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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New Research Proves the Value of AI Hiring
A new study has just confirmed what many in HR have long suspected: traditional psychometric tests are no longer the gold standard for hiring.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the research compared AI-powered, chat-based interviews to traditional assessments, finding that structured, conversational AI interviews significantly reduce social desirability bias, deliver a better candidate experience, and offer a fairer path to talent discovery.
We’ve always believed hiring should be about understanding people and their potential, rather than reducing them to static scores. This latest research validates that approach, signalling to employers what modern, fair and inclusive hiring should look like.
The problem with traditional psychometric tests
While used for many decades in the absence of a more candidate-first approach, psychometric testing has some fatal flaws.
For starters, these tests rely heavily on self-reporting. Candidates are expected to assess their own traits. Could you truly and honestly rate how conscientious you are, how well you manage stress, or how likely you are to follow rules? Human beings are nuanced, and in high-stakes situations like job applications, most people are answering to impress, which can lead to less-than-honest self-evaluations.
This is known as social desirability bias: a tendency to respond in ways that are perceived as more favourable or acceptable, even if they don’t reflect reality. In other words, traditional assessments often capture a version of the candidate that’s curated for the test, not the person who will show up to work.
Worse still, these assessments can feel cold, transactional, even intimidating. They do little to surface communication skills, adaptability, or real-world problem solving, the things that make someone great at a job. And for many candidates, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, the format itself can feel exclusionary.
The Rise of Chat-Based Interviews
Enter conversational AI.
Organisations have been using chat-based interviews to assess talent since before 2018, and they offer a distinctly different approach.
Rather than asking candidates to rate themselves on abstract traits, they invite them into a structured, open-ended conversation. This creates space for candidates to share stories, explain their thinking, and demonstrate how they communicate and solve problems.
The format reduces stress and pressure because it feels more like messaging than testing. Candidates can be more authentic, and their responses have been proven to reveal personality traits, values, and competencies in a context that mirrors honest workplace communication.
Importantly, every candidate receives the same questions, evaluated against the same objective, explainable framework. These interviews are structured by design, evaluated by AI models like Sapia.ai’s InterviewBERT, and built on deep language analysis. That means better data, richer insights, and a process that works at scale without compromising fairness.
Key Findings from the Latest Research
The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, put AI-powered, chat-based interviews head-to-head with traditional psychometric assessments, and the results were striking.
One of the most significant takeaways was that candidates are less likely to “fake good” in chat interviews. The study found that AI-led conversations reduce social desirability bias, giving a more honest, unfiltered view of how people think and express themselves. That’s because, unlike multiple-choice questionnaires, chat-based assessments don’t offer obvious “right” answers – it’s on the candidate to express themselves authentically and not guess teh answer they think they would be rewarded for.
The research also confirmed what our candidate feedback has shown for years: people actually enjoy this kind of assessment. Participants rated the chat interviews as more engaging, less stressful, and more respectful of their individuality. In a hiring landscape where candidate experience is make-or-break, this matters.
And while traditional psychometric tests still show higher predictive validity in isolated lab conditions, the researchers were clear: real-world hiring decisions can’t be reduced to prediction alone. Fairness, transparency, and experience matter just as much, often more, when building trust and attracting top talent.
Sapia.ai was spotlighted in the study as a leader in this space, with our InterviewBERT model recognised for its ability to interpret candidate responses in a way that’s explainable, responsible, and grounded in science.
Why Trust and Candidate Agency Win
Today, hiring has to be about earning trust and empowering candidates to show up as their full selves, and having a voice in the process.
Traditional assessments often strip candidates of agency. They’re asked to conform, perform, and second-guess what the “right” answer might be. Chat-based interviews flip that dynamic. By inviting candidates into an open conversation, they offer something rare in hiring: autonomy. Candidates can tell their story, explain their thinking, and share how they approach real-world challenges, all in their own words.
This signals respect from the employer. It says: We trust you to show us who you are.
Hiring should be a two-way street – a long-held belief we’ve had, now backed by peer-reviewed science. The new research confirms that AI-led interviews can reduce bias, enhance fairness, and give candidates control over how they’re seen and evaluated.
Blog
AI Maturity in the Enterprise
Barb Hyman, CEO & Founder, Sapia.ai
It’s time for a new way to map progress in AI adoption, and pilots are not it.
Over the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to see inside dozens of enterprise AI programs. As a CEO, founder, and recently, judge in the inaugural Australian Financial Review AI Awards.
And here’s what struck me:
Despite the hype, we still don’t have a shared language for AI maturity in business.
Some companies are racing ahead. Others are still building slide decks. But the real issue is that even the orgs that are “doing AI” often don’t know what good looks like.
You don’t need more pilots. You need a maturity model.
The most successful AI adoption strategy does not have you buying the hottest Gen AI tool or spinning up a chatbot to solve one use case. What it should do is build organisational capability in AI ethics, AI governance, data, design, and most of all, leadership.
It’s time we introduced a real AI Maturity Model. Not a checklist. A considered progression model. Something that recognises where your organisation is today and what needs to evolve next, safely, responsibly, and strategically.
Here’s an early sketch based on what I’ve seen:
The 5 Stages of AI Maturity (for real enterprises)
- Curious
- Awareness is growing across leadership
- Experimentation led by innovation teams
- Risk is unclear, appetite is cautious
- AI is seen as “tech”
- Reactive
- Gen AI introduced via vendors or tools (e.g., copilots, agents)
- Some pilots show promise, but with limited scale or guardrails
- Data privacy and sovereignty questions begin to surface
- Risk is siloed in legal/IT
- Capable
- Clear policies on privacy, bias, and governance
- Dedicated AI leads or councils exist
- Internal use cases scale (e.g., summarisation, scoring, chat)
- LLMs integrated with guardrails, safety reviewed
- Strategic
- AI embedded in workflows, not layered on
- LLM/data infrastructure is regionally compliant
- AI outcomes measured (accuracy, equity, productivity)
- Teams restructured around AI capability — not just tech enablement
- AI-Native
- AI informs and transforms core decisions (hiring, pricing, customer service)
- Enterprise builds proprietary intelligence
- FAIR™/RAI principles deeply operationalised
- Talent, systems, and leadership are aligned around an intelligent operating model
Why this matters for enterprise leaders
AI is a capability.And like any capability, it needs time, structure, investment, and a map.
If you’re an HR leader, CIO, or enterprise buyer, and you’re trying to separate the real from the theatre, maturity thinking is your edge.
Let’s stop asking, “Who’s using AI?”
And start asking: “How mature is our AI practice and what’s the next step?”
I’m working on a more complete model now, based on what I’ve seen in Australia, the UK, and across our customer base. If you’re thinking about this too, I’d love to hear from you.
Blog
Beyond the Black Box: Why Transparency in AI Hiring Matters More Than Ever
For too long, AI in hiring has been a black box. It promises speed, fairness, and efficiency, but rarely shows its work.
That era is ending.
“AI hiring should never feel like a mystery. Transparency builds trust, and trust drives adoption.”
At Sapia.ai, we’ve always worked to provide transparency to our customers. Whether with explainable scores, understandable AI models, or by sharing ROI data regularly, it’s a founding principle on which we build all of our products.
Now, with Discover Insights, transparency is embedded into our user experience. And it’s giving TA leaders the clarity to lead with confidence.
Transparency Is the New Talent Advantage
Candidates expect fairness. Executives demand ROI. Boards want compliance. Transparency delivers all three.
Even visionary Talent Leaders can find it difficult to move beyond managing processes to driving strategy without the right data. Discover Insights changes that.
“When talent leaders can see what’s working (and why) they can stop defending their strategy and start owning it.”
Metrics That Make Transparency Real (and Actionable)
🕒 Time to Hire
What it is: The median time between application and hire.
Why it matters: This is your speedometer. A sharp view of how long hiring takes and how that varies by cohort, role, or team helps you identify delays and prove efficiency gains to leadership.
Faster time to hire = faster access to revenue-driving talent.
💬 Candidate Sentiment, Advocacy & Verbatim Feedback
What it is: Satisfaction scores, brand advocacy measures, and unfiltered candidate comments.
Why it matters: Many platforms track satisfaction. Sapia.ai’s Discover Insights takes it further, measuring whether that satisfaction translates into employer and consumer brand advocacy.
And with verbatim feedback collected at scale, talent leaders don’t have to guess how candidates feel. They can read it, learn from it, and take action.
You don’t just measure experience. You understand it in the candidates’ own words.
🔍 Drop-Off Rates, Funnel Visibility & Automation That Works
What it is: The percentage of candidates who exit the hiring process at different stages, and how to spot why.
Why it matters: Understanding drop-off points lets teams fix friction quickly. Embedding automation early in the funnel reduces recruiter workload and elevates top candidates, getting them talking to your hiring teams faster.
Assessment completion benchmarks in volume hiring range between 60–80%, but with a mobile-first, chat-based format like Sapia.ai’s, clients often exceed that.
Optimising your funnel isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing smarter, with less effort and better outcomes.
📈 Hiring Yield (Hired / Applied)
What it is: The percentage of completed applications that result in a hire.
Why it matters: This is your funnel efficiency score. A high yield means your sourcing, screening, and selection are aligned. A low one? There’s leakage, misfit, or missed opportunity.
Hiring yield signals funnel health, recruiter performance, and candidate-process fit.
🧠 AI Effectiveness: Score Distribution & Answer Originality
What it is: Insights into how candidate scores are distributed, and whether responses appear copied or AI-generated.
Why it matters: In high-volume hiring, a normal distribution of scores suggests your assessment is calibrated fairly. If it’s skewed too far left or right, it could be too hard or too easy, and that affects trust.
Add in answer originality, and you can track engagement integrity, protecting both your process and your brand.
From Metrics to Momentum
To effectively lead, you need more than simply tracking; you need insights enabling action.
When you can see how AI impacts every part of your hiring, from recruiter productivity to candidate sentiment to untapped talent, you lead with insight, not assumption. And that’s how TA earns a seat at the strategy table.