In volume hiring, few moments carry the weight of the in-person, or ‘live’ interview. It’s the first time a candidate and the hiring team meet face-to-face (virtually or in person), and it often serves as the deciding factor for both sides. But getting to that moment – and making it count – requires more than (often painfully) aligning calendars. It requires thoughtful preparation, seamless logistics, and the right candidates in the room.
Why the Live Job Interview Matters
At its core, the live interview is the moment of truth. After a candidate has gone through initial screening and shortlisting, this interview is where both the hiring team (often a time-poor hiring manager) and the candidate decide if the fit is right. Often disregarded as a simple Q&A, interviews are about connection, culture fit, and gauging future potential. A great interview can result in a long-term team member; a poor one can mean starting the search all over again. So, making sure the right people are in the interview is paramount.
Here’s why the live interview is such a critical piece of the hiring puzzle—and why we’ve designed our Live Interview Scheduling tool to optimise this stage of the volume hiring process:
1. Getting the Right Candidates to the Interview
Before anyone even steps into an interview room (or joins a video call), ensuring that the right candidates make it through the screening process is crucial. Otherwise, time and energy are wasted on candidates who don’t meet the role’s requirements or organizational values. With Sapia’s Chat Interview, we’ve created a way to deeply understand candidates’ traits, personalities, and potential fit through their language. This powerful, AI-driven tool replaces traditional CV screening with something far smarter and more insightful, ensuring only the most suitable candidates advance. Our asynchronous Video Interview tool enhances this process, enabling hiring managers to ‘meet’ the candidate first – to see how they communicate and learn more about them before they progress to the final stage.
Live Interview – our new interview scheduling tool – builds on this foundation. It ensures that candidates who are best suited for the role based on their earlier assessments can be seamlessly moved to this stage. This means less wasted time for hiring teams and a more respectful, efficient process for candidates.
2. Seamless Interview Scheduling: Stop Wasting Time on Logistics
The most common pain point in high-volume recruiting is the endless back-and-forth of scheduling interviews. Recruiters and hiring managers can spend hours coordinating availability, rescheduling due to conflicts, or juggling time zones. For both the recruiter and the candidate, it can feel like scheduling becomes a bigger obstacle than the interview itself.
Our Live Interview Scheduling Tool changes that. Built with AI-powered time slot generation and bulk scheduling, it takes the headache out of logistics. With just a few clicks, hiring teams can send interview invites, allowing candidates to book in at the optimal time while staying informed and engaged in the hiring process. This saves hours for recruiters and hiring managers and ensures that candidates stay connected and excited about the process before they meet you.
3. Prepare Your Interviewers with Tailored Insights
A great interview requires asking the right questions. By the time a candidate reaches the live interview stage, they’ve already demonstrated their capabilities and alignment with the role. Now, it’s about understanding their deeper fit with the team and culture. But too often, hiring managers come into interviews underprepared, relying on generic questions that don’t give them the full picture.
Our tool addresses this challenge head-on. Because it’s part of the Sapia.ai volume hiring platform, hiring teams are equipped with tailored insights into each candidate that are automatically generated from the Chat Interview. Interviewers can access customized questions that are specific to the candidate’s profile, making each interview more meaningful and productive. No more scrambling to find the right questions at the last minute—just purposeful conversations that drive better hiring decisions.
4. Empower Candidates with Pre-Interview Information
The interview process isn’t just a test for the candidate; it’s also an opportunity for them to evaluate the organization. Candidates need to be well-prepared, not just in terms of interview content, but also in terms of understanding the company’s values, culture, and the specific role they’re applying for. A candidate who feels prepared and aligned with your organization is more likely to make a positive decision if offered the role.
Our tool empowers candidates by sharing critical pre-interview information in advance—details about the role, the organization, its values, and what to expect during the interview process. This ensures that candidates walk into the interview ready, confident, and informed, making for a better interview experience for both sides.
Bringing Humanity back to Hiring
Hiring should be a human experience, not a logistical nightmare. The live interview is one of the most important stages in the hiring funnel, and our Live Interview Scheduling Tool ensures that it’s as efficient, seamless, and thoughtful as possible.
From selecting the right candidates to optimizing the scheduling process, and ensuring both candidates and interviewers are well-prepared, we’ve taken the hassle out of interview logistics. With Live Interview, hiring teams can focus on what matters: building meaningful connections with candidates and hiring the best talent.
Are you ready to transform your live interview process?
Discover how Live Interview can save time, reduce frustration, and elevate the hiring experience for everyone involved. Schedule a demo today and experience the difference.
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Joe & the Juice Partners with Sapia.ai, Scaling an Exceptional Candidate Experience and Cutting Time to Hire
Read the full press release about the partnership here.
Joe & the Juice, the trailblazing global juice bar and coffee concept, is renowned for its vibrant culture and commitment to cultivating talent. With humble roots from one store in Copenhagen, now with a presence in 17 markets, Joe & The Juice has built a culture that fosters growth and celebrates individuality.
But, as their footprint expands, so does the challenge of finding and hiring the right talent to embody their unique culture. With over 300,000 applications annually, the traditional hiring process using CVs was falling short – leaving candidates waiting and creating inefficiencies for the recruitment team. To address this, Joe & The Juice turned to Sapia.ai, a pioneer in ethical AI hiring solutions.
A Fresh Approach to Hiring
Through this partnership, Joe & The Juice has transformed its hiring process into an inclusive, efficient, and brand-aligned experience. Instead of faceless CVs, candidates now engage in an innovative chat-based interview that reflects the brand’s energy and ethos. Available in multiple languages, the AI-driven interview screens for alignment with the “Juicer DNA” and the brand’s core values, ensuring that every candidate feels seen and valued.
Candidates receive an engaging and fair interview experience as well as personality insights and coaching tips as part of their journey. In fact, 93% of candidates have found these insights useful, helping to deliver a world-class experience to candidates who are also potential guests of the brand.
“Every candidate interaction reflects our brand,” Sebastian Jeppesen, Global Head of Recruitment, shared. “Sapia.ai makes our recruitment process fair, enriching, and culture-driven.”
Results That Matter
For Joe & The Juice, the collaboration has yielded impressive results:
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33% Reduction in Screening Time: Pre-vetted shortlists from Sapia.ai’s platform ensure that recruiters can focus on top candidates, getting them behind the bar faster.
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Improved Candidate Satisfaction: With a 9/10 satisfaction score from over 55,000 interviews, candidates appreciate the fairness and transparency of the process.
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Bias-Free Hiring: By eliminating CVs and integrating blind AI that prioritizes fairness, Joe & The Juice ensures their hiring reflects the diverse communities they serve.
Frederik Rosenstand, Group Director of People & Development at Joe & The Juice, highlighted the transformative impact: “Our juicers are our future leaders, so using ethical AI to find the people who belong at Joe is critical to our long-term success. And now we do that with a fair, unbiased experience that aligns directly with our brand.”
Trailblazing for the hospitality industry
In an industry so wholly centred on people, Joe & the Juice is paving the way for similar brands to adopt technology that enables inclusive, human-first experiences that can reflect a brand’s core values.
If you’re curious about how Sapia.ai can transform your hiring process, check out our full case study on Joe & The Juice here.
Blog
Sapia.ai Wrapped 2024
It’s been a year of Big Moves at Sapia.ai. From welcoming groundbreaking brands to achieving incredible milestones in our product innovation and scale, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in hiring.
And we’re just getting started 🚀
Take a look at the highlights of 2024
All-in-one hiring platform
This year, with the addition of Live Interview, we’re proud to say our platform now covers screening, assessing and scheduling.
It’s an all-in-one volume hiring platform that enables our customers to deliver a world-leading experience from application through to offer.
Supercharging hiring efficiency
Every 15 seconds, a candidate is interviewed with Sapia.ai.
This year, we’ve saved hiring managers and recruiters hours of precious time that can now be used for higher-value tasks.
Giving candidates the best experience
Our platform allows candidates to be their best selves, so our customers can find the people that truly belong with them. They’re proud to use a technology that’s changing hiring, for good.
Leading the way in AI for hiring
We’ve continued to push the boundaries in leveraging ethical AI for hiring, with new products on the way for Coaching, Internal Mobility & Interview Builders.
Blog
Situational Judgement Tests vs. AI Chat Interviews: A Modern Perspective on Candidate Assessment
Choosing the right tool for assessing candidates can be challenging. For years, situational judgement tests (SJTs) have been a common choice for evaluating behaviour and decision-making skills. However, they come with limitations that can make the hiring process less effective and less inclusive.
AI-enabled chat-based interviews, such as Sapia.ai, provide organisations with a modern alternative. They focus on understanding candidates as individuals and creating a hiring experience that is both fair and insightful while enabling efficient screening and selection.
This shift raises important questions: Are SJTs still a tool that should be considered for volume hiring? And what do AI assessments offer in comparison?
1. The Static Nature of SJTs
Traditional SJTs use predefined multiple-choice questions to assess behavioural tendencies and situational knowledge. While useful for screening, these static frameworks lack the flexibility to adapt based on real-world performance data or evolving role requirements.
Once created, SJTs don’t adapt to new data or evolving organisational needs. They rely on fixed scenarios and responses that may not fully reflect the dynamic realities of modern workplaces, and as a result, their relevance may diminish over time.
AI-enabled chat interviews, on the other hand, are inherently adaptive. Using machine learning, these tools can continuously refine their models based on feedback from real-world outcomes such as hiring or turnover data. This ability to evolve ensures the assessments align with organisations’ needs.
2. Richer Data Through Open-Ended Responses
One of the main critiques of SJTs is their reliance on multiple-choice responses. While structured and straightforward, these options may not capture the full scope of a candidate’s thinking, communication skills, or problem-solving ability. The approach is often limiting, reducing complex human behaviour to a few predefined choices.
AI-enabled chat interviews work more holistically and dynamically. These tools provide a more complete picture of a person by allowing candidates to answer questions in their own words. Natural language processing (NLP) analyses their responses, offering insights into personality traits, communication skills, and behavioural tendencies. This open-ended format lets candidates express themselves authentically, giving employers a deeper understanding of their potential.
3. The Candidate Experience: Stressful or Supportive?
SJTs often include time constraints and rigid formats, which can create pressure for candidates. This is especially true when candidates feel forced to choose options that don’t fully reflect how they would actually behave. The process can feel impersonal, even transactional.
In contrast, chat-based interviews are designed to be conversational and low-pressure for candidates. By removing time limits and adopting a familiar chat interface, these tools help candidates feel more at ease. They also frequently include personalised feedback, turning the assessment into a valuable experience for the candidate, not just the employer.
4. Addressing Bias and Fairness
Traditional SJTs are prone to transparency issues, as candidates can often identify and select the “best practice” answers without revealing their true tendencies. Additionally, static test designs can unintentionally embed bias; due to the nature of the timed test, SJTs have been found to disadvantage some groups.
AI chat interviews, when developed ethically within a framework like Sapia.ai’s FAIR Hiring Framework, eliminate explicit bias by relying solely on the content of a candidate’s responses. Their machine learning models are continuously validated for fairness, ensuring that hiring decisions are free from subjective judgments or irrelevant demographic factors.
5. An Assessment That Improves Over Time
Workplaces are constantly changing, and hiring tools need to keep up. SJTs’ fixed nature can make them less effective as roles evolve or organizational priorities shift. They provide a snapshot but not a dynamic view of what’s needed.
AI-enabled chat interviews are built to adapt. With feedback loops and continuous learning, they incorporate real-world hiring outcomes—like retention and performance data—into their models. This ensures that assessments stay relevant and effective over time.
Rethinking Candidate Assessment
As hiring demands grow more complex, so does the need for tools that can capture the whole person, not just their response to hypothetical scenarios. While SJTs have played an important role in hiring practices, they are increasingly being replaced by tools like AI-enabled chat interviews.
These modern approaches provide richer data, adapt to changing needs, and create a richer and more engaging experience for candidates. Perhaps most importantly, they emphasise fairness and inclusivity, aligning with the growing demand for unbiased hiring practices.
For organisations evaluating their assessment tools, the question isn’t just which method is “better.” Understanding the specific needs of your roles, teams, and candidates will help you choose tools that help you make decisions that are both informed and equitable.