To find out how to use Recruitment Automation to hire faster, reduce bias and save, we also have a great retail industry eBook on Ai in HR.
Let’s discuss the significant issues that talent acquisition teams face with assessment centres and talent assessment tools every day. As a solution provider operating in the high-volume recruiting space, we’ve identified seven common problems with assessment centres and the use of talent assessment tools.
Firstly, a bit of an explanation.
Assessment Centres or “Group Interviews” are a popular recruitment tool for those who specialise in high volume recruitment or large enrolment programs. They usually bring together a large number of candidates. This group is then reduced to a smaller group in the final phase of the recruiting selection process.
Firstly, group interviews offer significant advantages for high-volume recruitment. They are thought to yield better results. For every candidate interviewed more are hired with greater accuracy. That is, compared to standard face-to-face interviews. They are also quicker. In that, there is far greater efficiency in the number of candidates interviewed per hour. Many large-scale recruitment programs use assessment centres to evaluate candidates against one another using various exercises. These exercises are designed to assess your suitability for the job. They check your performance in your role as well as your knowledge of the company and its culture. Some exercises involve you working individually. Others assess you and your ability to work as part of a group.
For the candidate:
An invitation to an assessment centre shows that you are successful in the early stages of the recruitment process. It usually takes place after the first round of pre-selection interviews and before the final selection. This can be seen as more reliable and fair than an interview alone. It gives you the chance to demonstrate your potential in a variety of environments. Candidates should also be able to learn more about the culture of the organisation and the role of the workplace.
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Assessment Centres provide an evaluation method based on multiple evaluations, including occupational simulations. They monitor a candidate’s performance across a range of activities. This is to assess skills, competencies and traits that could be used in the workplace. Many companies use this method to recruit their graduate programs. In other words, to assess potential employees who have little or no professional experience. The bonus is that it also gives employers the opportunity to make a positive impression.
1. They are a pain to organise.
“No Julie, we do not have an afternoon session on Tuesday just on Monday and Thursday” – sound familiar?
2. No one wants to be there.
The candidate wishes they had a job already. The hiring manager wishes they had their staff already. The recruiter wishes they were out for lunch. The general tone is: “when will this be over?”.
3. They are disappointing.
The results are never what you expected – for anyone! Maybe you attend with optimism. More likely you probably think to yourself “how will I select from this dire bunch of candidates???!“.
And every candidate is thinking: “This is ridiculous and unfair and like …totally ridiculous”.
4. Speaking loud seems to get you noticed.
Seems like whether you are the assessor or the candidate, the person who speaks loud often wins out. Almost always leaving participants to wonder: “Were fair decisions made and were the right decisions made?“.
Loud does not equate to right. Being confident does not equate to right either. Right?
5. They are all different.
There is little to no consistency or standardisation. For anyone is part of a national or global talent acquisition team – this is somewhat worrying. Particularly when you are recruiting for the same role across multiple geographies. When the bar to enter that role (and your organisation) moves, its a shift in goalposts and everyone knows: “that just ain’t fair!”.
6. Keeping the paperwork for compliance reasons is terribly time-consuming.
The record-keeping on assessment centres is an administrators nightmare. The spreadsheets to obtain attendance records, then print-outs to capture scoring. And for how long do you actually have to keep every scoring sheet? Is it a year or is it 7?
7. Calibration is rarely objective and never data-driven.
In concluding the assessment centre, the team calibrate their results together. This is the final decision-making process. Who should we progress to hire and who should be declined?
For anyone who has been an assessor, we all know that this calibration piece is too often based on opinions: “I believe she will really fit in” “She seemed to be super friendly” “I think she will be a great hire”. Believe, seemed, think. What is this? A fortune-tellers table in the corner of a dodgy country market? What happened to objective decision making?
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Above all, they are ridiculously time-consuming! With so much time being spent on Group Interviews, should we think seriously about how they could be done better? Hours organising and days invested in an event with unpredictable results. Seems crazy! Can we do something to improve this costly and unwieldy process?
It is for these reasons that Sapia has launched LiveInterview – the app that specialises in making group interviews:
1. Easier to organise
2. A pleasure to be there
3. Yield better results – especially considering all attendees were preselected using FirstInterview!
4. Totally fair and equitable
5. Consistent and standardised
6. Easy to administer. No record-keeping needed anymore, ever
7. Data-driven objective decision making plus it delivers a better hiring yield.
Now, let’s make the assessment centre shine, and produce the results we expect. To learn more, leave your details here, and we will be in contact.
Suggested Reading:
https://sapia.ai/blog/graduate-recruitment-during-covid-19-whats-different/
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:
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.
DEI by Design, Not by Mandate
With Sapia.ai:
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.
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:
“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:
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?
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.
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.)
Sapia.ai’s methodology is rooted in the science of human behaviour but powered by cutting-edge AI. We asked two core questions:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
But skills on their own — even soft ones — are generic, disjointed, and often disconnected from real-world performance. In contrast:
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?
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:
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.
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:
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.
To hire effectively at scale, particularly in a technology-driven world of work, talent leaders must shift their lens:
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.
Sapia.ai has developed a comprehensive Competency Framework using a data-driven approach. Download the full paper here.