Search for “Candidate Experience” on Google and you will get in the region of 2.3M results. “Wow, that’s a lot!”
Yet do the same search for “Customer Experience” and you will 56x that amount – with a whopping 132,000,000 results delivered to you. Also, have a look at Google Search trends over the past 10 years and, this is what you will see. Overall, there is very little interest in “Candidate Experience” when compared to “Customer Experience”.
The same trend exists in books. Search Amazon for “Customer Experience” and there are over 1000 books written. However, if you do the same search for “Candidate Experience” and theres a pithy 20 books.
To borrow from our recent blog on The Two Big Reasons To Prioritise Improving Candidates’ Experience In 2024: Candidate experience is defined as the perception of a job seeker about an organisation and their brand based on their interactions during the recruiting process. Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. Is there a difference?
It’s all about how the human feels when interacting with your brand. Thus, it’s all about the human and candidate experience.
What could we learn from that ‘thought experiment”? We borrowed Blake Morgan’s article in Forbes as a source. Some of these quotes should be read as if your full-time role is in Talent Acquisition.
These could provide a source of inspiration for your next retrospective or “Lessons Learnt” on Candidate Experience.
“We see our candidates as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the candidate experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
“Candidate experience isn’t an expense. Managing candidate experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
“Make the candidate the hero of your story.” – Ann Handley
“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” – Walt Disney
“If you don’t care, your candidate never will.” – Marlene Blaszczyk
“Loyal candidates, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell
“Candidate experience better be at the top of your list when it comes to priorities in your organization. Candidate experience is the new marketing.” – Steve Cannon
“Building a good candidate experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt
“Exceptional candidate experiences are the only sustainable platform for competitive differentiation.” – Kerry Bodine
“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Candidates are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.” – Ian Schafer
“Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale
“Your mission statement may be on the wall, but your core values are displayed in the attitudes of your employees.” – Elle Clarke
“So, get to know your candidates. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” – Kristin Smaby
“Treat each candidate as if they are the only one!” – Laurice Leitao
“The key is to set realistic candidate expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Richard Branson
“Revolve your world around the candidate and more candidates will revolve around you.” – Heather Williams
“To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your candidates, you first have to respect those candidates.” – Colleen Barrett
“How you think about your candidate influences how you respond to them.” – Marilyn Suttle
“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand” – Howard Schultz
“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
“Ease your candidates’ pain.” – Hazel Edwards
“Your most unhappy candidates are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
“Courteous treatment will make a candidate a walking advertisement.” – J.C. Penney
“Good candidate service costs less than bad candidate service.” – Sally Gronow
“Candidate service is an opportunity to exceed your candidate’s expectations.” – John Jantsch
“It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your candidate’s’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken candidate relationship.” – Mark Cuban
“Only once candidate service has become habitual will a company realize its true potential.” — Than Merrill
“Candidates don’t care about your policies. Find and engage the need. Tell the candidate what you can” – Alice Sesay Pope
“Here is a powerful yet simple rule. Always give people more than they expect to get.” – Nelson Boswell
“A lot of people have fancy things to say about candidates service, but it’s just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.” – Christopher McCormick
“We have entered the era of the candidates. Today, providing candidates with outstanding candidate service is essential to building loyal candidates and a long-lasting brand.” – Jerry Gregoire
“Great candidate service doesn’t mean that the candidate is always right, it means that the candidate is always honoured.” – Chris LoCurto
“The first step in exceeding your candidate’s expectations is to know those expectations.” – Roy H. Williams
“Satisfied candidate is the best source of advertisement” – G.S. Alag
“Making candidate evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about.” – Valeria Maltoni
“No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a candidate’s concern.” – Albert Schindler
“Candidates who love you will market for you more powerfully than you can possibly market yourself.” – Jeanne Bliss
“If you want to be a good brand and have a value exchange with the candidate… you’ve got to have the listening mechanisms that can catch up to the candidate as well.” – Kelly Soligon
“People don’t just buy your products that they can see; they buy your attitude that they can sense” – Roxanne Emmerich
“Just having satisfied candidates isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” – Ken Blanchard
“Happy candidates are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.” – Lisa Masiello
“Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your candidate interactions.” – Betsy Sanders
“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ – Brian Tracy
“Your candidate doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Damon Richards
“When you serve the candidate better, they always return on your investment.” – Kara Parlin
“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt
“If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the candidate first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc
“Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your candidates and their reactions.” – Jake Knapp
“Treat the candidate like you would want to be treated. Period!” – Brad Schweig
“Never lose sight of candidates. Always be focusing on meeting their needs and expectations.” – Sue Duris
The good news is that for those organisations who genuinely want to improve candidate experience, it has become much easier to do so. It is now straightforward to give great experiences at scale while also driving down costs and improving efficiencies.
Alas, the win-win is easily attainable. In the Sapia Candidate Experience Playbook, read how organisations are hiring with heart. All done by creating positive experiences for candidates while also decreasing the workload for the hiring team.
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.