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High volume hiring? Here’s why smart-touch hiring is better than high-touch

The secret to securing great talent is a first-rate candidate experience. If you have been in any way entangled in the aftermath of 2021’s Great Resignation, you know that even an attractive remuneration package, with compelling benefits, is not enough: Now, more than ever, prospective hires will want to see the best of your organisation, and that includes the best of you. You must be fast, decisive, and flexible, from the point of first contact.

This is a problem amplified by scale. If you’re responsible for hiring 100,000 employees per year, for instance, you may find you are required to provide a top-notch candidate experience for that many prospects. You could decide that it is better to do things the old fashioned way, but it is more and more likely that, in doing so, you will miss out on great talent. The cost of such losses is best avoided.

Automation, be it through an assessment tool, conversational Ai platform, or Applicant Tracking System (ATS), is the simple key to solving volume hiring in a chaotic market. However, understandably, many high-volume hiring managers tend to think that automation comes at the cost of personalisation and human contact. If, for instance, you’re processing 5,000 prospects to fit 300 job openings, how do you ensure your candidates are met with the high-touch journey they expect? Is an automated Ai conversation, in the minds of candidates, not just as impersonal as older methods of qualification?

What ‘high-touch’ actually means, and its purpose

On the face of it, ‘high-touch’ implies an emphasis on person-to-person, face-to-face contact in your hiring process. If you can see your candidates, if you can greet them warmly and exalt your free-breakfast policy, you can make them feel special. Sending an email or a link to a form is impersonal, outmoded, and risks alienating the people you want to attract. 

What if, instead, high-touch is a stand-in for meaningful contact, instead of lots of contact? What if you could conduct a smooth, quick, and painless interview process that:

  • Asked the best from candidates, and allowed them to provide thoughtful responses in their own time
  • Explored the human aspects of their personality, and not just the line items on their CV
  • Ignored, by design, the aspects of candidates prone to bias (such as appearance, ethnicity, age, and so on)

Is that not more effective than a by-the-book interview in which you smiled a lot, engaged in forgettable small talk, and discussed a laundry list of perks?

Woolworths, Australia’s largest private employer, adopted the smart-touch automated hiring approach, and won handsomely for it. They used our Chat Interview (chat-based) and Video Interview (video-based) solutions to assess nearly 9,000 candidates, achieving a candidate satisfaction score of 9.2 out of 10. We saved the hiring team time and money, helped give each of their candidates the fairest possible go, and best of all, helped them achieve their hiring targets. 

Woolworths wanted the equivalent of a high-touch candidate experience, and judging by these candidate testimonials, they certainly got it:

“The chat makes you feel like you’re in a safe space – it gives everyone an equal opportunity instead of an in person interview as people can get extremely nervous”.

“I found the process to be reflective and I liked how they wanted to know about me”.

“Everything was amazing! By far the best interview system I’ve encountered! It allowed me to be comfortable and be myself, it really allowed me to take my time with my responses rather than stutter over my words”.

“It was great. I like the potential to retake videos and how quick you’ve responded”.

There you have it: That is how a small hiring team can process nearly 10,000 candidates, using conversational Ai, and offer a truly high-touch candidate experience. But the benefits don’t stop there.

With a smart-touch automation solution, Talent Analytics can heighten your touch

When you entrust your hiring process to Smart Interviewer, our smart interviewer, you automate the process of meaningful data collection. That data is then transformed into actionable insights that help you improve your hiring processes. With TalentInsights, you could learn:

  • Your average time to hire
  • Estimated time saving in hours (incidentally, we’ve helped our customers save a total of 530,000 hours that would have been spent in cumbersome, high-touch interviews)
  • The quality of your candidate pool overall, or by gender
  • Overall candidate engagement scores

And much more. Suddenly, you have the numbers to back your wider hiring strategies, be they focussed on DEI, or fairness, or another goal. You can show your business that you are making real, quantifiable strides, and leading the way in efficiency and social responsibility.

The appetite for good, actionable data in HR is higher than it has ever been. Hiring managers are waking fast to the realities of the Great Resignation – that we just don’t know as much as we should about what constitutes good talent and candidate experience. In other words: We don’t really know why people are leaving, and we don’t really know why they do or don’t choose us in the first place.

According to a recent study by Madeline Laurano, founder of Aptitude Research, only 50% of the companies that invest in Talent Analytics actually trust the source of their data. When you consider that around 80 million American workers are hourly workers, one of the hardest-to-recruit employment segments of the moment, it becomes clear that the need for useful data is absolutely critical. 

What approach will you take? What kind of experience will you provide your candidates, before and after hiring? What kind of data will guide your decisions? Remember: The choice to do nothing is still a choice, and it has an indeterminate cost.


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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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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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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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