The process of recruitment has benefited hugely from the development of automated application tracking system (or ATS) workflows that help perform the initial triage of applicants, cutting down submissions to a more manageable size for the HR manager.
However, whilst this provides efficiencies to the hiring organisation, it can leave candidates feeling frustrated or potentially even discriminated against when they don’t have visibility into why they haven’t been selected to progress. The worst kind of feedback is no feedback.
Let’s take a look at this in more detail and how FORTYEIGHT can help create more transparency in the process without losing the benefits of automation.
How recruitment automation works
When a recruiter receives applications for a position, these could number in the hundreds or thousands. It would take a human hours to go through all of these to filter out the least qualified.
Automations are useful because they can apply a criteria to do this filtering process. For example, if the job posting asks for a minimum 5 years’ experience, your ATS might automatically reject all those applicants who don’t meet this threshold. Unsuccessful candidates are then moved into a ‘Disqualified’ tab and forgotten about, or at most sent a short automated email informing them their application wasn’t successful and to thank them for their time.
Automation workflows continue to become more intelligent, fast progressing from simple application forms with multi-choice responses that disqualify candidates based on their answers, to more intelligent systems that benchmark CVs using neural networks that are trained to determine candidate suitability using topic detection, linguistic analysis and social profiling.
The personal touch is lost and applicants can quickly get discouraged, or feel ‘tricked’ by the organisation they’ve applied to. This simple lack of transparency can rapidly spiral into regulatory issues from non-compliance with the obligations of GDPR’s Article 22 on automated individual decision-making, to damage of a company’s talent brand that results from candidates’ perception of bias and discrimination.
This is where we come in.
How FORTYEIGHT can help
FORTYEIGHT acts as a transparency layer between you and your applicants, letting applicants know what observations have been made about them by you and your technology, and giving them the option to review the accuracy of those observations, and retain them for the future.
Step 1: When a candidate applies for a position and you analyse their application or CV, you observe their suitability for the position as “Not qualified” as a result of them not meeting the criteria described in the job description.
Step 2: For each observation you make about the applicant, your system notifies FORTYEIGHT using our RESTful API or by uploading a CSV of these observations.
Step 3: We inform the applicant in real time, providing them with a simple interface to view and understand the observation(s) you have made about them, and to review their accuracy.
Instead of selecting and rejecting candidates ‘behind closed doors’, FORTYEIGHT brings this process out into the open, informing them when their application has been rejected by the initial screening process and telling them why.
Why you should use FORTYEIGHT
The benefits of integrating FORTYEIGHT with your applicant tracking system are to show candidates that you value transparency in your hiring process, and want to give them as much information as possible to help them become more successful in their job search.
Just as salary transparency transformed the industry in terms of hiring women, making your hiring process more transparent by informing each applicant of the observations made about them, you will be able to increase all aspects of diversity in your pipeline.
This novel approach also helps address the mounting concern over the implementation of Article 22 of GDPR within the recruitment industry. FORTYEIGHT’s transparency-as-a-service API ensures candidates are given the means to express their point of view over the data collected about them. You can read more about using FORTYEIGHT to address Article 22 in this article.
Getting started with FORTYEIGHT
From your end it’s simple - once you sign up with FORTYEIGHT, you connect with our API to notify us each time a new observation has been made about an applicant. We use that notification to inform the user, who then decides what to do with it.
Book a demo with our team to learn more about FORTYEIGHT.
