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Here’s where to start with improving your employer brand

In this jobs market, the secret to success is not necessarily a huge job ad budget or a top-range salary and perks package. You don’t even need to be the biggest, or the best known – many are the top-notch candidates that have been ghosted by the world’s most sought-after companies.

How to improve your employer brand | Sapia.ai employer brand software
If you want to improve your employer brand, a mix of consistency, technology, and marketing nous is required.

You do, however, have to invest in employer brand. Most of us know this, of course, but few companies have made the appropriate investment in long-term brand building. It’s a marketing play, fundamentally, and it’s difficult to do right, but the benefits can be huge for your business.

Why should you care about employer branding?

It’s your best long-term approach to recruiting. If you give every candidate a caring, consistent, and memorable experience, you will dramatically increase your fill rate AND your talent network. People talk about good experiences – in fact, according to our own data, a single good experience while applying for a job makes candidates 77% more likely to recommend you as an employer of choice.

The good news is, too, that the impact of an employer brand can be easily measured, according to Dr John Sullivan: By the number of job applications you receive each year. Now, don’t confuse this point with the opening sentence of this post – there’s a difference between a company’s brand and its employer brand. You might be a Fortune 100 company with a household name, but if your job application process is terrible, people will know you and remember you for that. 

(And, if you’re not careful, a poor employer brand will end up affecting your wider brand.)

Where do you start with improving employer branding?

Your employer brand touches everything. You have seconds to introduce yourself to candidates, show off your best features, and get them to apply. That doesn’t mean, however, that you need to throw everything out and start again. Start with some easy wins, and then take a wider focus to include things like your technology and feedback processes.

Stodgy artwork, pixelated logos, spelling errors, outdated information, broken links… these will break your recruitment strategy before it has had the chance to work. So start here.

Employer brand audit checklist

Channel Items
Website Is our ‘About us’ section up to date?
Do we have a ‘careers’ or hiring information page?
Do both sections, along with the rest of our website, adequately reflect our values?
Social media platforms Is our ‘About us’ section up to date?
Do we include correct contact information, including to our website?
Does our imagery and content reflect our brand values?
Are our job postings attractive and adequately promoted on the page?
Recruiting portals (Seek, Indeed) Is all of our information up to date?
Are our visual branding touchpoints (logo, header/banner images) of sufficient quality?
Is all of our information up to date?
Third-party recommendation apps (e.g. Glassdoor, Productreview.com) What is the average star/quality rating of our reviews (mostly negative, positive, mostly positive)?
Have we made an effort to visibly address customer/employee feedback on the platform?

 

It’s important to note that the branding and visual appeal of your organization is not primarily your responsibility – maintaining it is a team effort. But portals and third-party apps are often overlooked over time, as a brand develops and organization information changes. It’s never a bad idea to champion the task of regular housekeeping, and get your best marketing minds to help.

Improving employer brand with technology

With our Ai Smart Interviewer on your team, you’ll give every single candidate an engaging, empowering experience with your brand, boosting its value from the moment they click ‘apply’.

You can have offers out to the best candidates in just 24 hours. This is an incredible value proposition for candidates who are applying for 5, 10, maybe even 20 jobs at a time and usually don’t expect to hear anything back.

Here’s how it works:

  • Every candidate interviews with our Ai over chat (and in return, gets personalised insights and tips – another tick for your employer brand and EVP)
  • Shortlisted candidates auto-progress to a non-Ai Video Interview (which, candidates rate 9/10)
  • Hiring managers review the video responses and pick the best with the help of our Talent Insights profile.

Our customers have cracked the candidate experience code, enjoying application completion rates in excess of 80%, and candidate satisfaction scores of more than 90%. Everyone gets an interview, and no one is ghosted.

Remember: There’s no space in this market to be slow.


Blog

How leading retailers are using AI-Native Hiring

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:

  • Candidates ghosted during slow hiring cycles
  • Store managers are overloaded with admin
  • Recruiters are overwhelmed with 100,000+ seasonal applicants
  • Talent is overlooked due to bias or unfair screening processes, not a lack of potential

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. 

  • Woolworths: 5,000 hours saved in a single week
  • Starbucks: Doubled hiring capacity, 91.8% completion
  • Holland & Barrett: Time to hire cut from 20 to 7 days
  • Woodie’s: 3x more ethnic minorities hired in 3 months

DEI by Design, Not by Mandate

With Sapia.ai:

  • 98% of candidates opt in to demographic questions
  • Zero adverse impact detected across gender, ethnicity, and disability
  • 1.5–3x improvements in diverse hiring rates

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. 

  • 9.2/10 CSAT across 2.6 M+ retail candidates
  • NPS: 78 (30+ points above industry benchmark)
  • 87% more likely to recommend the company’s products post-interview

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:

  • No use of resumes or scraped data
  • Hosted securely via AWS Bedrock
  • Claude-powered LLM scoring with model cards and explainability
  • Independent audits on bias, privacy, and methodology

“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:

  • Wasted recruiter hours
  • Lost revenue from unfilled roles
  • Bad churn that drains training budgets
  • Lower customer satisfaction from poor-fit hires.

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?

 

Book a demo

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Blog

Reinventing the Competency Framework: A Data-Driven Approach for the AI Era

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.

Why Rethink Competency Frameworks?

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.)

Our Approach: Where AI Meets I/O Psychology

Sapia.ai’s methodology is rooted in the science of human behaviour but powered by cutting-edge AI. We asked two core questions:

  1. Can we make competency discovery agile, scalable, and evidence-based?
  2. Can we use AI to automate the process without losing the rigour of traditional psychology?

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:

  1. Behavioural Descriptor Extraction
  2. Clustering and Labeling
  3. Cluster Analysis by I/O Psychologists
  4. Thematic Categorisation and Definition of Competencies

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.

Built to Scale. Built to Adapt.

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: 

  • Job Analyser – Starting with a job description, it creates a unique competency profile for each role to build tailored structured interviews in seconds.
  • Structured Chat-based Interviews that assess candidates’ responses according to the competency profile for consistent candidate assessment.
  • Talent Insights Reports from every interview with deep reasoning and explainability for fair and objective hiring decisions.
  • Phai Career Coach for internal mobility and employee growth that considers their competency strengths and career aspirations.

The Future of Talent Acquisition & Development is Competency-First

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.

Want to see how it works? Download the full framework.


 

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Blog

It’s Time to Stop Hiring for Skills, and Start Hiring for Competencies

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.

Skills vs Competencies: The Crucial Distinction

  • Skills are task-specific capabilities. Think Python programming, Excel, or even negotiation.

  • Soft skills refer to interpersonal or behavioural qualities like adaptability, communication, and resilience.

But skills on their own — even soft ones — are generic, disjointed, and often disconnected from real-world performance. In contrast:

  • Competencies are clusters of skills, knowledge, behaviours and abilities that are observable, measurable, and context-specific.

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?

Why Competencies Matter More Than Ever

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:

  1. Roles are changing faster than static skill frameworks can keep up

  2. Job candidates may have non-linear, cross-functional backgrounds

  3. The shelf-life of technical skills is shrinking rapidly

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.

Adaptive Talent: The New Competitive Advantage

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:

  • Learning agility

  • Change resilience

  • Cross-functional collaboration

  • Problem-solving in ambiguous contexts

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.

Building a Competency-Based Talent Framework

To hire effectively at scale, particularly in a technology-driven world of work, talent leaders must shift their lens:

  1. Define Role-Specific Competencies: Move beyond job descriptions based on qualifications or vague skill sets. Break roles down into measurable competencies that reflect current and emerging performance expectations. This step is crucial for organisations to be able to accurately assess role-fit in the next stages. Sapia.ai does this automatically, taking job descriptions and building role-specific competency models in seconds.

  2. Assess Competencies Fairly and Objectively: Use structured behavioural interviews, ideally at scale. These provide a much more accurate picture of a candidate’s readiness than self-reported skills or credentials. Sapia.ai’s AI powered interviews enable competency assessment, at scale.

  3. Build Pathways for Development and Internal Mobility: A competency framework makes it easier to identify transferable strengths, development gaps, and future-fit potential. It gives employees clarity on how to grow within the business. Using an AI-powered coach can help ensure that talent is being continuously developed against the organisation’s competency framework.

The Future of Work Requires Depth, Not Just Breadth

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.

Keen to Shift to Competencies, but Lacking a Framework? 

Sapia.ai has developed a comprehensive Competency Framework using a data-driven approach. Download the full paper here.


 

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