Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Candidate centric operating model is not negotiable. Good experience can't be faked. It needs to be built into every single step of your journey, into your systems, into your people.
When we evaluated what truly drives performance in customer experience roles skills were more reliable predictor than previous work experience, former formal education or anything like that.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series.
In this episode Cathy Enderis speaks with Irena Marich, global talent acquisition leader and HR technology strategist at Found Ever. Irena discusses how Found Ever is transforming talent acquisition with the help of Maki people.
They explore explore the innovative use of AI to create tailored skills based assessments in multiple languages, significantly enhancing the recruitment experience across 45 countries.
Let's get to it.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: Irena, welcome to the what Works podcast. I'm so excited to have you.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
[00:01:14] Speaker C: To get started, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and about your company.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: I am a talent acquisition strategist at Foundeavor. FoundeVR is a global leader in the customer experience.
We support over 750 top brands and we operate in 45 countries with a workforce of approximately 170,000 people and we deliver more than 9 million customer interactions per day.
My focus is designing scalable hiring strategies that are focused on speed, efficiency and quality, but also putting into equation the dynamics of customer experience environment.
So that means blending technology with data and candid centric design.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: Great. So 170,000 employees around the world, where are you located?
[00:02:09] Speaker A: I am originally from Croatia but I live in Serbia.
[00:02:13] Speaker C: 170,000 employees and you're in customer experience. So what are the problems when you are trying to hire probably a lot of people and when you're trying to recruit a lot of people around the world with a focus on experience?
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Well, as you can imagine in 45 countries we have many different setups when it comes to hiring and therefore we have different challenges and problems we're trying to solve.
Hiring at scale in some of our markets is not just a logistical challenge, it's a strategic one. As you can imagine operating in such a high profile environment, we had some rigid hiring models.
We needed to face them and become more innovation driven. We had some inconsistencies in recruitment which means that outcomes of hiring and can't experience were not aligned amongst the markets. So we wanted to have that true response to candidate expectations because candidate expectations are evolving over the years. Just like in the world of web browsing, right? Candidates are expecting faster, more engaging process and of course, above all, the process.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: To be fair, how many candidates do you get and how many hires do you have a year? I mean, it must be a huge volume.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: It's a huge volume and it's not possible to say just like one number because it doesn't give the full picture. But I can tell you that we had times when we hired 2,000 people over a weekend.
[00:03:46] Speaker C: So you hired 2,000 people over a weekend. How do you hire at scale like this?
[00:03:52] Speaker A: The team works as an army. Everybody knows their role.
There is no unified talent acquisition function, which means people are segmented into specific areas of expertise. So we have pre screeners, screeners, interviewers, people who are specifically trained to conduct behavioral interviews, people who are skilled in interpreting assessment results, and then the hiring managers who would finally make a decision based off everything that systems produced and the human input produced.
[00:04:27] Speaker C: How does technology change all of this? Because we hear a lot about AI, obviously changing the talent acquisition process and talent acquisition function function. How does it impact that?
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Well, I found ever generally in the last couple of years took the route of bringing AI into life.
And when I say that we first wanted our employees to get acquainted with AI. So in addition to some tools that we have internally, like helping with writing or translation or internal generative AI, we're also focused on AI strategy. Strategy for our clients. Right. But before we can roll that out to a client, we of course wanted to have really, you know, sound case within the company.
And when it comes to talent acquisition, with our previous assessment partner, we did not have that. And we kind of felt that with this global strategy that company is going towards, it makes sense to introduce that in talent acquisition space.
So we partnered with Maki people in order to gain a couple of benefits. Right. So we liked that the assessments were skill based. Their technology was focusing on what matters to us.
And for high volume hiring of customer service, you pretty much need to understand their communication skills, typing speed, how they handle chats, their language proficiency is number one, and the customer service aptitude.
And so with that skills based approach, we absolutely love that. And in addition to that, we were also able to build something we called SJTs or situational judgment tests.
Now these are immersive experiences that can be tailored to a specific customer service role. So agent role, it can be customer service, it can be sales oriented, technical, and it can even go deeper into the industry. So it can be immersive specific for healthcare or insurance verticals.
[00:06:29] Speaker C: So what does it mean to have a skill based assessment? How is it different to a old Fashioned assessment data is telling us that.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: 99% of candidates, after being asked about their experience, are saying that they appreciate more being assessed on their skills than on traditional experience, competences and so forth. Traditional way of screening might not bring into the true light what candidate is bringing to the table.
So someone may have skills intrinsically and needs very little work to make them into something super proficient and very professional. Right. So when we say skill based, we pretty much mean skills that are relevant for our industry.
We have a huge talent pool of people who have not had previous work experiences. So for them, it's really hard to explain what the job is just by reading a job description. So they don't get the full idea of what job entails, what are the requirements, how am I going to be positioned against the client and things like that. So these realistic job previews which are assessing customer service skills or actually helping candidates as well to understand the role, to understand the company.
It's like, you know, instead of reading a PDF, someone puts you in a room and here you are, here is a call center and here's your headset and here's a client or here's a customer and then you need to respond to this customer and you need to act like this and you need to follow this, you know, method and you need to look into this database for information.
So, you know, it's, it's really helpful and useful for them as well to get acquainted to our role. Because maybe during that process someone will understand that, hey, this is not for me. And then we don't want to waste anyone's time, right? Or maybe, oh, okay, this is what it is. I think I can do this. That's already better. You know, it gives, it increases the motivation of a candidate.
[00:08:31] Speaker C: That's super important, I think. So it's not just for you and your team to understand what the candidate can do, but it's for the candidate to understand what the job is really about. How long are the assessment in general?
[00:08:43] Speaker A: For the majority of markets, we are trying not to go over 27 minutes to keep it under 30 minutes just for the sake of candid experience.
But in some cases where we really need a thorough assessment, then it doesn't go over 45 on average.
Maki has this really great functionality of spoken language assessment. Previously, all of these language dimensions were assessed based on tests and they are long and they are black and white or gray and they're boring and candidates are losing concentration.
And so we have now spoken language assessment and it's two minute recording and Then Maki transforms that speech to text transformation. And then this transcript goes through the Sephir framework, which is common European framework for assessing a language skill. So once you get Zephyr level, that pretty much stays that way unless you are improving your language skills and you can use that moving forward.
[00:09:46] Speaker C: How does AI get used in these tests?
[00:09:52] Speaker A: It exists in the spoken language proficiency. There is a conversion after the speech into text and then the transcript goes through the Sephir framework. So in addition to that, what we also liked on Bucky is the ability to create avatars and they're a bit conversational, so we can tailor them based on our market specifics. So for Philippines region, we have one Persona with the Philippine specific name and image and the tone of voice that is guiding candidates through first steps. And then these few first steps are very important so candidates can relax and feel, you know, confident they can do it. And this avatar Persona provides a bit of encouragement and also helps with explanation of every next activity in the process. Right. So we have different Personas per region.
Of course it can be one Persona. We can have separate one by every country. But I don't think that, you know, some things just don't make sense to complicate. So this did a really, really good job. So that's also where it's included.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: What results have you gotten so far from using this new process and the new approach to the assessments?
[00:11:10] Speaker A: In the first six months we had I believe 200,000 candidates completing marquee. I know we have 95% candidate satisfaction rate. After each activity, there is a quick survey for a candidate. How did you like this activity? And then they can grade it and provide comments.
So 95% of candidates appreciate the flow, saying experience was faster, easier and more engaging. As I mentioned, they also like being assessed on screen skills and not credentials. I think 99% of them said that this type of assessment flow actually improved their perception of Foundevr as an employer. And when it comes to time, time to hire, that's a bit trickier. In some markets we are achieving 100% on time fill rate.
I'm talking about countries who deployed Maki. And in other countries we have reported so talent acquisition teams reported the improved hiring efficiency.
So I would say overall highly positive feedback from the markets.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: So the candidates, they liked also that they get feedback, is that right?
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that was also one of the amazing things that we have never had before. And in addition to us being able to create assessments, we can super easily adjust the assessments so that after candidate completes it, it gets sent automatically to candidate's email address.
So it's something they get out of the, for them. And you know, specifically with personality tests, people just love someone to tell them about their traits, about the dominant traits, you know, things that are part of their personality print. And that's one of the main assessments that we are sending to candidates.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: You learn something about yourself, right, when you go through the process. About yourself, about your skills, about your personality and about also as you said before, about you're fit for this job or not, right. You can learn if this job is going to be for you. And I'm sure there's been times when people then opted out of the process, but it's a good thing because otherwise you'd hire them potentially and they get to the job and then they say, oh my God, this is nothing for me. And then I got to leave you anyway. And it's just wasted time and effort for everybody. So this is really great. Well, I know we could talk for hours more, but I know we're almost out of time. So as we wrap up, what are your lessons learned? What did you learn on this process? Anything that was difficult, anything that was surprising to you as you went through this process of really changing the assessment process around and using AI and technology in new ways.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: I would recommend everyone introducing AI in small steps, of course, so that everybody feels comfortable in that, right? It's not an easy transformation for recruiters, that's for sure. Because people like to do things their old way. They get comfortable in their old ways, they, they trust the old way. Right? So now it takes time to build that trust, which is not easy. You know, with humans it's easy. You meet someone, you, you talk to them, you, you look face to face and you automatically have this type of like either reaction or you know, you either connect or you don't connect, but you have an opinion, right? So, and this is very different, you are completely like disarmed because all of your mechanisms are gone now. So they don't like they can participate in this type of relationship. Right. But what we did learn is that there is no way back. Candidate centric attitude, candidate centric operating model is not negotiable. Right.
Good experience can't be faked, right. It needs to be built in, into every single step of your journey, into your systems, into your people.
We definitely prefer skill based assessments because when we evaluated what truly drives performance in customer experience roles, skills were more reliable predictor than previous work experience, formal education or anything like that.
Also, partnering with Maki is great because they are helping us structure our thoughts around future in hiring transformation. Right. So we have some ideas. We partner with them, we are brainstorming. They basically are very open to listen to us.
We are partnering on the roadmap, not in the sense that we are directing the roadmap, but we are providing inputs and, you know, things that we would love to see happening in the future. And they're very receptive to our needs. And yeah, that's what I think that we learned from this experience. It was a great journey.
[00:16:00] Speaker C: Great. So where are you going next? Where are you taking this next?
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Well, Maki AI agents, we want to build them into our broader tech stack.
And for now, yes, they will be focused on pre screening actions. But moving forward, potentially we would like to see them being more autonomous in taking actions and not just assisting.
So actions like screening, scheduling, stimulation, learning from interactions can free up a lot of time for talent acquisition.
We of course need to be very careful regarding that because different markets have different regulations regarding AI, so we're very cautious of that. But we do have markets where we can, we could pilot a step further from, from what we are currently implementing.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Wow. So how is it going to change the role of the recruiter? Because if they have all these autonomous agents doing this, what's the role of the recruiter going to be?
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Well, first, I think I would give them a different name, like talent Advisors.
They will be helping candidates find their best role.
I think they will be doing what currently AI cannot, and it's questionable whether or not it will be capable of that in the future, which is looking at the person holistically because, you know, I can easily want to be an astronaut. Right. My knowledge and skills can be great, but I'm afraid of heights. So does it really make sense for me? You know, I have like, everything is a plus, plus, plus, and in the combination, I'm a great candidate. But, you know, this one thing which presents the hygiene element that can be screened out by a person only, that's.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: A great way to end. And I totally agree with you. We call this the super worker, where we're saying recruiters eventually will become what we call superworkers, which they are going to focus much more on the human aspects of this work, while the AI takes a lot of the other things away from them. But it's going to eventually be a much more interesting job and a much more engaging job at a much more meaningful job job. So totally agree with you.
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I learned a lot about what you're doing, and I think you are really setting the stage and trailblazing what it means to be in recruiting and candidate experience for the future. So I can't thank you enough.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: You're more than welcome. Thank you for having me.
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Thank you for listening to this engaging episode of the what Works podcast series.
We hope you found my conversation with Irena Maric, global talent acquisition Leader and HR Technology strategist at foundever, both informative and inspiring. Irena's insights into leveraging AI for transforming talent acquisition and improving the candidate experience using Machi people's AI was so compelling. If this episode resonated with you, be sure to to subscribe for more conversations with experts. Until next time, keep exploring what works in your world.
