Employer branding is a crucial element for attracting top talent. A strong employer brand not only helps attract candidates but also enhances the company’s reputation and employee retention rates. However, one of the often overlooked aspects of employer branding is the experience that candidates have when applying for a role.
A retailer invests in the in-store experience, as they understand that customers need to have a great experience up to the moment of purchase to secure the sale. It’s the same for candidates.
The difference in experience between many employers’ flashy career sites and their application process is stark and often surprising. Candidates explore a heavily branded, experiential website that showcases the brand, only to be hit with endless pages of forms and faceless CV uploads once they hit apply.
In contrast, investing in a positive candidate experience can significantly impact an organization’s ability to attract and retain the best talent, making it an essential part of any comprehensive employer branding strategy.
Understanding Candidate Experience
Candidate experience refers to the overall perception and feelings a candidate has about an organization throughout the recruitment process. Just as any organisation obsesses over customer experience, so too should the HR function obsess over candidate experience.
Your candidate experience is shaped by various stages, including:
- Awareness: How candidates first learn about your organization and its job openings.
- Consideration: The research and evaluation process candidates go through to determine if they want to apply.
- Application: The process of submitting a job application.
- Assessment / Interview: The experience a candidate has when being assessed and/or interviewed for the role.
- Decision: The outcome of the application, whether it’s a job offer or rejection.
- Onboarding: The initial experience of new hires as they join the organization.
Each stage is critical in shaping a candidate’s overall perception of your brand, which influences their decision to join the organization, and what they share of their experience with others.
The Link Between Candidate Experience and Employer Branding
A candidate’s experience can significantly impact an organization’s employer brand. Here’s how:
- Positive Experiences: Candidates who have positive experiences are more likely to accept job offers, recommend the organization to others, and even become customers. A smooth, transparent, and respectful recruitment process can leave a lasting impression, enhancing your brand’s reputation.
- Negative Experiences: Conversely, negative experiences can harm an organization’s reputation. Candidates who feel undervalued or disrespected during the recruitment process may share their experiences on social media and review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, deterring other potential candidates from applying. They can also deter the candidate from interacting with you as a consumer. For consumer-facing organisations hiring in high volume, this impacts revenue.
Benefits of a Positive Candidate Experience
Investing in a positive candidate experience can yield several benefits:
- Higher-Quality Applicants: Candidates who have positive experiences are more likely to apply, and likely to share their experiences with others, increasing the quality of the applicant pool.
- Increased Candidate Engagement: Reduced dropoff and leakage due to an engaging experience means more candidates remain through your hiring process, giving you a better chance of finding the candidates who belong with you. On average, candidates who are invited to a chat interview powered by Sapia.ai are 80% likely to complete it.
- Improved Employee Engagement and Retention: New hires who start with a positive experience could be more likely to be engaged and stay with the company longer.
- Enhanced Employer Brand: A positive candidate experience strengthens the employer brand, making the company more attractive to top talent. Brands that have invested in their candidate experience by leveraging Sapia.ai to give everyone a chat interview and personalised insights are elevating their employer brand. 81% of candidates are likely to recommend others to apply for a job with the company, and 82% are more likely to recommend the products and services of the company based on their interview experience.
Key Elements of a Positive Candidate Experience
To create a positive candidate experience, organizations should focus on several key elements:
- Clear and Transparent Communication: Keep candidates informed throughout the recruitment process. Regular updates, clear job descriptions, and honest feedback are crucial.
- User-Friendly Application Process: Ensure the application process is simple and intuitive. Avoid lengthy forms and streamline steps to make it easier for candidates to apply. Using an ATS that integrates with other tools that candidates need to engage with such as assessment providers, will streamline the process and keep it consistent for candidates.
- Respectful, Engaging & Inclusive Assessment & Interview Process: Treat candidates with respect and give them the space to bring their best selves to their assessment. Ensure that up-front assessments are untimed, chat-based, and blind – meaning all candidates can confidently put their best foot forward without fear of bias.
- Leverage Smart Automation To Progess Top Candidates Quickly: If you can’t move quickly, the top candidates will likely get snapped up before you engage with them. Using smart automation with tools like Sapia.ai, to automatically progress the top candidates to the next stage ensures they remain engaged in your process.
- Timely and Constructive Feedback: Providing feedback promptly, whether positive or negative, shows respect for the candidate’s time and effort. Using an assessment like Sapia ensures that every candidate gets positive, non-directional feedback from their initial assessment, automatically.
- Effective Onboarding Practices: Once a candidate is hired, an effective onboarding process can set the tone for their future with the company, helping them feel valued and integrated from day one.
The Case for a Chat-Based Selection Process in Enhancing Candidate Experience
Incorporating an AI chat-based interview into your selection process can significantly enhance the candidate experience. Here’s why:
- Low Pressure: Chat-based AI interviews are untimed and allow candidates to respond at their own pace, reducing the stress and anxiety often associated with traditional interviews.
- Accessibility: Mobile-friendly chat interviews make it easier for candidates to participate from any location, at any time, using their smartphones.
- Inclusivity: Rather than relying on CVs and Cover Letters, this format ensures that everyone gets an interview and feedback, making the process fairer and more inclusive.
- Engagement: Chat-based interviews are engaging and interactive, helping candidates feel more connected to the organization and, through the structured interview, giving candidates a realistic job preview.
- Unbiased: Automated chat interviews help remove unconscious bias from the recruitment process, ensuring a fair evaluation based on responses rather than personal biases.
For a deep dive into the importance of candidate experience & how to deliver a world-leading one, check out our Candidate Experience Playbook.
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Blog
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.