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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Blog
The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?
Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels.
As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?
At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020.
Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.
The Rise of GPT
When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’).
Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans.
That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.
Full Transparency with Candidates
Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it.
This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses.
The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data…
We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers.
The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again.
The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.
Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups
We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.
However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right.
Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers.
We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.
However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward.
It’s a mix of perspectives.
Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes.
This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build.
Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇
Research Paper Download: AI Generated Content in Online Text-based Structured Interviews
Blog
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.