How Automation Can Improve Hiring Speed and Quality for BPOs

Dave Biesinger 00:00

All right, welcome to how automation can improve hiring speed and quality for BPOs presented by Daniel Ash and Cody Jolley. So Daniel's the CEO and co-founder of Journeyfront and he spent the last decade figuring out how to make hiring decisions more accurate and predictive. In fact, he even wrote a book about it, the BPO Hiring Playbook, which is available for sale now on Amazon. And Cody, our VP of customer success has been at Journeyfront for almost eight years, actually I think eight years now, just recently had a work anniversary, happy work anniversary Cody. He started out building predictive hiring models as an intern for us and he now runs customer success. And he's had a hand in just about every single customer implementation we've ever done. With that said, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Daniel, who's going to guide us through this very interesting topic.

Daniel Ash 00:58

Okay, thank you, Dave. Great to see you all and looking forward to this discussion. As Dave mentioned, we're going to be talking about improving hiring speed and quality and how automation is the key for doing both. I am going to share a few things around how to do this in the context of BPO hiring and then I'll turn it over to my colleague Cody and we'll even give you a live demo of Journeyfront's platform and how we approach this within the platform. And we are going to have time at the end for some Q&A as well. So if you have questions along the way, Dave and other team members will be monitoring. Feel free to add those there. But just know also that we are going to leave a space for the end. Let's dive in. So obviously, you're here off many of you representing BPOs across the globe. BPOs face a unique challenge when it comes to hiring. You have to manage high volumes of candidates and hire high volumes often on very tight timelines with complex client matching requirements that probably are uniquely challenging in ways that most corporate recruiters couldn't even fathom, right?

If you think about the amount of time and energy and work that's required with some of the kinds of tasks you do across the hiring process for BPOs, right? Moving candidates, screening, interviewing, ranking across different stages, moving candidates through these stages, communicating even all the document collection that might happen at the end. Even just for one candidate, that can add up, right? Each activity that you have to do. Now, if you extrapolate these numbers across even just 100 candidates, we're talking about 100 to 400 hours of manual work. And if you talk, we're talking about 1,000 candidates up to 1,000 to 4,000, let alone more than 1,000 candidates, right, which many BPOs face candidate volumes even greater than this, right? So as if hiring for BPOs wasn't hard enough, given the amount of work that's required here, you also have to balance two things in a really unique way.

You have to balance hiring speed and you have to balance hiring quality. Both matter, right? It's not just the amount of work that goes into hiring at your volume on your kinds of deadlines with the complexity that is all the things you have to do to match candidates to clients. It's also paying attention to the speed at which you have to do this and the quality factor that makes BPO challenging difficult, right? Hiring speed matters because top talent is off the market fast. General studies estimate within 7 to 10 days for some of these competitive markets where you're hiring agents, that certainly can be even faster. Candidate engagement declines over time. So it's one thing if you follow up with the candidate very quickly, if you wait a day, if you wait a couple days, if you wait a week or two, you're going to see that candidate start to drop off and then you have to spend all sorts of time just trying to reengage them, as you all know so well. And the last reason speed matters is delays can cause you to miss a client deadline and therefore SLAs associated with that client.

And it can cascade to missing other client deadlines as well that might be happening around the same time, right? So you all know speed matters a ton. Quality matters as well. Poor hiring decisions lead to performance issues on the operation side of the house or even performance issues manifesting during onboarding and training. Delay or quality issues with hiring can lead to, as you all know, turnover, even turnover in the first 90 days, even 30 days, even no show rates on day one, right? If this person wasn't truly a fit, if they weren't really engaged and we thought they were all those kinds of quality hiring decisions can impact turnover in powerful ways. And lastly, quality issues leads to lost clients, right? If the issues are bad enough, it's going to affect client SLAs, going to damage those relationships. And the most important thing, which is your growing revenue base, will be at risk, right? So speed matters, quality matters, and there are, of course, tactics to improve hiring speed and hiring quality, right?

Tactics to improve speed. A number of things here, but just as one example, certainly you can reduce the number of screening steps that you require of candidates. There's nothing to stop you from even having no screening steps in the sense that you could have a candidate just upload their resume and then you make a hiring decision, right? And that's it. Certainly that would be faster, but that would have implications for quality, right? Similarly, there's tactics that you can employ that improve hiring quality like, similar to the other one, not reducing, but increase the number of screening steps, right? You could just add in more levels of screening and certainly quality would go up, but speed will go down. These types of tactics and the natural tension that exists between the two are not what we're focused on in today's webinar and not what Journeyfront's focused on. We are focused on how can you improve both speed and quality and what are those tactics like? There's a variety of tactics that don't cause that natural tension where by employing this tactic, it might move the needle on speed, but not quality or vice versa.

It actually can help improve both, right? So, for example, the example we used earlier, reducing or increasing the number of screening steps, we can certainly automate some of these screening steps. So, you're still going fast and perhaps even faster than if a human was doing that screening, but now we're both moving the candidate faster through and we might even be able to do more robust screening by automating steps versus what a manual screen might do where you're chasing candidates, calling them up on the phone and not getting too deep, kind of doing only surface level screening, right? And we'll talk more about what we mean by that. But the point is there are things that can be done to improve both speed and quality, and certainly, as you might have seen from that list on the right side, automation, if you're going to do this, improve both outcomes at once, as is required so often in BPO hiring, automation is going to be at the center of that. You're going to have to lean into automation. You have fixed team size.

Perhaps your team is very lean, as often BPOs run quite lean. You have fixed resources, yet growing candidate volumes, reducing deadlines, right? Reducing time to actually hire these people. You're going to need automation to do it. So, what we're going to talk about is Journeyfront's approach to this. We are obviously, for those that don't know us, we're an intelligent hiring platform focused on and built for BPOs to help BPOs improve hiring speed and quality. And we have a robust automation suite within this platform. If you think about automation, the kinds of things you might want to automate from a high level, you have three categories. You have to measure candidates during the hiring process and decide, you know, collect info and decide what you think about the info you've collected on those candidates. You have to then, obviously, decide what to do with the info you've reviewed, and then you have to act in a variety of different ways, right? Within Journeyfront, the measurement suite and what we can automate is very robust.

So, this includes things like using AI to score resumes tied to client requirements, screening questions that can produce knockouts of candidates that do not meet minimum qualifications or really in a pointed manner get at other things that are needed. But it also includes a robust set of other kinds of assessments, AI language testing, job simulations where the candidate tries out the job and you can test if they can do the job, behavioral assessments and so on, right? The point is we have the ability to introduce new ways of measuring candidates that are automated, they don't require a human, which means it can happen to every candidate in close to real time. It's not just the ways to automate the measurement with candidates, but it's how we aggregate all of those measurements being made that lets the rest of the automation suite produce its true power, right? And let me give you an example of what I mean by this. There's a lot of systems and approaches where you might have a resume scored on a 1 to 100 scale, you might have a human doing an evaluation that, you know, is kind of just in their head and then you might have some kind of, you know, language test that spits out a CEFR score, right?

For example, what Journeyfront allows you to do is in a customized manner, configurable by req, by geo, by client, the system normalizes all these scores. So as a candidate is going through the process, everything gets normalized on a 1 to 5 scale and all of that gets aggregated on that candidate's record. And we're going to show you what that looks like, you know, in a live setting here in a bit, but that normalization is crucial for being able to do a lot of the other robust things we can do in the rest of that, the part of that framework, the ability to decide and act, right? So now that all of these measurements can get normalized, both automated assessments, for example, that are built into the platform, but also human driven assessments can get normalized on that 1 to 5 score. It allows us to set variety of customizable pass fail thresholds that can vary job to job. It allows us to produce all of those scores and inputs in one place in an aggregate scorecard view that allows for both faster and higher quality hiring decisions.

And then all of those decisions could be made in seconds, right? Across all candidates at once. So essentially you're deciding up front when you're building this plan as opposed to each candidate by candidate by candidate as they come along. And then you can produce automated actions that might spin or spin out from those decisions that the system's making. So that could be rejecting a candidate, advancing, sending follow up reminders, scheduling those candidates for interviews, even matching them to different hiring classes based on their scores or moving them to another req, et cetera. Examples that my colleague Cody will speak to. So this is how Journeyfront approaches automation. Measure, decide, act. A lot of capabilities within that set of functionality. And I'm gonna turn it over to Cody to get a little bit more prescriptive in sharing how we go about doing this. And for any of our customers that are on this call, we're gonna actually do a little mini training on how to set up these automations so that you can really understand the details of how it's done.

Cody Jolley 11:27

Awesome, thanks for saying that foundation for us, Daniel. I'm super excited to be with everyone today. Before I get into the product to show you some things, there's some foundational stuff that you can understand. As Daniel mentioned, we have a whole suite of automation tools, which I'm gonna get to. One of those tools is our actual automations. And our automations are built on three things. There's a trigger, an event that starts it, right? Candidate completes the activity. Maybe they've been in a step or status for too long. That might be a trigger. Then we have a condition. So we have the trigger, the condition, what is needed in order for the action to take place, right? So conditions might be things like their score is too high or too low. Maybe their status was updated to rejected. Maybe they were assigned to a hiring class which triggers an action later down the line, right? And then we have the action. Which is the actual function that's gonna happen. You know, all these manual things that recruiters are forced to do on day to day.

What are those actions, right? So maybe move them to a step. Maybe we ought to reject them. Assign them to a hiring class. Maybe we're sending custom messages. Whether it's SMS, WhatsApp or what have you. A whole different things. And in fact, to give you a sense of like all the different variations here. You know, all the different types of triggers we have, right? They're hired, they're rejected. Time and step, right? We've got various different conditions. Some which I'm not gonna be able to get into today. That all allow you to get really custom in what your personal workflows are, your hiring flows are in each one of your respective businesses. And then actions. Assign a user, change a step, reject them, send an email, WhatsApp, sending a WhatsApp message, assigning the hiring class, moving them to another job req that they're more qualified for. Or just a list of a few actions that can be automated. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. That a lot of time is spent manually reaching out to candidates, trying to get them to move steps.

You know, a huge time saving here.

Daniel Ash 13:29

One of the things I'd add, Cody, just briefly is that the nice thing about this suite is it's customizable, req by req, geo by geo, and so on. But also you don't have to start with everything, right? You can start with what the most obvious things to automate are. Kind of a walk, run, fly approach. And then over time, as you maybe experience issues in the funnel or want to take it to the next level, you can add in other automations along the way. Yeah.

Cody Jolley 13:54

Yeah, so let's actually see what this looks like. So I'm going to go through in a live demonstration, a few automations that are set up based on that framework. I'm going to show you an automation that based on a pre-screen response are auto-rejected. I'm going to show you an automation that when they complete their application, they auto-advanced through an assessment or simulation without review. Show how kind of communications can be set up. Show a scenario of, you know, maybe I've got multiple roles open right now and someone's qualified, a technical qualified rep, how they automatically move to that job req and potentially hiring class. And then automated interview scheduling and submission, which we all know is quite a hassle to coordinate interviewing and once hiring managers, applicants, and keeping people moving. So these are just five I'm going to show, but as you can see from that previous slide, there's so many different combinations that we can have, again, based on your workflow.

So with that, let me share my screen and let's get into the product here. So I'm going to start here at the foundation. Can everyone see my screen, is that coming through? Okay, great. So what you're looking at here, this is Journeyfront. This is within a job req in Journeyfront and I'm in the job req set up. And the set up is where you go to essentially build out your hiring plan. And often when we work with clients, this step seems trivial. And I will say it does take an investment, right? It does take an investment to get things set up, to write your rules, to build your automations, to add your steps. But if you can change your mindset too, and TA and HR, we're people, right? So last thing we want to do is to get into a piece of technology and we just want to get the app and start talking to them.

But I'm telling you the investment upfront is worth it. Instead of spending hours of time reviewing resumes, you spend one hour setting up the req so that you never have to review a resume again. So let me show you what I'm talking about in this set up. The first thing I'm looking at is in the screening plan. So what is a screening plan? A screening plan is a list of all the steps and activities and automations, end to end from the time someone applies all the way through offer. In the screening plan, you'll see that I have a few steps. Pre-screen, I've got a few activities, qualification questions. One of the first automations you'll see is that we have a basic knockout that if they're under 18, they're automatically gonna get rejected. So I don't have to click through 100 applicants and see if they're 18 or not. It's just gonna do it for us, right? We also have an initial pre-screen as well, an AI video interview that they're gonna submit a video. Our AI tool is gonna score it so that I don't have to spend the time calling someone and seeing if their language ability is good enough, right?

It's gonna do it for me. The first automation will be the, within here we then create the automation and the first automation I created is that pre-screen auto-move that was mentioned before. So again, the framework, I've got a trigger. The candidate completes the activity. In this case, it's gonna be the internet speed test. I'm gonna delay it for two minutes. And then what's my condition? My condition is if they've completed all these activities and their overall score is greater than three and they haven't been rejected, I'm gonna move them to the simulations, which again, are gonna be scored using AI, right? I'm gonna advance them to the next step. Another one that I set up, similar idea, pre-screen final attempt. This seems simple, but I can't tell you how useful this is, especially when you get stale applicants. A lot of time is spent in reviewing who sent a message to the applicant, why are they still stuck?

What's going on? I love the use of automations to when they're in a step first or amount of period, they've been here for a long time, like let's just shoot them a custom message, right? A personal note saying, hey, we're still super interested in you. We'd love you to complete the application, right? And then a few others that I'm gonna show, the qualified technical roles. So let me give you the scenario. So what I'm gonna pretend is that I'm a recruiter and my main goal is to fill our customer service voice agent classes amongst my various clients. But I was given direction that there's this unique client that needs a technical support rep that maybe speaks German or some specific language. So on top of everything I'm doing, I need to somehow sift quickly a technical rep that's qualified, right? And this automation is gonna help us do that. And the way this is gonna work is that when they complete that qualification questions, I have a question built, pre-screen question, that asks them how much technical troubleshooting do you have?

You know, do you have any experience technical troubleshooting, right? And depending on their answer to that question, if they have a score of technical troubleshooting of, you know, five plus years, I'm gonna automatically move them to the req where computer skills is needed, where I'm hiring that applicant, okay? And then the last thing that I'm gonna demonstrate as far as automations is the automated interview scheduler. So we've got a tool very similar to Calendly, although designed for recruiting and recruiting needs, where I have this interview activity, and what I wanna do is if people pass my assessments, I immediately wanna invite them onsite to do an actual recruiter interview. And in theory, they should be totally qualified. They've met all the qualifications, they pass the simulation, the language test, the skills test, so that when they come onsite, I'm more or so validating that they meet the requirements and then obviously some logistics that all recruiters have to do.

So in the recruiter interview, I've set the activity so that when they move here, when they move to this step, it's automatically going to send them a link to schedule and it's gonna show up immediately on my calendar when they've scheduled the interview, okay? Last two things before I actually show you the capabilities of once you've set up kind of all these things. So we've mainly been talking about the screening plan, measurements that we're gonna use to automate qualifications, auto advance, statuses, et cetera. There are two other tools that I'm gonna talk about briefly. One is AI resume scoring. So much time is spent reviewing resumes. We have a tool that if an applicant submits a resume, you put in the qualifications that matter to you. When we look at resumes, there's always stuff we're looking at, right? We're looking at, do they have any close employers that meet the employers we care about?

Sometimes we look at job hopping, have they only been in jobs for a few months, right? And recruiters have these mental notes of all these things you're looking at in a resume. And again, this is the investment upfront where I can come in and put instructions. Hey, when I look at a resume, I wanna look at these things that matter. And I just set up a simple example of I'm looking for some technical troubleshooting experience and then I'm making sure that they have all of these things, call center experience, and then I do have this job hopping. So I wanna see, do we see them hopping between jobs? Okay, so that's another thing that's gonna configure. I'm gonna show you where this comes in place here in a second. And last thing is the use of AI agents to do the follow up. A lot of manual time is spent by recruiters following up with people. Have you submitted this? Can you complete your application? I'm still missing this form on the onboarding, right?

A great use of agents and AI and recruiting is those manual tasks, right? Of following up and so forth. And so I've configured an agent to kind of help me with those tasks, okay? Once I've set up all these things, I am geared to go and I'm gonna make a statement that you guys are gonna be like, there's no way. But in theory, with all this set up, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to have a same day hire or hire someone within three hours of their first application or what have you. We have countless customers who have proven that out where they're literally time to hire, especially in peak season onsite is like just a few hours from the time they apply to get them all the way through. And I know that sounds crazy, but I'm gonna show you a real example of how that happens based on these automations and these triggers. Okay, so I've set up, now I'm gonna go into kind of a live req applicant pool scenario.

Quick call out is not the point of this kind of webinar, but to me, one thing that is not technically capturing the automation is the organization aggregation of the things as a recruiter I wanna see. A lot of people use like custom spreadsheets to aggregate all the information and make a lot of manual things to like keep their notes different. What I've done, I've set up this view of columns to the things that matter to me. I'm mainly hiring customer service voice agents, but I'm looking for this technical qualified person who might speak a different language for this unique class, right? So what I have here is the people's names or emails, their overall score, their statuses, and then I have a few things that matter to me. I'm looking at technical troubleshooting, I'm looking at languages that they submitted and potentially sources that they've applied to, okay? You also notice that on here, I have my AI tools working for me where I've got my AI resume scores and my agent who's working on follow-up tasks for me, right?

On top of that, at the very base level, right? I can, because I've set up all of my attributes, my skills test, my internet speed test, whatever, all the things that I care about, language ability, I have an overall score where I can quickly rank applicants, right? So in this case, I see Dwight Schrute, he's actually my best applicant, but in this job where he got rejected, and the reason he got rejected was because he's qualified for a technical role. So that's cool, that's nice, I click into Dwight, I'm looking in and seeing why is that the case? And come to find out, he's got five plus years of technical troubleshooting, the automation ran, and he's been moved to that job req that I care about where I'm hiring for that very niche role, right? Boom, I don't even have to do anything, I don't even have to look at Dwight's scorecard, I'm just doing this for the demonstration, that's been done for me, right? Bada-bing, bada-boom.

All right, let me show you some of the other cool things. To prove my point, is it possible to make a same day hire? How far can we take this? So I have this applicant, Marisol here, and I'm going to go to comments and activities, and what I have here is the applicant begins the application at 11 today. They complete all their tests, their typing tests, their qualification questions, they complete the AI video interview, right? And the automation runs because this person passes and automatically moves to the simulation. In this case, the applicant gets an email to complete the simulation, they complete the simulation, right? And now they're 10 minutes into the application, they're already on step two, right? Now here we are, 11.08. They complete it, they submit the simulation, they submit their video interview, and then immediately this person is moved and receives an email saying, hey, please schedule an interview, let's have it scheduled, right?

And here I am as a recruiter, I don't have a spreadsheet that I need to go to, I don't need to do anything like that, I see my interview in Marisol happening in two hours. Pretty cool, right? Here we are, just open this morning, and in the afternoon I'm having someone come on site For this req, I just opened up. I submit my interview, right? complete my interview. There's another automation that in this case, it moved into manual review because this person didn't do super well in their recruiter interview. We moved them along and they finished the manager and now they're going to sign the hiring class and move to the offer letter, all of this has happened. And mind you, real interviews, I recognize take 20 to 30 minutes, but adding that from 11 oh two plus the 20 40 by 12 20, we've gone all the way through this application, all the way to the offer. Two last things, on kind of this kind of demonstration.

I mentioned that there are AI tools automatically scoring. So we have the knockouts, right? That if they don't meet a qualification, they're automatically going to be rejected. We also have AI scoring going on where it's listening to the call. It's providing me a response of why this person, you know, has verbal communication skills and it's automatically scoring it for me. If you, if any of anyone on this call has ever had to review video interviews or listen to video interviews, it's a lot of time. It's a lot of time to listen to all those calls. And if you're doing a mass volumes, like we're talking about a hundred applicants a day, you do not have time unless you're going to put a lot, a lot of manpower to review every application, every video interview, automated score generated really simple. Same thing with the simulations, a series of questions based on the role. You know, in this case, this is an angry customer. They have to listen to call. They have to respond and, you know, they didn't do super a good job.

You know, they yelled at the person. I told them to calm down. They got a one, right? It all scored up for them. in a really quick way. The last thing is, when we look at resumes, again, a huge time spent reviewing resumes, I've got an AI tool that based on the things I care about is scraping the resume and seeing does this person have customer service experience, you know, did they work at a call center, right? And it's highlighting where we picked this up on foreign language. Yep. They already have it. It saves me the time as a recruiter to have to go through line by line and quickly kind of aggregate and see, okay. Yep. They check the boxes. Do, do, do. we're good to go. No job hopping. We're happy with it. Again, no human intervention at all. So as you can imagine over scale and time, what this cuts down, and just these five automations I've shown is the ability to have to sort people based on qualifications for one req over another, it automatically moves people to other reqs that they're qualified for, it simplifies the need for me having to follow up, be email, text, what have you.

I've got automations that when they reach certain steps or times, I'm going to send out that communication. I've automated AI review or resume review completely with an AI tool where me as a human, if I need to still look at the resume, I can. But because I've taken time to put in my qualifications, the things that I'm looking at when I review a resume, I trust that it's doing its thing. And the final thing is I've configured the columns and the attributes I care about so that as a recruiter, I can quickly see who are my top rank applicants, who got knocked out because they weren't 18, right? And I'm going to call Evans, right? I can see which agents are working, which applicants. So I don't have to spend the time following up. I trust that we're sending messages to get them to complete the next steps. hopefully this is helping, you guys get a sense of, you know, just a few automations, how much time this can save.

Organizationally, and, with the standards that you set up. So you aren't losing quality, right? I'm measuring these people against the skills that I care about. I'm using job simulations and language tests to ensure they meet the quality that my clients require. okay. That's in the live demo, unless Daniel, Emmalyn, Dave, if there's anything you want me to touch on here, if not, I'll end with a few last tips.

Daniel Ash 30:16

Yeah, I think we're good. Let's, let's give a, let's end on a few last tips and tricks, and then we'll open up for any questions the group has.

Cody Jolley 30:24

Okay. as we've prepared for this, I was asked, you know, what were some, you know, tips and tricks I've learned across all the customers and I came up with just a handful that I think are super helpful. The first one is document the happy path. What I mean by that is in order for you to set up automations, you have to know what the path is. So in a piece of paper somewhere notes right down the steps, I want them to apply through Facebook, and then if they're over three, I want them to move to pre-screen and if they're in pre-screen, I will move to this. Write it out. It's worth it. It will help you organize when you go in to create automations to know which ones that need to be built, versus trying to figure out, okay, how is this actually going to work? build it out, build a workflow piece of paper, some notes. It helps a ton. The second tip.

Daniel Ash 31:10

Cody, just as an aside, if you're a Journeyfront client, we will help you with that too. We have a large, what? 12,000 person BPO we're about to launch here globally right now. And, and they hire the US, Latin America, and the Philippines in mass. And we have built out workflows, the Philippines workflow, the US and the Latin America in collaboration with them. So you can rely on our team to help you document these happy paths as well.

Cody Jolley 31:36

Yeah. Okay. Second tip. when you implement anything now, and this has, I think it's a true principle for anything, but definitely automations is once you deploy it, make sure you have eyes on the funnel, right? Did my configurations work as I expected? Did I see the drop off drop off? I was, I was hoping have I removed the amount of manual steps or tasks that my recruiting team is doing to an automation or an AI tool? we have tools in Journeyfront that make it really easy to see time and step and where the bottlenecks are. but when automations are deployed, always go back. Once you deploy it, check the funnel. Did it improve? Are people getting stuck? You know, you don't want that to build up over time. The third one asking us about their experience. it's, it is so valuable to ask one simple question after an application.

You know, Hey, candidate, what did you think on a scale one to five of your application experience? You know, or if you want specific information on, you know, what was your experience scheduling an interview? Did you like that? Did you like my onboarding form? Right. to help inform kind of what we can do to improve our automations. one thing that this helps with is a lot of people get concerns with, well, if I have automations, am I going to lose the human touch? Ask that, you know, I'm going to ask the survey. Thanks for completing it. You know, did you feel like you were, you were, we were attentive and, you know, being humans, even though maybe a robot is doing it behind the scenes, right? and then the fourth tip is, know the limits of the system. in Journeyfront, but any system you're, you're knowing, you have to understand kind of the limits that you're working with. and, so specific concrete examples for this is, the framework that I just showed trigger, condition, action, right?

that's, I need to have all three in order for an automation to work. Right. know what actions can happen or not happen, within the system. So that as you start building and you get to a place, you're like, oh, shoot, I thought I could do this. Right. And we've wasted time or we thought I was going to do something that was going to do. to Daniel's point, if you're a Journeyfront customer, we'd love spending time to help you understand this and the limitations of what it can or can't do. So you can work within the bounds of the product that you've used. so we definitely, yeah, want to state that, yeah. So those are just kind of my tips and trips. So let's, let's, yeah, any questions.

Dave Biesinger 34:17

Well, great job, both Cody and Daniel, I know it probably feels like we've been drinking out of the fire hose for a little bit, and, you may have questions for this portion. Feel free to unmute yourself and just ask the questions. you know, we want this to feel like a discussion. If you're not comfortable with that, feel free to drop the questions in the chat and, we'll just open it up to you. What questions do you have? Yeah, you can either, ask, drop in the chat or even just message to Dave on the chat. You've done that already. Yeah. Okay. So here's a question for Daniel. how does automation change the role of the recruiter? Since, it seems like the system is doing some of the things that recruiters often do. So how does the role change?

Daniel Ash 35:09

Yes. so obviously automating some of these activities, starting, with low value activities that, you know, maybe it's not the best use of recruiters time to chase a candidate, a random candidate of the thousand that abandoned the completion process, the pre-screen process, or, you know, trying to coordinate in an interview, right? By automating those things away, it certainly shifts the work of the recruiter, to where they can focus on more high value activities. We've seen that this, becomes more of the role becomes a bit more of a talent orchestrator because the top of the funnel filtering and screening can be taken care of the recruiter can sit atop the process and they're not responsible for pushing and moving all these, you know, this volume through the process, they're, they're responsible for monitoring it and making sure that we have the numbers we need at the top of the funnel or mid funnel. Because we got it. We know how many people we need to hire for client A versus client B versus client C by X, Y, and Z dates.

Right? So that's what I mean by talent orchestrator there. They're certainly more involved in some of the, areas you want them to be involved in where they can maybe have the biggest impact. So for example, really high fit candidates, following up with them manually. Cody showed, we have a AI agent that can do the follow up. Interestingly, the recruiter can actually supervise the AI agent and tell them, I want you to manage these candidates and I'm going to take these candidates and the agent will not touch these other candidates, right? That's all opt in and you have configuration capabilities of where they use this, where you use that or how, but that's an example of being a talent orchestrator. And then more high volume activities would be things like, you know, that final phone screen for only candidates who have been engaged, completed the pre-screen and the assessment process who are already qualified, certainly selling the candidate on the role that involvement right at that crucial point can be very important. Certainly the putting more thought by taking away some of the manual work that might be done, freeing up the recruiters time to put more thought into the actual kind of back end of the process, matching of specific candidates to specific clients based on their alignment with that hiring profile, freeing up these manual steps and kind of low value activities is what allows recruiters to do that.

So those are some ways, certainly recruiters are able to manage more hiring classes and more candidate volume by deploying automation, whether it's with a system like Journeyfront or otherwise, those are, those are a few things that come to mind.

Cody Jolley 37:33

You know, just add one thing to that, Dave, as well, before we go to the next question is I love this question because as I stated in my section, TA and HR were people, right? And too often I see talent teams really changed the role of what talent acquisition and HR is to like managing spreadsheets, following up. I, you know, I can't tell how many customers have like whole teams that they literally call them screeners. And what they do is just screen and call applicants. They're not even recruiting by automating all these things. I think you are allowing recruiters to do what they do best, which is selling people, qualified people on the company, actively creating good campaigns for sourcing and getting people in, these activities have so much higher ROI for a company than filling out and completing spreadsheets or having to call people or click through resumes. All needed, but if you've got technology, let's get recruiters doing recruiting things.

So, you know,

Dave Biesinger 38:37

Great, great answers. Great question. yeah, any, anyone else, I've got a, I've got a few more here, but I want to make sure that, attendees, feel free to come off mute and ask your question. So if not, we're going to jump into, yeah. How do you decide like what scoring threshold to set? Is it like a gut call? Do you let the data tell you like, how do you manage that? Cody, you want to answer that one?

Cody Jolley 39:11

Yeah. So there's definitely levels here. you know, level one, we naturally do this. like I mentioned, when recruiters are looking at resumes, there's kind of a checklist of like criteria they're looking for, right? I'm looking for two to two to three years experience in this. I'm looking for people with this language experience, et cetera. So level one is like, Hey, I'm just going to do what I'm doing as a human in my brain, but putting it into a technology and quantifying it. So people two plus three years of experience, get a score of three people below that could score one. I would say that's level one for like thresholds and overall scores. level two is, when you actually start using data to, choose your thresholds and your actions, I'll give you a small example. we had a customer once that their hiring manager was convinced that they needed, I'm just going to use like a, example, so it doesn't go away.

But they need people that worked at McDonald's. Okay. They absolutely needed two years of McDonald's experience. And that was like a threshold that they decided, right? fast forward a year, we do analysis people with more McDonald's experience and less than McDonald's experience. Are they still performing? Are they still retaining? Come to find out that it wasn't five plus years of McDonald's experience that led to good performers or people that retaining, it was actually like less than one year of experience, the total opposite of what the hiring managers thought. So that data changed the threshold from we need people with a score of five plus on this attribute to actually need people with a score of less than one on the attribute. So that's a kind of a level two, three, and four, when you include data to, decide the thresholds and the automation pass and fail. And we want all of our customers to get that point. Yeah.

Daniel Ash 41:06

In other words, what starts off as, you know, setting these scoring thresholds in the profile is a, is a combination of, you know, the client requirements, what do they require? You know, what language see for score, what skills, what have you working with the recruiters, working with operations and our team helping as well from our experience with other clients over time, we can use the data to inform those decisions too. And we haven't talked about that and we won't go into depth, but Journeyfront also has this feedback loop that we call it the closed loop that will analyze all those scores you saw on that scorecard Cody showed against things like your new hire, agent performance KPIs and, or retention of hires, and we'll identify what's correlating with success and retention within the role. And, and that's his example he's using of, we saw that people that had this optimal range of experience were actually those that performed best stayed longest, not the previous range of experience that they had thought. So that's what he's referencing.

Dave Biesinger 42:01

It was great when your assumptions get challenged, right? great question, great answers. we'll just ask one more. I think one of the concerns people may have is that this candidate experience could feel robotic or, inhuman and Cody, you've touched on the importance of maintaining that human connection in the recruiting process. So how do you ensure that the candidate experience is good throughout this? Yeah, that's, for me, Dave. for you and Daniel, why don't you both answer?

Cody Jolley 42:37

Yeah, I'll start here. Yeah, so, I'm going to start first back with the importance of taking time to invest in the build. So, if all you're doing is like a simple, please complete the next step as a reminder communication automation, that feels really robot, robotic, and it feels like spam in your email versus something like, hi, my name is Cody. I work at Journeyfront and I was really impressed with your resume. And I feel like you'd be a great fit. Would you mind completing your application? Although there is a, an agent behind the scenes saying that message when someone receives it, that seems like a real thing that seems like that came from a person and it takes time for companies to invest that level of kind of personal touch and the communication and what have you. and then I feel strongly that human, a human touch needs to happen. So once you set up the automation, as soon as you can get someone in front of a human, the better, even if that means like, Hey, I'm not even going to do an interview.

If someone completes the application, I'm just going to give them a personal call or ring just to say, Hey, there's more than just a robot behind her. There's a human looking at this and I appreciate what you've done. Right. and the last thing that's super important is you kind of have to over communicate what's happening. So when you have a, an application, you want to put things like, this is going to take five minutes to complete. And here are the steps you can expect, you know, you're going to finish it at the pre-screen, there'll be simulation and then, you know, we'll invite you on site. what is really jarring for candidates is when they don't know, Oh, I'm going to be expected to submit a video interview. Ooh, that's bad. we've got case study after case study of when you put a simple message ahead that says, Hey, for this next activity, we need you to be in a quiet place, we're going to ask you to record a video. We want to get to know you. That increases so much the completion rate versus people thinking, Oh, I'm going to submit this and no one's ever going to review it.

Right. or, you know, this was a surprise to me. This was jarring. this isn't a super human touch. So those are really the three things that I would recommend to make sure you're still being a human and have the human touching application. Yeah, Daniel, what are your thoughts?

Daniel Ash 44:55

Yeah, I'll just leave it at, this is the experience can be designed to be mobile friendly. cause you wouldn't have lots of cans. Maybe they're applying from their phones and simple in that fashion. It's designed to, because it's all in one workflow, one single system, you know, what often happens skipping around a different systems, this for the ATS, this for an application, this for the, this for the assessment portion as an example, that clunkiness can be minimized where it's just one single flow. The candidate knows exactly what they're doing. giving candidates visibility via these automations on where they are in the process, that's what Cody means by investing. Like a lot of the biggest friction that candidates feel is confusion around what, where they are in the process or skipping around a different systems and just never hearing back from that black hole once they submit their application, those are things that automation can help, introduce and by automating a lot of those kinds of things, you even can add more of the human touch on the candidates for whom it matters most, those who are qualified and have shown engagement.

So those are some additional things that you can do.

Dave Biesinger 45:58

Great, great answers. Well, we're going to, unless there are any more questions that anyone wants to ask, we're going to go ahead and wrap here. thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you to the presenters for taking some time to share your wisdom. we are offering, we'll distribute the recording. First off, we'll send this around if you want to share it with anyone. There's also a companion guide that goes with this and you'll get that as well, so that if there are any topics that you want to dive into in greater depth, you'll have a document where you can dive into those topics. And then finally, if anybody who has attended here today would like a free copy of our book, the BPO hiring playbook, please just send me a note and I will send you a physical copy in the mail for free.