From one recruiter to another and one employer to another, the ways candidates are selected vary greatly. But ask anyone involved in the process, and most will agree that what happens at the early candidate screening stage, is critical to getting the best outcomes. Traditionally, it’s also been the most time-consuming and costly part of the hiring process.
Long before a face-to-face interview, recruiters need to screen candidates to decide, from potentially thousands of applicants, who should proceed to the next steps in the hiring cycle. But before they’ve even met a candidate, can recruiters really assess someone’s ability and suitability for the job they’re applying for? Yes, they can, especially with tools like the situational judgement test.
In contemporary recruiting, a suite of tools and technologies can help take the hard work and the guesswork out of the hiring process. Talent assessment tools, like situational judgement tests for managers or situational judgement tests for customer service, help recruiters identify the best candidates faster – talent who will be the best fit for the role and the team, work most productively and stay in the role longer.
While traditionally a time-consuming manual review of applications and CVs would begin the hiring process, recruiters have embraced technologies that can automate these processes from the outset.
In this article, we compare two top of the funnel tools recruiters are using to assess candidates: traditional situational judgement tests (SJTs) and the next generation text interview platform.
Sapia Ai-enabled automated interviews could provide the answers you’re looking for, helping to connect to the best talent faster and more cost-effectively.
Situational judgement tests are used to assess a candidate’s judgement and ability to respond appropriately to the real-world situations they would be likely to encounter in the workplace.
Candidates are presented with a workplace scenario and then they are required to choose or rank the best (or worst) paths to resolve the challenge, conflict or opportunity. They are a type of psychological aptitude test that provides insight and assessment of a candidate’s job-related skills.
While the challenging scenarios presented to candidates are hypothetical, the best tests are designed around the role they are applying for.
Reflecting real situations they could encounter, the scenarios may involve working with other team members or supervisors, interacting with customers or dealing with day-to-day challenges.
Situational judgement tests date back to the 1940s. While the ways they are delivered may have changed, they remain a popular way to assess skills such as problem-solving and interpersonal skills. They are also useful in assessing soft skills and practical, non-academic intelligence.
Situational judgement tests are customised to the role and the organisation. Generally, they would be looking to assess a candidate’s aptitude for a role by measuring competencies that might include:
As they are produced by a range of different providers, SJTs can be delivered in a number of ways. As they are also tailored to suit specific roles and companies, tests can vary in their length, structure and format. While some may be paper-based, most tests are delivered digitally.
The tests provide candidates with a workplace scenario – as a written description or as a video or digital animation – and a challenge related to that scenario. Typically, candidates are then presented with four or five possible paths of action in multiple-choice format to deal with the situation described.
Different approaches are used for candidates to provide their answers. Some may require candidates to choose both the most desirable and the least desirable action. Others may ask candidates to choose just one preferred option or rank all actions in terms of effectiveness.
Situational judgement tests are typically used before the interview stage and often used in combination with a knowledge-based test.
SJTs are designed to help recruiters and hiring managers to:
Since 2013, Australian recruitment technology specialist Sapia has worked to solve a problem for every recruiter and employer. That is how to get to the right talent faster while consistently improving the candidate experience.
Sapia’s text-based interview platform uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to provide reliable personality insights into every candidate. While SJTs can be expensive time-consuming to create, administer and assess, Sapia’s platform can provide like-for-like personality and job-fitness tests with far greater ease and at a fraction of the cost.
Here is feedback from a customer after running a pilot using SJTs:
Often situational judgement tests don’t accurately represent what the job is really about. There are so many aspects that need to be considered within a real-world situation. Feedback from the SJTs pilot groups is that they often felt as though they were being forced into specific areas that may not be job-related. There needs to be more flexibility for a candidate to say: “I would do this, but I would also do a bit of that”. Having an experience that gives flexibility in answering. It enables candidates to have that open-ended answer to express what was important to them.
Smart Interviewer is Sapia’s machine learning interview platform. With learning from analysing more than 165 million words in text-based interviews with more than 700,000 candidates, Smart Interviewer combines standard interview questions related to past behaviour and situational judgement to reliably assess personality traits. The questions can be customised to the specific role family – sales, retail, call centre, service etc– and specific requirements relating to the employer’s brand and employment values.
The scientific foundation of Sapia’s Ai interview platform is that language forms the framework for the knowledge, skills and personality we possess. Through a simple text-based conversation, Smart Interviewer provides valuable candidate insights. It can predict a candidate’s suitability for a role and guide their progression through the recruitment process. It delivers the insights that recruiters and employers need to make better hiring decisions at scale.
Improving the candidate experience is a priority for every recruiter and employer. The effect of a poor experience can cause lasting damage to reputations and brands. Sapia is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction feedback. Candidates enjoy the process, appreciate the opportunity and value the personalised feedback. Something that’s simply not practical with most high-volume recruitment briefs.
As text is a familiar, non-confrontational way to connect, candidates enjoy the text interview experience. Unlike SJTs that lock them into choosing options from pre-determined answers, candidates appreciate the open-ended questions . Here they are empowered by the opportunity to tell their story in their words.
While questions are customised to the role, some typical examples include:
• What motivates you? What are you passionate about?
• Not everyone agrees all the time. Have you had a peer, teammate or friend disagree with you? What did you do?
• Give an example of a time you have gone over and above to achieve something. Why was it important for you to achieve this?
• Sometimes things don’t always go to plan. Describe a time when you failed to meet a deadline or personal commitment. What did you do? How did that make you feel?
• In sales, thinking fast is critical. What qualifies you for this? Provide an example.
Sapia provides blind-screening at its best, effectively reducing opportunities for bias from the assessment process to ensure every candidate is playing on a level field. Candidates recognise and appreciate the opportunity to tell their story without the subjective biases of a human interview or a cursory review of their CV. For top of the recruitment funnel interviews, Sapia removes CVs from the process altogether.
You can leave us your details to get a personalised demo OR try out Sapia’s Chat Interview right now, here.
Walk into any store this festive season and you’ll see it instantly. The lights, the displays, the products are all crafted to draw people in. Retailers spend millions on campaigns to bring customers through the door.
But the real moment of truth isn’t the emotional TV ad, or the shimmering window display. It’s the human standing behind the counter. That person is the brand.
Most retailers know this, yet their hiring processes tell a different story. Candidates are often screened by rigid CV reviews or psychometric tests that force them into boxes. Neurodiverse candidates, career changers, and people from different cultural or educational backgrounds are often the ones who fall through the cracks.
And yet, these are the very people who may best understand your customers. If your store colleagues don’t reflect the diversity of the communities you serve, you create distance where there should be connection. You lose loyalty. You lose growth.
We call this gap the diversity mirror.
When retailers achieve mirrored diversity, their teams look like their customers:
Customers buy where they feel seen – making this a commercial imperative.
The challenge for HR leaders is that most hiring systems are biased by design. CVs privilege pedigree over potential. Multiple-choice tests reduce people to stereotypes. And rushed festive hiring campaigns only compound the problem.
That’s where Sapia.ai changes the equation: Every candidate is interviewed automatically, fairly, and in their own words.
With the right HR hiring tools, mirrored diversity becomes a data point you can track, prove, and deliver on. It’s no longer just a slogan.
David Jones, Australia’s premium department store, put this into practice:
The result? Store teams that belong with the brand and reflect the customers they serve.
Read the David Jones Case Study here 👇
As you prepare for festive hiring in the UK and Europe, ask yourself:
Because when your colleagues mirror your customers, you achieve growth, and by design, you’ll achieve inclusion.
See how Sapia.ai can help you achieve mirrored diversity this festive season. Book a demo with our team here.
Mirrored diversity means that store teams reflect the diversity of their customer base, helping create stronger connections and loyalty.
Seasonal employees often provide the first impression of a brand. Inclusive teams make customers feel seen, improving both experience and sales.
Adopting tools like AI structured interviews, bias monitoring, and data dashboards helps retailers hire fairly, reduce screening time, and build more diverse teams.
Organisations invest heavily in their employer brand, career sites, and EVP campaigns, especially to attract underrepresented talent. But without the right data, it’s impossible to know if that investment is paying off.
Representation often varies across functions, locations, and stages of the hiring process. Blind spots allow bias to creep in, meaning underrepresented groups may drop out long before offer.
Collecting demographic data is only step one. Turning it into insight you can act on is where real change and better hiring outcomes happen.
The Diversity Dashboard in Discover Insights, Sapia.ai’s analytics tool, gives you real-time visibility into representation, inclusion, and fairness at every stage of your talent funnel. It helps you connect the dots between your attraction strategies and actual hiring outcomes.
Key features include:
With the Diversity Dashboard, you can pinpoint where inclusion is thriving and where it’s falling short.
It’s also a powerful tool to tell your success story. Celebrate wins by showing which underrepresented groups are making the biggest gains, and share that progress with boards, executives, and regulators.
Powered by explainable AI and the world’s largest structured interview dataset, your insights are fair, auditable, and evidence-based.
Measuring diversity is the first step. Using that data to take action is where you close the Diversity Gap. With the Diversity Dashboard, you can prove your strategy is working and make the changes where it isn’t.
Book a demo to see the Diversity Dashboard in action.
Why neuroinclusion can’t be a retrofit and how Sapia.ai is building a better experience for every candidate.
In the past, if you were neurodivergent and applying for a job, you were often asked to disclose your diagnosis to get a basic accommodation – extra time on a test, maybe the option to skip a task. That disclosure often came with risk: of judgment, of stigma, or just being seen as different.
This wasn’t inclusion. It was bureaucracy. And it made neurodiverse candidates carry the burden of fitting in.
We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.
Over the last two decades, hiring practices have slowly moved away from reactive accommodations toward proactive, human-centric design. Leading employers began experimenting with:
But even these advances have often been limited in scope, applied to special hiring programs or specific roles. Neurodiverse talent still encounters systems built for neurotypical profiles, with limited flexibility and a heavy dose of social performance pressure.
Hiring needs to look different.
Truly inclusive hiring doesn’t rely on diagnosis or disclosure. It doesn’t just give a select few special treatment. It’s about removing friction for everyone, especially those who’ve historically been excluded.
That’s why Sapia.ai was built with universal design principles from day one.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
It’s not a workaround. It’s a rework.
We tend to assume that social or “casual” interview formats make people comfortable. But for many neurodiverse individuals, icebreakers, group exercises, and informal chats are the problem, not the solution.
When we asked 6,000 neurodiverse candidates about their experience using Sapia.ai’s chat-based interview, they told us:
“It felt very 1:1 and trustworthy… I had time to fully think about my answers.”
“It was less anxiety-inducing than video interviews.”
“I like that all applicants get initial interviews which ensures an unbiased and fair way to weigh-up candidates.”
Some AI systems claim to infer skills or fit from resumes or behavioural data. But if the training data is biased or the experience itself is exclusionary, you’re just replicating the same inequity with more speed and scale.
Inclusion means seeing people for who they are, not who they resemble in your data set.
At Sapia.ai, every interaction is transparent, explainable, and scientifically validated. We use structured, fair assessments that work for all brains, not just neurotypical ones.
Neurodiversity is rising in both awareness and representation. However, inclusion won’t scale unless the systems behind hiring change as well.
That’s why we built a platform that:
Sapia.ai is already powering inclusive, structured, and scalable hiring for global employers like BT Group, Costa Coffee and Concentrix. Want to see how your hiring process can be more inclusive for neurodivergent individuals? Let’s chat.