Navigating HR tech products as a CHRO
Having been a CHRO of a listed company in my last role, I can empathize with the confusion and exhaustion that comes from navigating the myriad of HR tech products, especially those involving AI in HR tech, flooding the market while trying to manage many ongoing HR change initiatives.
Last year, as CEO of an HR tech start-up, a key player among companies using AI in HR, I did what most do in that role — I spent a whole lot of time talking to customers, CHROs, heads of talent, recruiters, and business owners, listening to their challenges to build a product that effectively integrates AI use cases in HR. There are a few themes I picked up on through these conversations.
- Improving procedural fairness — ensuring the most important processes (recruitment, promotion and REM ) is fair in both perception & application
- Solutions which deliver integrity of both recruitment and promotion decisions (as more companies aim to promote from within)
- A strong desire to leverage automation for low value, manual and/or repetitive HR tasks
- Make everything simpler for the HR team and employees
- More insights to make better, fairer decisions
- The challenges of knowing what data matters and building the internal capability to make use of it
What is the ‘right’ tech stack?
‘What’s the right tech stack for my team and our company?’ and ‘how do I integrate all these technologies?’ are questions every CHRO of any sizeable company is grappling with. And the answer is more complicated than committing to a new HRIS.
Whilst I am not a tech expert, I spend many hours a week thinking about one critical part of the HR function that is ripe for technology innovation — recruitment. In that vein, I am sharing some things I have learnt which I hope will be useful to your investments in your tech stack in 2019.
1. Decision-making transparency to enhance organisational trust
There are HR tech products that give you insights on engagement hot spots, employee sentiment, and screen applicants for roles by scraping and analysing people’s personal profiles or communications. If you believe (as I do) that transparency enhances trust, especially when it comes to anything coming out of HR, these tech products could undermine organisational trust and maybe even your employer brand. Look beneath the hood of a tech product to validate how it works. AI and the concern of algorithmic bias is one every CHRO needs to be ready to talk about. Understand the source data and how it will be used in the solution. For candidate selection, any front end testing needs to not only be valid but feel valid to the user. That’s why we use relatable and valid questions to assess candidates in building our predictive models. No CVs, no video and no games.
Any extra discretionary effort by employees is going to be heavily influenced by how much trust your people have in you. Better to invest in tech solutions that allow for more transparency around how decisions are being made, that use reliable, objective and valid data.
2. Create and source forward-looking data for prediction
Think of the people analytics generated by HR today — turnover reports, engagements stats, culture diagnostics, exit survey analysis, 9 box talent management. All of it is backward-looking reporting on the past performance of talent. Much of it also subject to the vagaries of human analysis, therefore biased insights. How many of your organisations use data to validate the placement of people on the ‘potential axis’ of a 9 box? Or use NLP to extrapolate the key themes from engagement surveys and exit survey verbatim?
A bigger challenge for all of this backwards analytics is connecting the dots — how does a culture survey actually move you towards and predict a different culture? My colleague who spent his early years building up the data science team for a leading engagement survey platform and led the benchmarking analysis for their clients observed that year after year the same companies were in the top and the bottom quartile of engagement.
Changing culture is hard unless you change the people — the people you hire and the people you promote.
Predictions versus Psychometrics
The best investment you can make to change the culture and help the organisation move towards forward-looking predictive analytics is to start to capture data from the outset — from your applicant pool, through to the people you hire.
Having a data DNA profile of your applicant and hired pool means you can better target your employer branding, you can identify with high accuracy the profile of the stronger performers, the people who are high flight risk in the early months, the talent that moves fastest to productivity. Knowing these profiles means you can seamlessly feedback into your recruitment a better hiring profile.
This is the power of predictive analytics over psychometric testing which has no feedback loop back to the business on whether the person with the high OPQ test was any good in the role.
3. Data authenticity matters
‘Garbage in garbage out. This is usually a reference to a data quality issue.
Data can take many forms- it’s not always hard numbers (more on that later), it can be data that is structured and regulated by you vs data that is unstructured and not regulated by you, such as CV’s. The former is always better — closer to the objective source of truth, usually owned by you, and less prone to gaming.
CVs are a source of bias
CVs are a poor man’s data substitute and rarely indicative of anything. A CV is a highly gameable type of data and relying on CV data to select talent exacerbates the risk of bias, as was experienced by Amazon when they built their hiring models around a 10-year database of CVs (mostly male).
I won’t spend time on the risks of bias in CV screening as enough has been written about that, other than to share this from a blog post which quotes academic research that ‘both men and women think men are more competent and hirable than women, even when they have identical qualifications ‘, and that ‘resumes with white-sounding names received 50% more calls for interviews than identical resumes with ethnic-sounding names’. https://www.lever.co/blog/where-unconscious-bias-creeps-into-the-recruitment-process.
Removing bias in the screening process is no longer about social justice, now it’s about commercial outcomes — McKinsey has documented each year since 2014 that companies with top quartile diversity experience outsized profitability growth https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity
4. Think broadly about ‘what is data’
There are a plethora of surveys that make the point that HR functions are starting to invest in the power of people analytics.
Making data more visual has been a big driver behind the success of engagement analytics companies such as a Culture Amp, Glint and Peakon, transforming ugly engagement decks and the traditional circumplexes into insights-driven real-time dashboards. Visualisation offered by tools like Tableau is table stakes these days for HR.
Data doesn’t always look like data in a traditional sense. Take textual search data, human behavioural tracking data for example. Google has been making money off that data strategy for years and there are now books written about how google search terms are the most accurate mirror to our true beliefs and values (Read Everybody Lies for a fascinating insight into the power of text).
Tracking human behaviour has been mainstream in marketing teams for years, but has been slower to be leveraged in HR. In consumer marketing, no one cares why a person is more likely to buy an item, they are only interested in optimising for the outcome. There has been some interesting research applying consumer behaviour analysis to HR with fascinating insights, for example, that your choice of browser in completing an online assessment is a strong predictor of your performance in the role.
5. Provide data-driven actionable insights for the business
In consulting there is an often-used accusation of consultants ‘boiling the ocean’, which usually refers to those 100-page decks with chart after chart, visualising every data point possible as if the sheer weight of the deck is somehow testament to its accuracy.
Most junior consultants aspire to write the ‘killer slide’, the elusive one slide that crystallises the strategy in one data visual that will transform the company’s trajectory.
As HR teams start to produce more output on people analytics, there is a risk of ‘boiling the ocean’ on people analytics — quarterly engagement surveys, monthly churn data, diversity reporting. Figuring out the ‘so what’ of the data and using those insights to move the needle on business metrics that matter is harder, but also necessary. For HR integrating non-HR owned data is also important to get a fuller picture, especially for sales led businesses. For example, if sales drop off at the 2-year mark, what can HR do about that? What HR processes change as a result of seeing high correlations between sales trajectory in the first 6 weeks and tenure greater than 6 months.
In building predictive models for our clients, this is a sample of some of the actionable insights that were revealed through analysing both HR and sales performance data:
- We found that female sales recruiters had a faster performance trajectory, but with a noticeable slow down at 2 years — this led the client to change their targets at recruitment to hire more women and embed new development programs for women at the critical 2-year mark
- We observed a strong statistical correlation between outbound inside sales performance in the first 6 weeks and retention beyond 6 months, which led to changes in their onboarding but also more stringent probation processes earlier on to avoid holding onto people for too long
- We identified better team leaders based on the relative performance of new starters by team leaders, where performance is defined as speed to sales productivity and retention at the 1-year mark
- We reduced the complexity and time invested in KPI tracking for both recruiters and the operations team through knowing which KPIs truly mattered as lead indicators of performance
6. Think creatively about what business data can help in HR
HR’s role is very much one of building bridges across the organisation — taking a helicopter view of talent, ensuring that the needs of the business will be met in 3 years, 5 years by the people in the business, in enabling communication and collaboration channels across teams and geographies.
Building a single source of truth about their employee base often justifies HR’s biggest tech investment in helping achieve those objectives — the so called ‘one size fits all’ HR system. Yet it’s a big step to assume that even with the HRIS in place that HR has all the data it needs to do its job. Every function is making similar investments — sales & marketing into CRMs, operations teams into rostering systems, LTI and OHS data that might sit in the BU or a separate OHS team.
Last century, HRs accountability might have ended when they filled a role. Today, HR is accountable for ‘talent optimisation’ and that means ensuring people’s success through their career with the organisation, and often even beyond. Knowing how that talent is performing on the job– roster adherence, injury patterns, call centre metrics, sales performance — are integral to optimising that talent pool.
Capitalise on these various streams of data!
I encourage HR leaders to be expansive about what is performance data, especially objective performance data, and being relentless in sourcing that data from their non-HR colleagues internally.
7. HR as a data generator for the business
Data generated within HR can help drive broader organisation decisions. B2C companies with large volumes of sales and marketing applicants can leverage the power of those volumes for the benefit of the rest of the business.
Big brand companies can receive half a million-plus applications in one year, often engaging meaningfully with just a fraction. Technology allows you to test and engage meaningfully with every one of those applicants. Instead of thinking of that pool only as a candidate pool relevant to recruitment, for a B2C business, that pool is most likely also your consumer base and a rich source of data for your business.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) for product and services like travel, retail, software, financial products range from $7 to $400, with companies committing substantial advertising budgets to reach that kind of audience, yet over in recruitment, they are engaging with them for free, at a point where the candidate/consumer is at their most willing and motivated to engage with you.
Imagine what consumer data you could capture from that applicant pool for the benefit of the business?
Transparency and authenticity, forward-looking predictive data, business impact first, think creatively and broadly, and HR as a data generator. These are 7 themes that can transform your organisation in by leveraging the data hidden within HR through the efficient use of technology.
You can try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, or leave us your details to book a personalised demo
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How leading retailers are using AI-Native Hiring
Retail leaders have embraced AI to improve supply chains, automate checkout, and enhance customer experience. But what about finding the people who deliver that customer experience?
AI brings incredible possibilities to supercharge how retailers hire, develop, and retain talent.
At Sapia.ai, we helped iconic retailers like Woolworths, Starbucks, Holland & Barrett, and David Jones reimagine hiring from the ground up – replacing resumes, ghosting, and gut feel with structured, ethical AI that delivers performance and fairness at scale.
The Retail Problem: Volume, Turnover, and Ghosting
Retail is high volume. It’s high churn. And it’s high stakes for candidate experience:
- Candidates ghosted during slow hiring cycles
- Store managers are overloaded with admin
- Recruiters are overwhelmed with 100,000+ seasonal applicants
- Talent is overlooked due to bias or unfair screening processes, not a lack of potential
And yet, most hiring still relies on broken tools: resumes, forms, manual processes, and outdated systems.
Sapia.ai: The AI-Native Hiring Engine Built for Retail
Our platform automates the entire “apply to decide” journey, leveraging AI & automation to streamline the hiring process & bring intelligence into retail hiring.
Smart Interviewer™: Mobile-first, chat-based, structured interviews for a holistic candidate assessment.
Live Interview™: AI-driven bulk interview scheduling without calendar chaos.
InterviewAssist™: Instant interview guide generation.
Discover Insights: Embedded analytics to track hiring health in real-time.
Phai: GenAI coach for career and leadership potential.
Unlike resume parsing or generic chatbots, Sapia.ai assesses soft skills, communication, and culture fit using natural language processing and validated psychometrics. It’s ethical AI built in, not bolted on.
From Application to Interview in Under 24 Hours
Candidates don’t want to wait. They don’t want to be ghosted. And they don’t want resumes to define them.
> 80% of Sapia.ai chat interviews are completed in under 24 hours.
We see consistently high completion across categories: grocery, merchandising, home improvement, and luxury retail.
“It was fast, fair, and I actually got feedback. That never happens.” – Retail Candidate Feedback
Real Impact, Across Every Retail Category
Sapia.ai powers hiring for millions of candidates across diverse retail environments:
| Impact of Sapia.ai on Retail Hiring in 2024 | |||
| Category | Hours Saved | FTEs Saved | Cost Saved |
| Grocery | 272k | 131 | $6.5m |
| General Merchandise | 193k | 93 | $4.6m |
| Specialty Retail | 133k | 64 | $3.2m |
| Home Improvements | 103k | 50 | $2.5m |
| Merchandising | 22k | 11 | $0.5m |
| Luxury | 9k | 4 | $0.2m |
The savings created by intelligent, AI-native automation have unlocked team capacity, impacted retailers’ P&L, and improved store readiness.
Speed That Delivers Real ROI
Every candidate gets interviewed instantly. No waiting. No bias. Just fast, fair, data-backed decisions. This generates real impact for retailers who previously relied on slow, outdated processes to handle thousands of applicants.
- Woolworths: 5,000 hours saved in a single week
- Starbucks: Doubled hiring capacity, 91.8% completion
- Holland & Barrett: Time to hire cut from 20 to 7 days
- Woodie’s: 3x more ethnic minorities hired in 3 months
DEI by Design, Not by Mandate
With Sapia.ai:
- 98% of candidates opt in to demographic questions
- Zero adverse impact detected across gender, ethnicity, and disability
- 1.5–3x improvements in diverse hiring rates
DEI Fairness Scores (based on actual hiring data):
Gender: 1.03 (vs customer baseline of 1.01)
Ethnicity: 1.15 (vs customer baseline of 0.74)
Why? Because ethical AI removes what humans can’t unlearn: bias. With a candidate experience that is inclusive by design, retailers can ensure fairness in screening, and measure it in hiring.
Candidate Experience = Brand Experience
Retail candidates are your customers. And the experience you give them matters. We have built a brand advocacy engine that delights candidates and gives you the data to prove it.
- 9.2/10 CSAT across 2.6 M+ retail candidates
- NPS: 78 (30+ points above industry benchmark)
- 87% more likely to recommend the company’s products post-interview
Responsible, Explainable AI Built for Retail
Not all AI is created equally. Since 2018, Sapia.ai has been built on a foundation of responsible AI:
- No use of resumes or scraped data
- Hosted securely via AWS Bedrock
- Claude-powered LLM scoring with model cards and explainability
- Independent audits on bias, privacy, and methodology
“We can’t go back to life before Sapia.ai. We used to spend half the day reading resumes.”
— Talent Lead, Starbucks AU
What’s at Stake: Time, Brand, and Revenue
Every day spent using outdated hiring methods costs retailers:
- Wasted recruiter hours
- Lost revenue from unfilled roles
- Bad churn that drains training budgets
- Lower customer satisfaction from poor-fit hires.
With Sapia.ai, you get the productivity unlock retail hiring demands, and the intelligence your talent deserves.
Want to see how fast, fair, and human retail hiring can be?
Book a demo
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Reinventing the Competency Framework: A Data-Driven Approach for the AI Era
We can’t hide from reality anymore. Talent needs are shifting overnight, and AI is redefining what it means to work. Traditional talent frameworks are no longer fit for purpose. At Sapia.ai, we believe the future of talent strategy lies in a smarter, fairer, and more adaptive way of defining what great looks like.
Our AI hiring platform is built on the largest proprietary dataset of interview answers globally – we’re a data company at heart, and we’ve seen the power of data-driven people methodology in transforming how organisations hire and retain good talent.
So, when it came to building a new Competency Framework that could be leveraged globally for hiring for any role at any scale, of course, we used a ground-up, data-led methodology that bridges the gap between organisational psychology and AI.
Why Rethink Competency Frameworks?
Conventional frameworks are typically crafted through expert interviews and focus groups. While valuable, they tend to be subjective, static, and too slow to keep pace with evolving job demands. As roles become more fluid and technology augments or replaces task-based skills, organisations need a new way to understand the human capabilities that genuinely matter for performance.
We wanted to identify enduring, job-agnostic competencies that reflect what drives success in a modern workplace – capabilities like adaptability, resilience, learning agility, and customer orientation.
(Why competencies and not just skills? Read why here.)
Our Approach: Where AI Meets I/O Psychology
Sapia.ai’s methodology is rooted in the science of human behaviour but powered by cutting-edge AI. We asked two core questions:
- Can we make competency discovery agile, scalable, and evidence-based?
- Can we use AI to automate the process without losing the rigour of traditional psychology?
The answer to both: yes.
We began with a rich dataset of over 37,000 job descriptions across industries and role types. Using large language models (LLMs) and advanced NLP techniques, we extracted over 200,000 behavioural descriptors. These were distilled down through a four-step process:
- Behavioural Descriptor Extraction
- Clustering and Labeling
- Cluster Analysis by I/O Psychologists
- Thematic Categorisation and Definition of Competencies
This resulted in a refined list of 25 human-centric competencies, each with clear behavioural indicators and practical relevance across a wide range of roles.
Built to Scale. Built to Adapt.
Our framework is intelligent, but importantly, it’s adaptive. Organisations can apply this methodology to their own job descriptions to discover custom competencies. This bottom-up, role-data-led approach ensures alignment to real work, not just theoretical models.
And because the framework integrates directly with our AI-powered hiring tools, you get a connected system that brings your talent strategy to life.
Our framework comes to life in the following tools:
- Job Analyser – Starting with a job description, it creates a unique competency profile for each role to build tailored structured interviews in seconds.
- Structured Chat-based Interviews that assess candidates’ responses according to the competency profile for consistent candidate assessment.
- Talent Insights Reports from every interview with deep reasoning and explainability for fair and objective hiring decisions.
- Phai Career Coach for internal mobility and employee growth that considers their competency strengths and career aspirations.
The Future of Talent Acquisition & Development is Competency-First
Skills alone cannot predict success. Competencies do. As AI continues transforming how we work, Sapia.ai’s Competency Framework offers a scalable, scientific, and fair foundation for hiring and developing the talent of tomorrow.
Want to see how it works? Download the full framework.
Blog
It’s Time to Stop Hiring for Skills, and Start Hiring for Competencies
If you’re a CHRO or Head of Recruitment at an enterprise today, chances are you’ve been inundated with messages about the importance of “skills-based hiring.” LinkedIn’s recent Work Change Report (2025) is full of compelling data: a 140% increase in the rate at which professionals are adding new skills to their profiles since 2022, and a projection that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs today will have changed.
This is essential reading. But there’s a missed opportunity: the singular focus on “skills” fails to acknowledge the real metric that talent leaders need to be using to future-proof their workforce — competencies.
Skills vs Competencies: The Crucial Distinction
- Skills are task-specific capabilities. Think Python programming, Excel, or even negotiation.
- Soft skills refer to interpersonal or behavioural qualities like adaptability, communication, and resilience.
But skills on their own — even soft ones — are generic, disjointed, and often disconnected from real-world performance. In contrast:
- Competencies are clusters of skills, knowledge, behaviours and abilities that are observable, measurable, and context-specific.
Put simply, competencies answer the all-important question: Can this person apply the right skills, in the right way, at the right time, to deliver results in our environment?
Why Competencies Matter More Than Ever
The Work Change Report outlines a future where job titles are fluid, roles evolve quickly, and AI is a constant disruptor. This creates three massive challenges for hiring at scale:
- Roles are changing faster than static skill frameworks can keep up
- Job candidates may have non-linear, cross-functional backgrounds
- The shelf-life of technical skills is shrinking rapidly
Skills alone don’t tell us whether someone can succeed in a role that will look different 12 months from now. But competencies can. Because they measure not just what a person knows, but how they apply it.
Adaptive Talent: The New Competitive Advantage
The LinkedIn report highlights a critical insight: organisations now prioritise agility in entry-level hiring. And there’s a good reason for that. With professionals expected to hold twice as many jobs over their careers compared to 15 years ago, adaptability is not just a nice-to-have. It’s core to success.
But you can’t measure agility with a keyword on a CV. You measure it by looking at competencies like:
- Learning agility
- Change resilience
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Problem-solving in ambiguous contexts
When you shift the focus away from skills to behavioural competencies that can be defined, observed, and assessed in structured ways, you open yourself up to a much more dynamic and more useful way of managing talent.
Building a Competency-Based Talent Framework
To hire effectively at scale, particularly in a technology-driven world of work, talent leaders must shift their lens:
- Define Role-Specific Competencies: Move beyond job descriptions based on qualifications or vague skill sets. Break roles down into measurable competencies that reflect current and emerging performance expectations. This step is crucial for organisations to be able to accurately assess role-fit in the next stages. Sapia.ai does this automatically, taking job descriptions and building role-specific competency models in seconds.
- Assess Competencies Fairly and Objectively: Use structured behavioural interviews, ideally at scale. These provide a much more accurate picture of a candidate’s readiness than self-reported skills or credentials. Sapia.ai’s AI powered interviews enable competency assessment, at scale.
- Build Pathways for Development and Internal Mobility: A competency framework makes it easier to identify transferable strengths, development gaps, and future-fit potential. It gives employees clarity on how to grow within the business. Using an AI-powered coach can help ensure that talent is being continuously developed against the organisation’s competency framework.
The Future of Work Requires Depth, Not Just Breadth
LinkedIn’s data shows that people are learning more skills more quickly than ever. But the real question for talent leaders like you is: Are those skills being applied in ways that drive value? Are we hiring for task proficiency or performance?
The truth is that the organisations that will thrive in an AI-driven, skills-fluid economy aren’t the ones chasing the next hot skill. They’re the ones designing systems to identify, develop and scale competence.
Keen to Shift to Competencies, but Lacking a Framework?
Sapia.ai has developed a comprehensive Competency Framework using a data-driven approach. Download the full paper here.