a loan today, they receive the same experience no matter what they apply for, and are pre-approved for other loans that would previously require an entirely different process.

The Branch Bank Employee of the Future

Generally speaking, people want easy and intuitive self-service until they don’t. When they run into something they can’t do themselves, they expect simplicity, ease, and expertise. In these situations, they visit the branch bank. This doesn’t mean branch banks are going away, but it does mean the skills needed in those banks are changing. The branch bank employees of tomorrow need to be empowered to make judgments and help customers creatively. They can’t just follow a process and check a box. To that end, JPMC is looking beyond previous experience and skills to behaviors and competencies. To find the people that are the best fit, they’re turning to HireVue Assessments to identify candidates with the traits they need. So far, they’ve seen that Tellers who score well on the AI-driven assessment are 15% less likely to leave due to attrition at the 90 day mark, and receive slightly better performance reviews at the one-year mark. For Call Center agents, they’ve seen attrition among high and medium scoring candidates drop by 36% - delivering a huge ROI.

What it Means for Recruiting Teams

Ultimately, shifting to an AI-based approach will mean less time reviewing resumes and more time feeding the hiring funnel with qualified applicants and consulting with hiring managers. It means less time transacting a process, and more time closing the deal. JPMC’s session was full of great ideas about what the future of recruiting looks like that we didn’t have space for here - register for the livestream to get their session on demand when it becomes available.

Where Does AI Fit in Hiring? From High Volume to High Impact with Hilton

Carolyn Shuster, Director, Corporate Recruitment, Hilton; Amber Weaver, Director of High Volume Corporate Recruitment, Hilton

From chatbots to video-based assessments, Shuster and Weaver shared how AI dynamically and compartmentally augments today’s most cutting-edge hiring processes.

With a mission, “to be the most hospitable company in the world,” Hilton employs AI, as funny as it may sound, to make their hiring process more human.

Hilton employs AI through every process in the Hiring funnel. Hilton augments their sourcing efforts by using AI to quickly identify the strongest candidates from across the web. This process allows them to make sure their top results are the best fit for the position. By employing AI to assist with sourcing, Hilton empowers their recruiters to find people they know are worth investing time with, ultimately making it so their candidates are treated less like just another resume and more like a human being.

Moving further down the hiring funnel, Hilton enhances their screening and assessing processes with AI by utilizing HireVue and chatbot technology. By using predictive analytics combined with video interviewing, technical coding challenges through CodeVue and candidate engagement through SMS chatbot, Hilton dramatically improves their recruiter’s efficiency. By reducing laborious tasks and creating an improved division of labor between AI and recruiter, Hilton gets the most from both its people and its technology.

High Volume Global Hiring: How IKEA Transformed Recruiting in 30 Markets Using Video Interviewing

Göran Berg, Recruitment Manager, IKEA; Sushma Schwerdt, Recruitment Operations Manager, IKEA

In today’s final breakout session IKEA’s Göran Berg (Recruitment Manager) and Sushma Schwerdt (Recruitment Operations Manager) displayed that no matter your organization size, there is still room to be nimble in the HR space.

Looking to achieve buy-in among a large number of stakeholders and over 26 languages to integrate with, HireVue’s advocates within IKEA certainly faced a daunting task in garnering support. While IKEA inevitably received buy-in from stakeholders that represented 30 of the 31 countries, the transition from ideation to implementation proved to be rougher than expected.

As IKEA stores around the globe began adopting HireVue, some remained hesitant.

In an attempt to unfold why some stores were having massive success with HireVue while other stayed on the fence, IKEA discovered that six main objections were present among those struggling to integrate the new technology—

1. “This is not personal.” IKEA overcame this objection by finding and becoming best friends with their internal innovators and early adopters. This creates a grassroots movement where the rest of the organization gets on board because they see the results their peers are getting.
2. “This conflicts with our culture.” This objection came largely from Japan. There is a difference between culture conflict and technology conflict. In Japan there are existing HireVue customers finding great success - all that IKEA needed to do was tap into that same success.
3. “We cannot take for granted that this requires phones and computers.” For this objection, IKEA offered tips and technology for their candidates. This not only made the process more personal, it made it more authentic. It also helps to look at the stats. When IKEA came up against the objection that the elderly would not like the process, they looked at the numbers. As it happens, the elderly were just as comfortable with the process as their younger peers.
4. “IKEA is a people focused company.” Here, IKEA talked to their candidates to understand how they could make the process more candidate-friendly. They tweaked their communication templates so candidates still received the “IKEA touch.”
5. “We’re comfortable with the old way, phone screens are fine.” IKEA worked continuously through their adoption to share best practices, leveraging their internal champions to show that video interviews were a more efficient, candidate-friendly way to engage talent.
6. “Global solutions are optional.” Because IKEA ultimately wants their stores to run with little bureaucracy, they don’t mandate working with solutions that individual stores don’t see as a good fit. HireVue’s best-in-class support reduced the friction for store adoption - if a recruiter sent a text at 7 pm, they got an immediate response. After seeing HireVue’s potential, the “optional” solution quickly became the best solution.

The Secret to Reinventing Recruiting

Amber Grewal, Corporate Vice President, Head of Global TA, IBM

Technology is advancing rapidly, every industry is under disruption, and talent acquisition is no exception.

Secret #1: Upgrade your Operating Model

Recruiting’s operating model has always changed with emerging technologies. When the ATS came on the scene, TA built an operating model around process, efficiency, and compliance. When social media entered the mainstream, TA developed sourcing models and began leveraging technologies like the CRM. Today, recruiting’s operating model should be infused with Agile methodologies. For example, IBM recruits for legacy and emerging products. There needed to be a differentiation between the two. Speed, urgency, collaboration, and transparency to the business are of the utmost importance.

What is Agile TA? 

gile TA is an iterative, time-boxed approach to recruiting. It comes from the reality that not all roles are created equally. With traditional recruiting, each recruiter might need to fill 50-100 requisitions, and each gets prioritized by which manager yells the loudest. Agile TA prioritizes the roles that provide the highest value to the business first. Amber provided three tips for building an Agile TA function.

• Set recruiting in differentiated teams. People in an Agile recruiting team have various roles, they aren’t all “traditional” recruiters.
• Prioritize up front. Each business unit has a “headcount owner” that decides what roles are the most important and need to be prioritized.
• Time-boxed and run on sprints. Requisitions should be individually sized - a group of data scientists will have much different requirements than a group of network engineers.

The results IBM has seen from this process so far? They’ve cut recruiting time by 50%, reduced requisition cancellations by 75%, increased talent quality by 43%, and seen their NPS double for candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters.

Secret #2: Architect Your Workflow with Technology

Everything you do can be augmented with technology. As you collect more data, you’ll feed the exponential learning process and drive better predictions. With enough data, artificial intelligence will be able to: auto-create job descriptions, prioritize candidates, assist candidates, proactively source, administer & create interview panels, assess candidates in real-time, engage disengaged candidates, create custom offers for candidates, and onboard.

Secret #3: Supercharge Your Talent

Reinventing recruiting starts with people. To that end, recruiters should be up-skilled with 21st century skills. At IBM, they identified 14 critical 21st century recruiting skills in the domains of knowledge, ability, and behavior.

After identifying the critical skills, they assessed their recruiting function to create new roles: the Talent Influencer (a solution seller, brand ambassador, and power networker in a key domain); and the Talent Scientist (combining IO Psychology and sourcing skills, these recruiters make AI-assisted talent decisions and use data to tell stories).

They also set up digital TA academy where their recruiters could upskill and and earn badges. Thus far, they’ve seen 70k hours of learning in their TA organization, with 41 hours of learning per person. 68% of the entire organization has been upskilled.