Welcome to our last product update of the year, covering the months of November and December 2021. 

While Santa’s elves in the North Pole have been busy prepping gifts ahead of the 25th of December, we’ve been hard at work at HiPeople HQ to release new product updates before 2022 sets in. Our goal is to ensure that you end the current year with a bang – and start the new one with your best foot forward!

Just as we believe that getting feedback from former peers, managers or reports, is the best way to learn about candidates, we believe that getting feedback directly from users is the best way to develop the HiPeople platform. 

So, based on your feedback, what have we learned about HR and talent teams’ needs ahead of 2022? And how did we translate that feedback into improving the product?

Read on about a core user hiring challenge we uncovered, on how HiPeople can help you address that.

NEU! Use our improved candidate benchmarks to make  more objective and unbiased hiring decisions 

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We already knew that benchmarking is a big challenge, but based on your feedback we had confirmation of that.

The process of benchmarking starts by selecting the most important requirements for a candidate to possess, in order to fill in the position successfully – which sets the overall standard. For example, by looking at a candidate’s additional abilities and knowledge, personal qualities, and so on.

It sounds simple-ish. But the problem is that in order for it to work, it must be as objective as possible. And as humans, we have subconscious biases – ranging from age and sex to race and education. 

“There are more than 140 cognitive biases, writes the Guardian – and while we can be aware of them, we can’t remove them.”

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The problem with bias and how to reduce it

Bias applies to everyone – whether you are the person leaving a reference or sifting through candidate insights. For example, did you know that managers are more objective than peers when leaving a candidate reference? 

This is where tech comes in handy to uncover and avoid these biases. By standardizing the approach and process using an automated platform like HiPeople, compared to doing it manually, you are able to remove bias from the reference check process. Research shows that using an automated platform can help to reduce bias by up to 30 percent.  

One best practice is to ask the right questions. In this case, HiPeople helps to provide a structured and scientific framework for candidate references. Our platform combines data science and psychology to come up with the questions and formats. Asking the same questions to all candidates has proven to have a positive impact on removing bias and objectively assessing candidates. 

We use different question and answer formats, including the pairwise comparison question format. The idea behind forced-choice question designs is that the reference giver has to decide between different response options (e.g., takes ownership OR pays attention to detail) – and when both parts of the comparison are positive, it becomes harder to give an inflated answer. If you compare this to providing two separate ratings instead, you could simply rate both as 5/5.

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Our client Prisma, says: “[HiPeople] gives us a scientific foundation to make smarter onboarding decisions.”

Now, we don’t just want you to simply access candidate insights to make better data-driven decisions, but we also want you to instantly process and use this information too. That’s why we reviewed the look-and-feel and usability across the board to ensure more clarity – and to feed you this information in the form of easy-to-understand, actionable candidate insights that support your hiring decisions.

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So, our solution comes in the form of a new benchmarking dashboard (pictured below).

This new iteration enables you to easily and quickly benchmark the quality of candidates’ soft and hard skills by comparing them against others who have progressed through your reference process.

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See the graph above: under “Overall” you’ll find the candidate’s average score in response to a particular question – such as “drawing conclusions”, for example. The bar on the right of that provides a visual representation of how this score compares to your organization’s average score.

In addition, you can instantly see a benchmark among your organization's applicants (in parentheses on the far right). For example, your organization’s average “drawing conclusions” score is 2.66. 

We’ll get more into what it means for you and how we got here.

The Process: How we developed our new candidate dashboard

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As we’ve already touched on, benchmarking is important in the hiring process. It usually comes in at the stage of refining the candidate brief, and enables hiring managers to cut down the candidate pool – ultimately reducing the risk of mis-hiring (which happens to be a trillion-dollar problem, FYI). 

The HiPeople platform already offered benchmarking capabilities. So, we applied our newfound learnings to bring you an upgraded version.
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After conducting user test sessions to find out how we can provide more value, we learned that the “Summary” page didn’t provide enough detailed information about candidates. So, we developed and released the new skillset heatmap and benchmarking insights – and then, worked to improve the existing UI.

Our findings: What we learned from your expertise 

You confirmed our theory that talent acquisition experts require in-depth data and instantly visible parameters. So, we took that feedback on board and worked hard to build and deliver our latest update. 

We have given our platform a substantial winter makeover, improving these four key components: usability, usefulness, interactivity/engagement, maintainability. Overall, it’s about ensuring that our product is easy, fun, and adaptable to use.

Thus, enter our new and improved summary page (pictured above) and as we've illustrated earlier, a new benchmarking dashboard.

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Prior to this product update, you could see the candidate’s score in a particular skill. Now, you can instantly see the overall average score of the candidate compared to the average, right next to the skillset heatmap.

This way, you are also able to make the most of our in-depth talent insights right from the moment you land on your dashboard – instead of having to click through multiple steps to arrive at your final destination, aka user benchmarks.

Conclusion:

As always, our efforts all come down to one thing: ensuring that our customers can hire, onboard, and measure their talent better than ever before. 

This includes presenting the candidate data in the best possible way, too, with a clear and clean user experience design flow. But we also want to give you more ownership over what you want to see.

Now, you have the ability to get more out of your HiPeople talent insights dashboard, so that it is more tailored to what you want to know – thus, improving the process of gathering candidate references. But don’t just take our word for it:

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A HiPeople user shared with us that this feature allows them to provide their hiring manager with a concise summary from the reference check. Also, since our previous product update rollout, our Net Promoter Score (NPS) has increased by 20%.

To wrap up, you now can:

- Use detailed candidate benchmarks and make better decisions on data-driven insights and filter references to reduce hiring bias. 

- Tailor the information and the process even more to your hiring needs, so you can hit your DE&I hiring goals.

- Have better and clearer visibility of candidates: from comparing benchmarks, to managing references (see picture above). By instantly accessing our improved candidate dashboard, instead of sifting individual piles of CVs, you can save up on time to hire.

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To support your journey towards hiring more effectively and inclusively, check out our expert tips here. Contact us to book a demo with a HiPeople expert and see the product in action.‍