With a new team of Talent Acquisition (TA) professionals to embed, Sanna Selvehed, Project Manager Talent Experience, and the Talent Acquisition team wanted to:
- Increase objectivity, improve diversity and reduce TA inference
- Reframe thinking to focus on potential over readiness
- Improve the candidate experience
- Involve Hiring Managers more closely in recruiting
Rejlers partnered with Alva Labs and Teamtailor: Teamtailor to provide a custom Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and dashboard, and Alva Labs to provide early-stage psychometric assessment and core-skills based role-profiles to locate candidates who have potential to grow.
A modern consultancy firm with outdated methods
“It’s normal to want to recruit people based on what is known, who has the same background and experience as many of the others in the teams ” says Sanna. McKinsey has shown that the least diverse organisations perform in the bottom quartile for growth, and Rejlers wanted diverse voices, backgrounds and people to bring challenge and friction.
Increasing diversity requires strategic partners. Sanna and the TA team knew that tackling screening was a priority, because, when screening relies on CVs, women have to send in 30% more applications to secure an interview, and People of Colour have to send in an additional 50%.
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Says Sanna, ”Hiring Managers were certain that screening candidates for ‘readiness’ and past experience was the best way to hire”. All they needed was a simple alternative that could help TAs and HMs to find a new way to find potential and stop relying on manual readings of CVs.
Seeking simplicity in assessments and lower workloads
Across its workforce of more than 2,000 employees, Rejlers had been using traditional, late-stage psychometric assessments in some recruitments. In addition to not aiding diversity effort, traditional strategies provide recruiters with more opaque results that need to be interpreted. Says Sanna, “We needed to avoid doing our own interpretations of results.”
Traditional assessments were making decisions unnecessarily complicated: “With other tests, you have to make your own interpretation of how a person is and behave based on the result, which becomes a problem as you do not always get a fair assessment. Your prejudices and preconceived notions automatically come into play.
The way Alva's tests are structured means that you do not have to make your own interpretations of the results.” says Sanna.
Sanna’s right: when we need to make a quick decision, we rely on heuristics - aka, gut feelings. 85% of Hiring Managers own-up to leaning on their gut feeling. However, this leaning adds to systemic bias that excludes women and People of Colour from reaching their potential - a potential that, according to PwC, costs the UK economy £1 billion every year.
Partnering to simplify
“We were looking for simplicity, in the tests and our workloads” says Sanna. Rejlers was still using a lot of manual processes, and the new TA team was keen to digitise.
Alva and Teamtailor integrate seamlessly, allowing Hiring Managers and HR teams to have immediate access to which candidates are best to prioritise.
Says Sanna, “Teamtailor is very user-friendly and has enabled us to digitise large parts of the recruitment process. It's very easy to set up workflows and to handle and communicate with the candidates.”
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The integration means that Teamtailor and Alva speak with each other without friction: “Features such as smart move and triggers make it easy to find Alva results directly in Teamtailor. It is easy for all our recruiting managers to understand test results without logging into Alva”.
Hiring Managers and TAs have enjoyed the seamless integrations, merging them with Rejlers’ employer branding, and building smooth processes that allow them to concentrate on the candidates who are the right fit.
Integrating Hiring Managers
When recruiting to their trainee program, Nextgen, the Teamtailor x Alva integration helped Hiring Managers manage recruiting at scale: “It’s a large volume of candidates, all young professionals. Alva Labs helps us to see their potential. Teamtailor's user-friendly system makes it easy to handle all these candidates. The fact that you see Alva's test results in the system further simplifies the whole system.”
Says Sanna, “Everyone in the team thinks it has become easier and more fun to work with recruitment since we started with Teamtailor and Alva.” The seamless experience allows Hiring Managers to be more involved, as they can see the results in real time: fewer leaks in the funnel, easier communication, and a smoother process.
Alva’s software integrates into Teamtailor’s dashboard: “There’s no need to interpret - you have the candidate, their CV and test result in the same system, you don’t have to log in to a new system to understand their results, they’re just in one system. You just look in Teamtailor and it’s all there.”
But, even more excitingly, says Sanna, “Alva Lab’s assessments have generated more accurate and open-minded recruitment.”
Hire for potential
HR leaders at Sifted’s first annual conference discussed the need to hire people who have the potential to grow with you, saying: “whatever you want to achieve, you’ll only do it with the right people in post. The right people, with the right mindset and potential to deliver today and tomorrow.”
Says Sanna, “Alva Labs helps us to dare to look at potential before readiness. We had some candidates for a role where a couple of the candidates were "right" on the CV but not a good role fit in the tests.
We also had a candidate who had very good role fit, but was less of a match on areas such as previous employers, number of years of experience and so on. We dared to choose this candidate; so far they have contributed a lot, and they’re really a talent we want to see develop further with us. So hire for potential over readiness!”
Automating HR processes to some can feel cold; but, in reality, candidates want a smooth process, with immediate feedback and regular updates; by integrating Teamtailor and Alva, Rejlers has been able to create smooth, customised microsites that allow candidates to make seamless applications.
“Alva has helped us decrease bias and challenged us to dare to look a little bit more beyond the CV.”
