For recruiters and hiring managers, the fear of being ‘displaced’ by AI is real. There is discomfort in change and the unknown, and at Sapia.ai we work daily with organisations to reframe how AI is perceived by hiring teams.
We know that technology like Sapia.ai doesn’t displace, it elevates. But how to manage that elevation with your team is critical. Bringing a team of recruiters and potentially an entire organisation of hiring managers on a journey of change requires you to enable them to envision what’s possible for them in the new world. (Check out how we do that here).
Our customers know that leveraging tools like Sapia.ai to take care of the ‘grunt work’ of recruiting – the screening, the shortlisting, the scheduling – enables recruiters to become strategic business partners. They have much more time to focus on building and enabling strategic functions like advisory, sourcing, and performance analytics.
But what does it mean for a recruiter to elevate their role to this strategic level? What can they be doing day to day, with all this extra time?
Here are some practical examples of things that recruiters can finally start doing when they’re no longer shuffling through mountains of applications.
Enhancing Employer Branding and Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
EVP improvement: Focus on understanding and communicating what makes your workplace attractive. This means conducting employee surveys, focus groups, and market research to enhance the EVP and stand out in the highly competitive retail job market.
Strengthening employer branding: Spend time collaborating with marketing and HR to develop campaigns that showcase your company’s culture, benefits, and growth opportunities. This would attract top talent who align with your values, reducing turnover by attracting the right candidates from the start.
Developing a Talent Pipeline and Workforce Planning
Proactive talent pipeline: Create a more robust talent pipeline, focusing on identifying high-potential candidates for future needs, not just immediate hires. This would involve partnering with schools, training programs, and community organizations to ensure a steady flow of candidates. Leveraging technology like Sapia.ai to assess potential talent for soft skills will help you build these pipelines in a data-driven way.
Workforce planning: Collaborate with department heads to forecast staffing needs based on sales trends, seasonal spikes, and other factors, ensuring we have a ready supply of talent at the right times. This reduces the “emergency” hiring that contributes to high turnover and reduces your stress levels when it comes to seasonal hiring peaks.
Improving Candidate Experience
Streamlining the recruitment journey: With time freed up from manual tasks, you’re able to take a step back to review your end-to-end candidate experience—from application to onboarding. Do candidates feel informed, valued, and respected at every step? Building a seamless experience will lead to better retention and referrals. It’s important to note that this should always be done when bringing a new tool like Sapia.ai into your hiring process, considering how a new assessment or interview experience can enable enhancements to other parts of your process. Ongoing, having the capacity to review the process and understand what is working and what can be enhanced ensures you stay on top of your game.
Personalized interactions for high-value candidates: Because Sapia.ai provides you with a shortlist of the top candidates automatically, you can invest your time in ensuring the high-potential candidates receive personal outreach and interaction, offering a human touch to differentiate your company from competitors.
Data Analysis and Recruitment Metrics
Leveraging analytics: Invest time in analyzing recruitment data—such as time-to-hire, candidate quality, and turnover rates. This allows you to continuously refine your sourcing strategies and ensure you’re hiring candidates who are a better long-term fit. At Sapia.ai, data like this is provided to all customers, leveraging data from your ATS and augmenting it with data collected from our interviews to provide insight into key business metrics.
Turnover reduction strategies: By analyzing patterns in the data, you can develop initiatives to address the reasons behind high turnover. For example, this could involve identifying roles or locations with the highest turnover and implementing specific retention strategies for those areas.
Learning and Development Initiatives
Collaborating with L&D teams: Partner with the Learning and Development department to identify skills gaps in the frontline roles and suggest programs to help new hires succeed and stay with the company longer; and ensure that your new assessment capability is assessing for those skills.
Upskilling managers: Help your hiring managers to be better equipped to engage and retain frontline staff by implementing leadership development programs, focusing on coaching and managing retail workers effectively.
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Initiatives
D&I recruitment strategies: Focus on building a more diverse workforce by creating targeted outreach programs that attract underrepresented groups. You could partner with community organizations, diversity job boards, and internal employee resource groups to widen your prospective applicant pool and ensure inclusivity in your sourcing strategy.
Bias-free hiring process: By default, an AI you are using to screen or assess candidates should be inclusive and remove bias from the screening process. At Sapia.ai we provide diversity metrics to our customers that give visibility of potential hiring bias, all the way to the store level. Leverage this type of data to understand where improvements can be made and work with your business stakeholders to remove potential biases and ensure a diverse hiring practice.
Stakeholder and Relationship Management
Building stronger relationships with stakeholders: You can invest more time in fostering relationships with department managers, understanding their unique needs, and tailoring recruitment strategies to fit their teams. This ensures that hires align better with specific team dynamics and culture.
Partnering with HR and Operations: Collaborate more closely with the HR and Operations teams to improve the overall employee lifecycle experience—from onboarding to performance management to retention strategies.
Innovating Sourcing and Retention Strategies
Exploring new recruitment channels: Experiment with new ways to source candidates—such as social media campaigns, employee referral programs, and local community engagement efforts.
Retention-focused recruitment: Implement hiring practices that focus not just on filling roles quickly but also on finding people who are likely to stay long-term, aligning better with the company’s goals and values. When working with a tool like Sapia.ai, you are more likely to hire the people who belong with you, as they’re being assessed directly for potential role-fit at the first step of the hiring process.
Creating an Effective Onboarding Process
Onboarding program review: Take a deep dive into improving your onboarding process, making it more engaging, informative, and aligned with your company culture. This ensures that new hires feel supported and prepared, increasing their likelihood of staying.
By shifting focus from administrative tasks to strategic initiatives, you’ll create a more efficient recruitment process while significantly impacting retention rates, employee engagement, and long-term business success.
Related
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.
Blog
Situational Judgement Tests vs. AI Chat Interviews: A Modern Perspective on Candidate Assessment
Choosing the right tool for assessing candidates can be challenging. For years, situational judgement tests (SJTs) have been a common choice for evaluating behaviour and decision-making skills. However, they come with limitations that can make the hiring process less effective and less inclusive.
AI-enabled chat-based interviews, such as Sapia.ai, provide organisations with a modern alternative. They focus on understanding candidates as individuals and creating a hiring experience that is both fair and insightful while enabling efficient screening and selection.
This shift raises important questions: Are SJTs still a tool that should be considered for volume hiring? And what do AI assessments offer in comparison?
1. The Static Nature of SJTs
Traditional SJTs use predefined multiple-choice questions to assess behavioural tendencies and situational knowledge. While useful for screening, these static frameworks lack the flexibility to adapt based on real-world performance data or evolving role requirements.
Once created, SJTs don’t adapt to new data or evolving organisational needs. They rely on fixed scenarios and responses that may not fully reflect the dynamic realities of modern workplaces, and as a result, their relevance may diminish over time.
AI-enabled chat interviews, on the other hand, are inherently adaptive. Using machine learning, these tools can continuously refine their models based on feedback from real-world outcomes such as hiring or turnover data. This ability to evolve ensures the assessments align with organisations’ needs.
2. Richer Data Through Open-Ended Responses
One of the main critiques of SJTs is their reliance on multiple-choice responses. While structured and straightforward, these options may not capture the full scope of a candidate’s thinking, communication skills, or problem-solving ability. The approach is often limiting, reducing complex human behaviour to a few predefined choices.
AI-enabled chat interviews work more holistically and dynamically. These tools provide a more complete picture of a person by allowing candidates to answer questions in their own words. Natural language processing (NLP) analyses their responses, offering insights into personality traits, communication skills, and behavioural tendencies. This open-ended format lets candidates express themselves authentically, giving employers a deeper understanding of their potential.
3. The Candidate Experience: Stressful or Supportive?
SJTs often include time constraints and rigid formats, which can create pressure for candidates. This is especially true when candidates feel forced to choose options that don’t fully reflect how they would actually behave. The process can feel impersonal, even transactional.
In contrast, chat-based interviews are designed to be conversational and low-pressure for candidates. By removing time limits and adopting a familiar chat interface, these tools help candidates feel more at ease. They also frequently include personalised feedback, turning the assessment into a valuable experience for the candidate, not just the employer.
4. Addressing Bias and Fairness
Traditional SJTs are prone to transparency issues, as candidates can often identify and select the “best practice” answers without revealing their true tendencies. Additionally, static test designs can unintentionally embed bias; due to the nature of the timed test, SJTs have been found to disadvantage some groups.
AI chat interviews, when developed ethically within a framework like Sapia.ai’s FAIR Hiring Framework, eliminate explicit bias by relying solely on the content of a candidate’s responses. Their machine learning models are continuously validated for fairness, ensuring that hiring decisions are free from subjective judgments or irrelevant demographic factors.
5. An Assessment That Improves Over Time
Workplaces are constantly changing, and hiring tools need to keep up. SJTs’ fixed nature can make them less effective as roles evolve or organizational priorities shift. They provide a snapshot but not a dynamic view of what’s needed.
AI-enabled chat interviews are built to adapt. With feedback loops and continuous learning, they incorporate real-world hiring outcomes—like retention and performance data—into their models. This ensures that assessments stay relevant and effective over time.
Rethinking Candidate Assessment
As hiring demands grow more complex, so does the need for tools that can capture the whole person, not just their response to hypothetical scenarios. While SJTs have played an important role in hiring practices, they are increasingly being replaced by tools like AI-enabled chat interviews.
These modern approaches provide richer data, adapt to changing needs, and create a richer and more engaging experience for candidates. Perhaps most importantly, they emphasise fairness and inclusivity, aligning with the growing demand for unbiased hiring practices.
For organisations evaluating their assessment tools, the question isn’t just which method is “better.” Understanding the specific needs of your roles, teams, and candidates will help you choose tools that help you make decisions that are both informed and equitable.
Blog
Keeping Interviews Real with Next-Gen AI Detection
It’s our firm belief that AI should empower, not overshadow, human potential. While AI tools like ChatGPT are brilliant at assisting us with day-to-day tasks and improving our work efficiency, employers are increasingly concerned that they’re holding candidates back from revealing their true, authentic selves in online interviews.
As an assessment technology provider, we are responsible for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of our platform. That’s why we’re thrilled to unveil the latest upgrade to our flagship Chat Interview: the AI-Generated Content Detector 2.0. With groundbreaking accuracy and a candidate-friendly design, this innovation reinforces our mission to build ethical AI for hiring that people love.
Artificially Generated Content (AGC) is content created by an AI tool, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Pi. We initially rolled out the first version of our AGC detector last year and have continued to improve it as our data set has grown and these AI tools have evolved.
What’s New?
Our updated AGC Detector 2.0 achieves an impressive 98% detection rate for AI-assisted responses, with a false positive rate of just 1%. This gives organisations peace of mind that they’re getting the most authentic assessment of every candidate.
This cutting-edge system builds on Sapia.ai’s proprietary dataset of over 2 billion words, derived from more than 20 million interview question-answer pairs spanning diverse roles, industries, and regions. It’s trained on real-world data collected before and after the release of tools like ChatGPT, ensuring it remains robust and reliable even as AI tools evolve.
The Challenge of AI in Chat-based Interviews
Our data shows that around 8% of candidates use tools like GPT-4 to generate responses for three or more interview questions. While these tools may offer a quick way for candidates to complete their interview, they can inadvertently hide a person’s true personality and potential – qualities our customers are most interested in understanding through our platform. In fact, research from Sapia Labs shows that these tools have their own personality traits, which may be quite different from the candidate applying for the role.
For Candidates: Enabling Authenticity
When a response is flagged as potentially AI-generated, the system doesn’t disqualify candidates. Instead, a real-time warning pops up, allowing them to revise their answers or submit them as-is. This ensures that candidates are encouraged to present themselves authentically, reflecting their unique communication styles and sharing their genuine experiences.
For Hiring Teams: Actionable Insights
Responses flagged as AI-generated are highlighted in the candidate’s Talent Insights profile, accessible via Sapia.ai’s Talent Hub or ATS integrations. These insights give hiring teams the transparency to make informed decisions, fostering trust while accelerating hiring timelines.
Built on Unmatched AI Interview Expertise
“Our detection model’s strength lies in its foundation of real-world interview data collected from diverse roles and regions,” says Dr Buddhi Jayatilleke, Sapia.ai’s Chief Data Scientist. This depth of understanding enables the AGC Detector to maintain its industry-leading accuracy – even when candidates subtly modify AI-generated answers to appear more human.
Why This Matters
The AGC Detector 2.0 embodies Sapia.ai’s commitment to ethical AI that amplifies human potential. As our CEO Barb Hyman explains:
“The hiring landscape has fundamentally changed since ChatGPT, but our commitment remains clear: AI should amplify human potential, not penalise it. This breakthrough fosters authentic hiring conversations. Our real-time warning system helps candidates make better choices and gives enterprises confidence in their selection decisions.”
Testing and Validation of the AGC Detector 2.0
The new detector has been rigorously tested on over 25,000 interview responses generated by humans and leading AI models like GPT-4, Claude-3.5, and Llama-3. The results speak for themselves, reinforcing the reliability and fairness of this game-changing technology.
Fairness & Transparency in AI-Enabled Hiring
By detecting AI-generated content while allowing candidates to correct their responses, our AGC Detector 2.0 ensures every applicant has the chance to put their best, most authentic foot forward when applying for a role powered by Sapia.ai. For enterprises, it provides confidence in the integrity of their hiring decisions and ensures they’re connecting with real candidates at scale.