Background
When Australia Post announced their new Tech Academy initiative, aimed at “developing the best tech talent, from all walks of life”. It’s a two-year program that includes professional bootcamp-style training, on-the-job project experience, and mentoring to build a career within a growing tech world at Australia Post. The program is followed by access to long-term career opportunities with Australia Post.
Due to the nature of this exciting, and first of its kind, opportunity in Australia, Allegis Global Solutions (Allegis) was engaged to manage the hiring process from attraction to onboarding. As a trusted partner to Allegis, Vervoe was engaged to conduct the first stage of evaluation of Tech Academy applicants.
The challenge
Australia Post designed the Tech Academy to offer candidates a new career, as well as an opportunity to contribute to Australia’s growing tech workforce. Because of this, candidates were not required to have any prior experience in technology or coding, so traditional hiring methods like résumé screening weren’t appropriate.
In addition, Australia Post expected to attract a high volume of highly-motivated candidates.
The solution
Vervoe’s AI-powered candidate evaluation platform was selected as a way to gain insight into the suitability and potential of candidates without taking into account their professional backgrounds or demographics.
The questions were designed to give candidates an opportunity to showcase their passion for learning and their suitability for the challenging nature of the program. Candidates were asked to answer questions in text and audio, as well as edit spreadsheets.
Candidates were then automatically stack-ranked by Vervoe’s algorithms based on how they performed based on over 150 data points collected. Their responses were then reviewed by the talent acquisition team.
The results
Over 2,500 candidates applied for the Tech Academy within one month and 1,268 were identified as eligible for the program and were invited to complete an online Talent Trial on Vervoe’s platform. 1,123 candidates, or 89%, completed and submitted their Talent Trial.
With so many candidates completing Talent Trials, and only 400 places available at the next stage of the hiring process, Vervoe’s AI-powered auto-ranking capability was critical in helping the talent acquisition team decide who to progress. This is what Tania Dowling, Australia Post’s Talent Acquisition Team Leader, had to say about the value Vervoe added:
“When designing the recruitment process for Australia Post’s newly launched Tech Academy we knew there would be significant interest for such an innovative and exciting program. Partnering with Vervoe allowed us to design a fun, interactive and candidate centric experience. Their innovative question and response design options enabled us to effectively assess suitability based on motivation and capability, and we capitalised on Vervoe’s A.I. to efficiently assess and shortlist 1000’s of applications, increase diversity, and provide all applicants timely outcomes. The support and responsiveness from Vervoe was impressive and contributed to the positive experience.”
Allegis and Australia Post weren’t the only ones who were happy. Feedback from lots of candidates was overwhelmingly positive as well, with many candidates rating their experience 10 out of 10.
Here’s what candidates had to say:
“I think the questions will not only help Australia Post know me better, but personally I find answering the questions a way of reaffirming why I am doing this. It is a huge commitment, and I think this process is quite empowering.”
“The questions are relevant and creative. This application is use friendly. A great job by Australia Post hiring team!”
“This experience was awesome as questions were not typical interview questions. I enjoyed answering the questions. It was a different experience. I loved this interview technique.”