Fundraising Direct Adopts 80% 'No Interview' Model, Reducing Time-to-Hire to 2 Days
Background
Telephone fundraising provider, Fundraising Direct, delivers fundraising solutions to Canada’s leading not-for profit organizations and charities. Each year, Fundraising Direct hires and trains new employees for its results-based telephone fundraising campaigns designed to maximize fundraising pledges, build supporter loyalty, and support their clients’ missions.
Challenge:
No way of screening candidates for the position's required skills
With a diverse pool of applicants (including many young university students), the performance levels of new hires varied greatly, even with extensive training. Fundraising Direct had data on the key metrics of campaign success and knew which employees performed well and why. However, they had no way of applying these metrics to hiring. The old hiring process was manual, based on interviews, and captured only one of the seven core skills required for success.
Solution:
Using AI to automatically assess soft skills at scale
HiringBranch analyzed the metrics and designed a custom 20-minute automated speaking test that captured all seven core skills. The skills included strong conversational fluency, the ability to establish rapport with the client, as well as the ability to follow instructions. During a short proof-of-concept period, HiringBranch gave the speaking test to 200 new hires within their first day or two of joining. The 200 test results were then correlated with the new employees cumulative pledge scores, and then ranked among four performance tiers (from top-tier performers to low-tier performers).
Benchmarking:
Soft skills AI accurately selects the top fundraisers
The correlation results found that all the top-tier employees had significantly higher final scores than the lower-tiered employees (p < 0.01 ). The HiringBranch assessment was clearly able to select the top-tier candidates who raised the highest cumulative pledges.
The best indicators for top-tier employees were the scores on conversational fluency and establishing rapport with a client. This means HiringBranch’s AI-powered assessment accurately selected candidates with the top conversational skills that matter for sales success.
With this proof in hand, Fundraising Direct was now ready to pass every candidate through HiringBranch’s soft skills assessment and send offers to anyone who passed.
10%
80%
Results:
Better hires, more sales, less interviews
Fundraisers who were hired with the HiringBranch assessment were selling 10% more than those hired through traditional means. With candidates who took the HiringBranch assessment performing exceptionally well, it didn’t take long for Fundraising Direct to cut 80% of all interviews! By limiting interviews to special cases, Fundraising Direct was able to reduce hiring costs by 1.5 FTEs.
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