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.
A new study has just confirmed what many in HR have long suspected: traditional psychometric tests are no longer the gold standard for hiring.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the research compared AI-powered, chat-based interviews to traditional assessments, finding that structured, conversational AI interviews significantly reduce social desirability bias, deliver a better candidate experience, and offer a fairer path to talent discovery.
We’ve always believed hiring should be about understanding people and their potential, rather than reducing them to static scores. This latest research validates that approach, signalling to employers what modern, fair and inclusive hiring should look like.
While used for many decades in the absence of a more candidate-first approach, psychometric testing has some fatal flaws.
For starters, these tests rely heavily on self-reporting. Candidates are expected to assess their own traits. Could you truly and honestly rate how conscientious you are, how well you manage stress, or how likely you are to follow rules? Human beings are nuanced, and in high-stakes situations like job applications, most people are answering to impress, which can lead to less-than-honest self-evaluations.
This is known as social desirability bias: a tendency to respond in ways that are perceived as more favourable or acceptable, even if they don’t reflect reality. In other words, traditional assessments often capture a version of the candidate that’s curated for the test, not the person who will show up to work.
Worse still, these assessments can feel cold, transactional, even intimidating. They do little to surface communication skills, adaptability, or real-world problem solving, the things that make someone great at a job. And for many candidates, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, the format itself can feel exclusionary.
Enter conversational AI.
Organisations have been using chat-based interviews to assess talent since before 2018, and they offer a distinctly different approach.
Rather than asking candidates to rate themselves on abstract traits, they invite them into a structured, open-ended conversation. This creates space for candidates to share stories, explain their thinking, and demonstrate how they communicate and solve problems.
The format reduces stress and pressure because it feels more like messaging than testing. Candidates can be more authentic, and their responses have been proven to reveal personality traits, values, and competencies in a context that mirrors honest workplace communication.
Importantly, every candidate receives the same questions, evaluated against the same objective, explainable framework. These interviews are structured by design, evaluated by AI models like Sapia.ai’s InterviewBERT, and built on deep language analysis. That means better data, richer insights, and a process that works at scale without compromising fairness.
The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, put AI-powered, chat-based interviews head-to-head with traditional psychometric assessments, and the results were striking.
One of the most significant takeaways was that candidates are less likely to “fake good” in chat interviews. The study found that AI-led conversations reduce social desirability bias, giving a more honest, unfiltered view of how people think and express themselves. That’s because, unlike multiple-choice questionnaires, chat-based assessments don’t offer obvious “right” answers – it’s on the candidate to express themselves authentically and not guess teh answer they think they would be rewarded for.
The research also confirmed what our candidate feedback has shown for years: people actually enjoy this kind of assessment. Participants rated the chat interviews as more engaging, less stressful, and more respectful of their individuality. In a hiring landscape where candidate experience is make-or-break, this matters.
And while traditional psychometric tests still show higher predictive validity in isolated lab conditions, the researchers were clear: real-world hiring decisions can’t be reduced to prediction alone. Fairness, transparency, and experience matter just as much, often more, when building trust and attracting top talent.
Sapia.ai was spotlighted in the study as a leader in this space, with our InterviewBERT model recognised for its ability to interpret candidate responses in a way that’s explainable, responsible, and grounded in science.
Today, hiring has to be about earning trust and empowering candidates to show up as their full selves, and having a voice in the process.
Traditional assessments often strip candidates of agency. They’re asked to conform, perform, and second-guess what the “right” answer might be. Chat-based interviews flip that dynamic. By inviting candidates into an open conversation, they offer something rare in hiring: autonomy. Candidates can tell their story, explain their thinking, and share how they approach real-world challenges, all in their own words.
This signals respect from the employer. It says: We trust you to show us who you are.
Hiring should be a two-way street – a long-held belief we’ve had, now backed by peer-reviewed science. The new research confirms that AI-led interviews can reduce bias, enhance fairness, and give candidates control over how they’re seen and evaluated.
It’s time for a new way to map progress in AI adoption, and pilots are not it.
Over the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to see inside dozens of enterprise AI programs. As a CEO, founder, and recently, judge in the inaugural Australian Financial Review AI Awards.
And here’s what struck me:
Despite the hype, we still don’t have a shared language for AI maturity in business.
Some companies are racing ahead. Others are still building slide decks. But the real issue is that even the orgs that are “doing AI” often don’t know what good looks like.
The most successful AI adoption strategy does not have you buying the hottest Gen AI tool or spinning up a chatbot to solve one use case. What it should do is build organisational capability in AI ethics, AI governance, data, design, and most of all, leadership.
It’s time we introduced a real AI Maturity Model. Not a checklist. A considered progression model. Something that recognises where your organisation is today and what needs to evolve next, safely, responsibly, and strategically.
Here’s an early sketch based on what I’ve seen:
AI is a capability.And like any capability, it needs time, structure, investment, and a map.
If you’re an HR leader, CIO, or enterprise buyer, and you’re trying to separate the real from the theatre, maturity thinking is your edge.
Let’s stop asking, “Who’s using AI?”
And start asking: “How mature is our AI practice and what’s the next step?”
I’m working on a more complete model now, based on what I’ve seen in Australia, the UK, and across our customer base. If you’re thinking about this too, I’d love to hear from you.
For too long, AI in hiring has been a black box. It promises speed, fairness, and efficiency, but rarely shows its work.
That era is ending.
“AI hiring should never feel like a mystery. Transparency builds trust, and trust drives adoption.”
At Sapia.ai, we’ve always worked to provide transparency to our customers. Whether with explainable scores, understandable AI models, or by sharing ROI data regularly, it’s a founding principle on which we build all of our products.
Now, with Discover Insights, transparency is embedded into our user experience. And it’s giving TA leaders the clarity to lead with confidence.
Transparency Is the New Talent Advantage
Candidates expect fairness. Executives demand ROI. Boards want compliance. Transparency delivers all three.
Even visionary Talent Leaders can find it difficult to move beyond managing processes to driving strategy without the right data. Discover Insights changes that.
“When talent leaders can see what’s working (and why) they can stop defending their strategy and start owning it.”
What it is: The median time between application and hire.
Why it matters: This is your speedometer. A sharp view of how long hiring takes and how that varies by cohort, role, or team helps you identify delays and prove efficiency gains to leadership.
Faster time to hire = faster access to revenue-driving talent.
What it is: Satisfaction scores, brand advocacy measures, and unfiltered candidate comments.
Why it matters: Many platforms track satisfaction. Sapia.ai’s Discover Insights takes it further, measuring whether that satisfaction translates into employer and consumer brand advocacy.
And with verbatim feedback collected at scale, talent leaders don’t have to guess how candidates feel. They can read it, learn from it, and take action.
You don’t just measure experience. You understand it in the candidates’ own words.
What it is: The percentage of candidates who exit the hiring process at different stages, and how to spot why.
Why it matters: Understanding drop-off points lets teams fix friction quickly. Embedding automation early in the funnel reduces recruiter workload and elevates top candidates, getting them talking to your hiring teams faster.
Assessment completion benchmarks in volume hiring range between 60–80%, but with a mobile-first, chat-based format like Sapia.ai’s, clients often exceed that.
Optimising your funnel isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing smarter, with less effort and better outcomes.
What it is: The percentage of completed applications that result in a hire.
Why it matters: This is your funnel efficiency score. A high yield means your sourcing, screening, and selection are aligned. A low one? There’s leakage, misfit, or missed opportunity.
Hiring yield signals funnel health, recruiter performance, and candidate-process fit.
What it is: Insights into how candidate scores are distributed, and whether responses appear copied or AI-generated.
Why it matters: In high-volume hiring, a normal distribution of scores suggests your assessment is calibrated fairly. If it’s skewed too far left or right, it could be too hard or too easy, and that affects trust.
Add in answer originality, and you can track engagement integrity, protecting both your process and your brand.
To effectively lead, you need more than simply tracking; you need insights enabling action.
When you can see how AI impacts every part of your hiring, from recruiter productivity to candidate sentiment to untapped talent, you lead with insight, not assumption. And that’s how TA earns a seat at the strategy table.