Case Study: How AI-mediated virtual interviewing helped screen 250 000 candidates

In today’s post, we examine how using Artificial Intelligence (AI-mediated) virtual interviewing within a large candidate pool can revolutionize an organization’s recruitment practices.

In previous articles, we discussed how using virtual interviewing with human raters can translate into substantial benefits for both recruiters and candidates. Increasingly however, companies are also leveraging powerful AI and machine learning technologies to further enhance the capabilities of virtual interviewing.

In part, this is due to the demands placed on human raters when large volumes of candidates need to be screened and sifted. Even with the benefits of virtual interviewing, screening thousands or even hundreds of thousands of candidates will can be a challenge!

In our case study we look at how TTS’s virtual interviewing product partner, HireVue, implemented a revolutionary AI-mediated virtual interviewing solution within a global FMCG company with just such a need.

The client challenge

The client, a leading FMCG company operating in more than 190 countries, wanted to actively target Millennial workers in its recruitment drive. In fact, its global strategy was to increase the proportion of Millennials in their workforce to 60% in the next five years.

As such, it was important to not only cast the talent net far wider, but also to use recruitment and selection methods that would appeal to an increasingly internet and technology-savvy talent pool of Millennial graduates.

In addition, the client wanted to change its perception in the talent market from a somewhat traditional organization to an employer of choice for younger generations of talent. Within the FMCG sphere, competition for top talent is also fierce, with the large players in the market offering various incentives for young talent to join their ranks.

Consequently, the recruitment process had to be quicker, more appealing, and aid hiring managers and talent professionals in their talent decision-making.

Finally, high recruitment volumes also posed a challenge. For graduate-level positions, the client had traditionally implemented a recruitment drive across its global operation which generated hundreds of thousands of applications. However, only 800 candidates out of a possible 250,000 could be selected.

This represented a massive challenge for the client’s talent teams: How to whittle down from 250,000 to 800? The historic answer to this question was for the recruiters to use traditional telephonic screeners and live, face-to-face interviews. But such methods were extremely time consuming.

For instance, it had taken the global graduate recruitment team anywhere from four to six months to reach their final target of 800 candidates in similar projects in the past.

In the fast-paced environment of FMCG, this was clearly an untenable situation.

The client turned to HireVue and its AI-mediated interviewing solution to improve time-to-hire, efficiency, and accuracy in its selection processes.

An AI-mediated virtual interviewing solution

HireVue partnered with the client to design a mobile-friendly, highly digitized, and efficient selection process. An important consideration was the need to create an appealing, innovative process that still engaged candidates and showed a warm, human presence throughout the recruitment campaign .

To achieve these goals, HireVue set up a mobile virtual interview process that allowed candidates to answer and record their interview questions at their own convenience.

Therefore, it eliminated the need for live interview scheduling along with the complicated logistics that usually involves.

In addition, the client incorporated their own marketing video collateral to introduce potential graduate hires to the company, its values, and the selection process, thus maintaining human touch-points throughout.

Finally, the entire virtual interviewing process was embedded and integrated within the client’s ongoing recruitment process-flow and applicant tracking systems.

Using their propriety and well-grounded approach in matching speech, answer content, and facial expression to job outcome and performance, the HireVue team used AI and machine learning principles to screen for candidates who displayed suitable behaviors and answers in their virtual interviews.

Notable was the inclusion of bias mitigation strategies in the above approach that aimed at surpassing the normal human-rater biases found in interviews. The client was concerned that such biases had resulted in less diverse hires in the past.

The outcome: AI-mediated virtual interviewing has revolutionary benefits

The HireVue process was a massive success inside the client’s talent management operation, especially given the large recruitment volumes.

In the project, more than 250,000 candidates’ virtual interview answers were analyzed at digital speed, something that was entirely inconceivable in the traditional human-mediated screening processes of before.

Immediate benefits of the HireVue solution for candidates included:

  • Better candidate feedback and communication. Because the virtual interviewing process was quick and efficient, combined with almost instantaneous analyses of answers, candidates received more rapid and more frequent feedback throughout the entire recruitment cycle.
  • Successfully screened candidates who qualified for the next stage of assessment could do move on rapidly, before they were approached by competitors.
  • Unsuccessful candidates received rapid feedback that allowed them to explore other opportunities. This process received positive reviews from all candidates, who generally appreciated the lack of uncertainty and long waiting periods they experienced in the recruitment cycle. In fact, 83% of unsuccessful candidates praised the process as efficient, fair and brand-enhancing.
  • In total, more than 50,000 hours of candidate time was saved using this new approach.

For the recruitment and talent teams, the benefits were equally impressive:

  • Because the AI algorithm was tailored to predict the client’s competencies and known success factors, the talent team could screen on attributes that indicated potential rather than just qualifications, as was the case before.
  • Using AI-mediated rating of interview responses significantly decreased the load on the recruitment team, and they were able to screen out 80% of candidates and thereby reach their targeted shortlist very rapidly and efficiently. The client’s analysis revealed that recruitment time spend was reduced by as much as 75%.
  • In line with the company’s goal to attract a wider pool of Millennial talent, the process resulted in much greater completion rates within the graduate talent pool, shifting the traditional completion rate of screening interviews and assessments from 50% to a near-perfect 96% completion rate.
  • Because of this implementation, the client saved more than $1.3 Million in annual recruitment costs from the first year of shifting to HireVue.
  • Using the more rapid AI-mediated virtual interviewing reduced time-to-hire by 90%.
  • Finally, as was their goal, the client witnessed a massive increase in diversity of hires, due in large part to the AI-mediated rating system’s capacity to ignore biases based on gender or ethnicity that routinely plague human raters.
  • In fact, HireVue’s virtual interview screening resulted in the client’s most ethnically and gender diverse shortlist pool in its history.

Final thoughts & conclusions

This case study shows how utilizing new and powerful technologies like AI and machine learning, combined with innovative virtual interviewing platforms, can result in massive benefits to a client’s recruitment and selection processes.

Not only is AI-mediated virtual interviewing efficient when large numbers of applicants are involved, but the rating mechanism is also more predictive of job performance and far less susceptible to biases than traditional interviewing approaches.

At TTS, we are proud to be associated with HireVue, a world-leading innovator in AI technologies applied to talent decision making.

We look forward to helping our clients to revolutionize their recruitment and selection processes by incorporating AI-mediated virtual interviews into existing selection methods.

If you are interested in how HireVue’s virtual interviewing can benefit your organization’s talent decision-making, reach out to us info@tts-talent.com. We are looking forward to consulting with you!