Back

How you can get 9/10 candidate satisfaction from a video interview

To achieve a 9/10 candidate satisfaction rate from a video interview, you’ll need to focus on several key factors that contribute to a positive candidate experience. Video interviews are becoming increasingly common, and ensuring candidates have a great experience can make a significant difference in your hiring process.

Here’s how you can achieve that high level of satisfaction:

  1. Clear Communication:
    • Provide Detailed Instructions: Ensure candidates receive clear and concise instructions on how to join and navigate the video interview platform. Include information on technical requirements, test runs, and support channels in case of issues.
  2. Technical Readiness:
    • Check Equipment: Before the interview, make sure your own equipment is working correctly. Ensure that the video conferencing platform is stable and reliable to prevent any technical hiccups during the interview.
  3. Scheduling Flexibility:
    • Accommodate Time Zones: Be mindful of time zone differences. Whenever possible, offer flexible interview scheduling options to accommodate candidates from different regions.
  4. Interview Format:
    • Structured Interviews: Design a structured interview process that evaluates the candidate’s skills, experience, and cultural fit. Use a mix of behavioral and situational questions to gain a comprehensive understanding.
  5. Candidate Engagement:
    • Interactive Interviews: Encourage candidates to engage actively during the interview. Give them opportunities to ask questions and provide insights about the role and company.
  6. Professionalism:
    • Professional Appearance: Dress appropriately for the video interview, and maintain a professional background. This sets a positive tone and shows respect for the candidate.
  7. Empathy and Respect:
    • Active Listening: Listen attentively to the candidate’s responses and acknowledge their experiences and qualifications. Show empathy and respect throughout the interview.
  8. Feedback and Follow-Up:
    • Provide Feedback: After the interview, offer constructive feedback to candidates, regardless of the outcome. This demonstrates your commitment to their growth and development.
    • Timely Response: Ensure that candidates receive timely updates about the status of their application and the next steps in the hiring process.
  9. Technical Support:
    • 24/7 Support: Have technical support available 24/7 in case candidates encounter any issues during the interview. Quick resolution of technical problems is vital for a positive experience.
  10. Transparency:
    • Be Transparent: Be open and honest about the entire hiring process. Inform candidates about the timeline, the number of interview rounds, and what they can expect in terms of feedback and follow-up.
  11. Respect Privacy:
    • Data Security: Assure candidates that their personal data and interview recordings are handled securely and in compliance with privacy regulations.
  12. Continuous Improvement:
    • Feedback Collection: Collect feedback from candidates about their interview experience. Use this feedback to make improvements and refine your video interview process.
  13. Personalization:
      • Tailored Experience: Whenever possible, personalize the interview experience by discussing specific aspects of the candidate’s background and how they align with the role.
      • Candidate Well-Being:
        • Address Stress: Recognize that video interviews can be stressful for some candidates. Take steps to create a comfortable and welcoming environment to help them perform at their best.

By focusing on these factors, you can create a video interview process that not only effectively assesses candidates but also leaves them with a highly positive impression. A 9/10 candidate satisfaction rate is a testament to your commitment to a fair, respectful, and efficient hiring process.

————————————————————————————————————————-

Competition for candidates today is fierce. COVID, border closures, BREXIT, the last two years have created a global candidate shortage that’s hitting large organisations hard. 

That’s why in today’s market, candidate experience is king. The consistent theme in all of my conversations with CHROs globally is how to improve candidate experience and get an edge on the competition.

However, the bottom line is ever present, especially in industries that are now in recovery mode. How can recruitment teams and hiring managers be expected to deliver a world-class, personalised and interactive candidate experience when they’re already stretched too thin?

The answer lies in human-centred technology with an experience that makes candidates feel valued and heard, while automating the components of the process that suck time out of your team’s day and extend the time to offer, losing candidates in the process.

Why Australia’s largest private employer turned to automation 

With close to 1 million candidates annually, and a video interview experience that was sub-par for candidates and frustrating for hiring managers, Woolworths needed to drastically re-imagine their recruitment experience, making it more efficient and engaging.

How Sapia re-invigorated and streamlined Woolworth’s recruitment process

With a completely automated AI interview process, every retail candidate is interviewed by Smart Interviewer with Sapia’s Chat Interview chat. The automatically shortlisted candidates progress directly to Video Interview – a chat-based video interview that is reviewed by hiring managers who can then move straight to offer. It’s a seamless AI-driven process that’s designed to be fair and human-centred.

The results are simply fantastic 

Candidate satisfaction has blown the team away – 9.2/10 for First Interview and an unprecedented 9.0/10 for Video Interview. Yes, you read that right – 9/10 for a video interview, from almost 9,000 candidates. 

Completion rates for the video interview are above 75%, showing that candidates are happy to engage with a video interview that’s mobile-friendly, interactive and frankly, just works. Almost 50% of candidates complete both interviews on their mobile, making it easy for candidates to interview literally anytime, anywhere. 

Here’s what Woolworths candidates had to say about their Video Interview experience: 

“The chat makes you feel like you’re in a safe space – it gives everyone an equal opportunity instead of 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 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. ”

“I felt really calm during this interview. Which I definitely would not be in physical interviews. I was able to really sort out my thoughts and express myself to the fullest.  I really love this format of interviewing !”

Automating the end to end experience has given time back to extremely time-poor hiring managers, who no longer need to manage shortlisting or scheduling and can simply review the video responses of the top candidates as they come in. Smart Interviewer has video interviewed almost 9,000 candidates, 

In some cases, candidates have moved from ad to offer in 24 hours – giving Woolworths an edge as they can move quickly to capture candidates who otherwise might have accepted offers elsewhere. 

If you’d like to have a candidate experience as good as Woolworths, get in touch here for a product demo


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

Read Online
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.


 

Read Online
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.


 

Read Online