TalVista: Leveling the Hiring Process - Reducing the Skills Gap

Scot Sessions, CEO

With the aim of helping companies hire the most skilled talent, regardless of gender, race, nationality, and/or other biases in the HR technology landscape, TalVista embodies five hiring best practices—prioritized job skills, optimized job descriptions, redacted resume review, structured interviews, and data-driven hiring. Leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics across the entire hiring process, TalVista’s recruiting and hiring optimization tools help recruiters to instantly align with hiring managers on the essential job criteria needed to succeed at each job. TalVista helps companies attract an additional 30 percent more candidates who are qualified irrespective of their race, gender, or nationality that helps to eliminate unconscious biases.

On the trends in the HR technology space:

The major trends driving change in the HR spaceinclude robotic process automation, connected relationships through integrations and partnerships, and agility.

The first trend driving change in HR is robotic process automation through which administrative and tactical work is done much faster, enabling humans to be smarter. TalVista incorporates the same concept with the ability to adjust job descriptions with suggestions for more inclusive terms based on industry research, research that recruiters and hiring managers may be completely unaware of. When job descriptions are optimized, companies can expect a 30 percent increase in skilled candidates applying for the open role. This increase is made up of women and under-represented groups who would otherwise feel the job description may not be looking for someone like them. This robotic process is then extended for hiring managers to enable them to review resumes with redacted names, schools, and other personal identifiers to ensure they stay focused on skills and experience, rather than on where the candidate went to school or whether or not they played water polo.

The second trend finding its way into the HR space is connected relationships through integrations and partnerships. Since not all HR technology providers can deliver every solution, TalVista steps in and integrates with a company’s existing HR process to connect people through their technology and create dynamic partnerships. This approach allows companies to do business at a much faster pace with specialists in their field rather than a vendor who is spread thin trying to do too much.

The third and most important trend in the HR technology space is agility. With technological advancements happening at break-neck speed, the ability to move quickly and easily in this arena is a must. The greatest advantage of the TalVista solution is its seamless adaptability to fluctuating HR requirements of today’s fast paced companies.

In a discussion with CIO Applications Executives at TalVista, Scot Sessions, CEO, and Elaine Orler, Chairwoman, shared the approach they employ for helping companies hire the best talent, while fulfilling their client’s diversity and inclusion missions.

Please describe the main features of your solution and how they empower clients to gain a competitive edge?

We focus on the recruiting and hiring process, enabling decisions to be made based on data while mitigating bias. Our clients make decisions that truly align with and represent their company’s values and mission. They are hiring more diverse and skilled workers, providing greater opportunity across the board.

Elaine Orler, Chairwoman

TalVista helps firms prioritize job skills with alignment between the recruiter and hiring manager in a short span of time with a seamless and straightforward interface. Our solution leverages predictive analytics powered by machine learning to write more effective job descriptions, and provides real-time feedback to help firms create job listings that attract male and female candidates equally.

Seeing Beyond the Obvious. TalVista provides a view beyond the noise of unconscious bias, ensuring a skilled talent pool and workforce that is more diverse and inclusive

A resume is the self-expression of a person’s ability to describe what they have done and can do. We encourage our clients to invite their candidates to provide their resume in addition to filling out static form fields in their ATS. Our resume review tool redacts specific information that may cause biases to emerge. Essentially, we provide companies a tool to mitigate unconscious bias that all humans possess. By redacting names, addresses, schools, and phone numbers of candidates, the reviewer will be able to focus on the information that is important such as skills, education, ability, and experience to perform the job that he/she is being considered for.

TalVista also helps hiring teams pre-plan interviews with questions that focus on important hiring criteria, which determine job success. No matter if an interviewer is experienced or novice, we enable HR professionals to build an interview script allowing their hiring managers to remain on task during the interview and focus on questions that will best reveal the skills needed for the role. One feature especially unique to TalVista is the ability to assign questions to specific interviewers. This way candidates are only asked questions once rather than each interviewer asking the same questions over and over, which would make for a sub par candidate experience. The interview script can either be printed, or viewed from a computer or mobile device allowing the interviewer to take notes specific to each response. This keeps all parties present and focused on the immediate conversation.

With stiff competition for all types of jobs across industries, talent leaders are looking for ways to compete for the best talent and create a culture that is inclusive. That is TalVista’s primary mission. We help our clients reach a more diverse and skilled talent pool making it possible for companies to hire candidates that previously went undiscovered because of exclusionary andunconscious biases.

Please share a customer success story to help our readers get a better understanding of your solutions?

One of our customers had an opening for a ‘loss prevention position’. They typically had only a handful of candidates apply for this role. One of their greatest challenges was creating diversity, as any candidate with the correct skills could do the job. It was essential to create a job description that was inclusive and catered to minority groups and female candidates. A dual test run was done where the job description was published in its original format and again afterit went through our job description optimization component. The text of the original job description was optimized with research proven terms for inclusion and published for candidates to apply to. The optimized job description lead to an increase in applications from diverse candidates. As the client’s goals were focused on gender equality they utilized our resume redaction tool to review the resumes and in the end the client was able to consider a higher percentage of both male and female candidates for the position.

We focus on partnering with our clients and work hard to understand what is most important to them and help them achieve their goals and initiatives through the use of our easy to implement SaaS platform.

How does the future of the company look regarding enhancements and global expansions?

For the next several quarters we will be focused on delivering our platform to companies both nationally and globally who face challenges hiring top talent while building a diverse candidate pool and workforce. We want to help them succeed at being more inclusive. We look to partner with companies to better facilitate their needs and missions to ensure the best skilled candidates have the same opportunities as any other candidate. Both national and global companies are clamoring for help in this area. As we grow, we will continue to refine our solution and adapt our tools to keep up with advances in technology, while continuing to keep it simple and easy to use.