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
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.
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.