To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.
What is a Chat Interview?
A chat interview is a modern, tech-savvy approach to the traditional job interview. Instead of sitting across from an interviewer in a formal setting, you communicate with your potential employer through a chat-based platform. It’s like having a conversation with a friend, only this friend is interested in your qualifications and skills.
The Rise of Chat-Based Interviews
Why are AI-enhanced chat-based interviews gaining traction in the job market? The answer lies in the changing dynamics of communication and the evolving expectations of job seekers and employers, influenced by AI interview software.
Traditionally, interviews were conducted face-to-face or over the phone, but with the advent of technology, communication methods have evolved. People now prefer the convenience of text-based conversations. This shift has led to the rise of chat-based interviews, facilitated by AI for interviews, which align better with our modern, fast-paced lives.
Benefits of Chat-Based Interviews
So, why should job seekers and employers embrace chat-based interviews? Let’s explore some of the key benefits:
- Convenience: You can participate in a chat interview from anywhere, eliminating the need for travel and saving time.
- Reduced Pressure: Chat interviews are less intimidating, creating a more relaxed environment for candidates to showcase their true selves.
- Efficient Screening: Employers can quickly assess a candidate’s suitability through chat interviews, reducing the time and resources needed for the hiring process.
- Access to a Diverse Talent Pool: Chat interviews make it easier for international candidates to participate in the hiring process, promoting diversity.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Sapia interviews provide data-backed insights, helping employers make more informed hiring decisions.
Chat-Based vs. Text-Based Interviews
It’s essential to distinguish between chat-based and text-based interviews. While both involve written communication, they serve different purposes in the hiring process.
- Chat-Based Interviews: These are interactive conversations, often in real-time, with an interviewer or chatbot. They assess both hard and soft skills.
- Text-Based Interviews: Text-based interviews typically involve answering pre-written questions at your convenience. They focus primarily on hard skills and qualifications.
The choice between the two depends on the company’s hiring strategy and the role being filled.
A major study has validated the ability of AI-powered, chat-based interviews to assess personality traits and job fit.
The analysis of Sapia’s model, which uses text-based communication to interview candidates, has been published in peer-reviewed journal IEEE Access.
The researchers used data from more than 46,000 job applicants who completed an online chat interview and a questionnaire based on the six-factor HEXACO personality model. The HEXACO traits are honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
Personality models such as the Big Five and HEXACO are based on the ‘lexical hypothesis’. That is personality characteristics are encoded in language, showing the foundational impact of language in defining identifiable personality traits, the researchers say.
After the applicants’ personality traits were assessed they were asked to provide feedback on the accuracy of how they were described. Also, the researchers found 87.8% of the participants agreed with the description given for each of the six traits.
Behavioural questions
Sapia CEO Barbara Hyman tells Shortlist that in the Sapia interview question, they aim to avoid focusing on hypothetical scenarios that create the potential for candidates to give similar answers to others. Additionally, the interviews are oriented towards behavioral, not situational questions.
Candidates can likely work out what trait is being assessed by each question. However, they can’t “game” their responses with pre-rehearsed scenarios, she says.
Examples of the questions used in the interviews include:
- Which of our values do you really connect with, and why?
- Explain to us the one thing you really want to learn from someone else that you work with and why?
- What is a goal that you’ve set for yourself and what did you learn from achieving it (or not)?
- Sometimes things don’t always go to plan. Describe a time when you failed to meet a deadline or personal commitment. What did you do? How did that make you feel?
- What motivates you? What are you passionate about?
- Not everyone agrees all the time. Have you had a peer, teammate or friend disagree with you? What did you do?
- In sales, thinking fast is critical. What qualifies you for this? Provide an example.
- Would you rather win, or be happy? Explain your answer.
- Tell us about a time when you went above and beyond to do something for someone; how did that make you feel?
Sapia: Making recruitment easy!
Candidates respond to the assessment questions with a noticeable sense of intimacy and authenticity, even including emojis in their answers. “The same way they would respond to a friend”, says Hyman.
Finally, she adds that a text-based approach leaves less room for recruiter partiality compared to CVs, psychometric assessments, and video interviews.
Predicting personality using answers to open-ended interview questions, IEEE, June 2020
Source: Shortlist.net.au | Wednesday 15 July 2020 9:21am
Related
Blog
The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?
Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels.
As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?
At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020.
Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.
The Rise of GPT
When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’).
Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans.
That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.
Full Transparency with Candidates
Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it.
This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses.
The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data…
We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers.
The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again.
The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.
Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups
We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.
However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right.
Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers.
We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.
However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward.
It’s a mix of perspectives.
Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes.
This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build.
Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇
Research Paper Download: AI Generated Content in Online Text-based Structured Interviews
Blog
Joe & the Juice Partners with Sapia.ai, Scaling an Exceptional Candidate Experience and Cutting Time to Hire
Read the full press release about the partnership here.
Joe & the Juice, the trailblazing global juice bar and coffee concept, is renowned for its vibrant culture and commitment to cultivating talent. With humble roots from one store in Copenhagen, now with a presence in 17 markets, Joe & The Juice has built a culture that fosters growth and celebrates individuality.
But, as their footprint expands, so does the challenge of finding and hiring the right talent to embody their unique culture. With over 300,000 applications annually, the traditional hiring process using CVs was falling short – leaving candidates waiting and creating inefficiencies for the recruitment team. To address this, Joe & The Juice turned to Sapia.ai, a pioneer in ethical AI hiring solutions.
A Fresh Approach to Hiring
Through this partnership, Joe & The Juice has transformed its hiring process into an inclusive, efficient, and brand-aligned experience. Instead of faceless CVs, candidates now engage in an innovative chat-based interview that reflects the brand’s energy and ethos. Available in multiple languages, the AI-driven interview screens for alignment with the “Juicer DNA” and the brand’s core values, ensuring that every candidate feels seen and valued.
Candidates receive an engaging and fair interview experience as well as personality insights and coaching tips as part of their journey. In fact, 93% of candidates have found these insights useful, helping to deliver a world-class experience to candidates who are also potential guests of the brand.
“Every candidate interaction reflects our brand,” Sebastian Jeppesen, Global Head of Recruitment, shared. “Sapia.ai makes our recruitment process fair, enriching, and culture-driven.”
Results That Matter
For Joe & The Juice, the collaboration has yielded impressive results:
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33% Reduction in Screening Time: Pre-vetted shortlists from Sapia.ai’s platform ensure that recruiters can focus on top candidates, getting them behind the bar faster.
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Improved Candidate Satisfaction: With a 9/10 satisfaction score from over 55,000 interviews, candidates appreciate the fairness and transparency of the process.
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Bias-Free Hiring: By eliminating CVs and integrating blind AI that prioritizes fairness, Joe & The Juice ensures their hiring reflects the diverse communities they serve.
Frederik Rosenstand, Group Director of People & Development at Joe & The Juice, highlighted the transformative impact: “Our juicers are our future leaders, so using ethical AI to find the people who belong at Joe is critical to our long-term success. And now we do that with a fair, unbiased experience that aligns directly with our brand.”
Trailblazing for the hospitality industry
In an industry so wholly centred on people, Joe & the Juice is paving the way for similar brands to adopt technology that enables inclusive, human-first experiences that can reflect a brand’s core values.
If you’re curious about how Sapia.ai can transform your hiring process, check out our full case study on Joe & The Juice here.
Blog
Sapia.ai Wrapped 2024
It’s been a year of Big Moves at Sapia.ai. From welcoming groundbreaking brands to achieving incredible milestones in our product innovation and scale, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in hiring.
And we’re just getting started 🚀
Take a look at the highlights of 2024
All-in-one hiring platform
This year, with the addition of Live Interview, we’re proud to say our platform now covers screening, assessing and scheduling.
It’s an all-in-one volume hiring platform that enables our customers to deliver a world-leading experience from application through to offer.
Supercharging hiring efficiency
Every 15 seconds, a candidate is interviewed with Sapia.ai.
This year, we’ve saved hiring managers and recruiters hours of precious time that can now be used for higher-value tasks.
Giving candidates the best experience
Our platform allows candidates to be their best selves, so our customers can find the people that truly belong with them. They’re proud to use a technology that’s changing hiring, for good.
Leading the way in AI for hiring
We’ve continued to push the boundaries in leveraging ethical AI for hiring, with new products on the way for Coaching, Internal Mobility & Interview Builders.