Autism Spectrum Australia transforms its talent acquisition

Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) has improved its hiring effectiveness by implementing a new talent acquisition system and transforming its recruitment processes.

The not-for-profit operates 10 schools across Australia and also provides therapy services, plus an ‘Autism Friendly’ consulting service.

Senior manager of workforce services and systems David Dunne told a recent SmartRecruiters event that the organisation considers the people it hires to be “superhuman”.

“The teachers, the teacher’s aides, support workers, therapists: they’re the people that drive our organisation,” Dunne said.

“Those people do an amazing job every day supporting … our students, our participants, [and] people on the autism spectrum.

“We are there to serve them, and in order for us to do that well, we need to have a superhuman human hiring process effectively.”

Dunne said that the organisation’s previous hiring process was characterised by the amount of “unproductive work” foisted on hiring teams.

“Some of that unproductive work included a lot of manual processes; a really high volume of emails [and] no way for hiring teams to collaborate within the system about particular jobs or particular candidates,” Dunne said.

“We had no reporting capability, super unreliable data, and no insights, so we were really slow to act in a super competitive market.”

This was also being felt by prospective hires engaging with Aspect.

“The nature of the work that our organisation does relies on a lot of high-turnover roles. Teacher’s aides, support workers and therapists are really hard roles to fill,” Dunne said.

“We had such a broken process and technology stack that we were struggling to engage candidates.

“We were tracking around 18 to 20 percent turnover year-on-year at the time that we had the previous systems in place, so people were coming and leaving relatively quickly.

“In a typically high turnover role like a teacher or teacher’s aide, you can’t afford to do that.”

The organisation made a call to move away from its “very paper-based process … to a digitised, mobile-enabled, simplified user experience and simplified business process”.

“Basically taking everything we had in place and flipping it on its head,” Dunne said. “We were asking our TA [talent acquisition] team to basically change everything about how they worked.”

The organisation “spent the best part of a year” mapping its recruitment processes and engaging its internal stakeholders, before ultimately selecting SmartRecruiters to supply the new platform.

“There was genuine excitement from across the organisation when we went live with SmartRecruiters,” people services team leader Rachael Fox said.

“If I think about the things that we did as key highlights … we moved from no integration with any downstream systems to integration with our payroll system Aurion – the first time that’s been done in Australia, [along with] Zoom, Okta, DocuSign, Seek [and] LinkedIn.

“This created a whole heap of efficiency throughout the recruitment lifecycle.”

Fox said that the ability to customise SmartRecruiters meant that autism-friendly wording could be added automatically into recruitment processes.

“We’ve also been able to automate our responses [to candidates], which communicate the next steps in the recruitment process and … implement all of our templates in all of our interview invitations as well.”

Dunne said that the platform also “became a bit of a Trojan horse” for Aspect, encouraging the organisation to simultaneously overhaul “supplementary processes”.

This saw it reduce the number of employment contract templates it uses from 16 to six, “reinvent its careers website” and relaunch a referral program, which led to it receiving four times as many referrals of potential candidates in the first year.

“We are able to use the talent communities function in the [SmartRecruiters] system, so rather than going out to market for every single vacancy that we have, we can usually go back to the talent community to advertise before going to the job boards, which goes to that cost reduction as well,” Fox said.

This resulted in cost savings because the organisation “didn’t need to advertise every role on Seek, LinkedIn, or somewhere else because we generated more organic growth” in prospective candidates, Dunne added.

In total, the organisation has seen a 33 percent reduction in talent acquisition costs and a “conservative” 30 percent time saved.

“If I think about the amount of time that was saved for even hiring managers alone in being able to look at a dashboard within SmartRecruiters and see the status of every candidate that was in that had applied for that particular role, send communications, make decisions and set up interviews all from one central place, integrated into all our downstream systems, that in itself is probably 30 percent [of time saved],” Dunne said.

“That’s not even thinking about the candidate [experience]. So that’s quite a significant change – and there’s more we can do.”

Aspect is continuing to enhance its technology capabilities in the area of recruitment, with the addition of Sapia.ai, an “AI hiring agent”.

“This integrates seamlessly into SmartRecruiters,” Dunne said.

“The process of setting that up was straightforward. It’s going to save more time from our manager’s perspective by enabling automation of chat interviews.

The organisation also is exploring other AI-enabled enhancements using SmartRecruiters’ AI tool, Winston.