Sapia.ai’s founder and CEO on how AI can improve hiring

AI can be utilised in recruitment to remove some issues with unconscious bias, reduce the anxiety of an interview for candidates, and make HR workers’ lives easier by automating processes.

Sapia.ai’s founder and chief executive officer, Barb Hyman, joined The HR Leader on 31 August 2022 to discuss the benefits of AI in the hiring process.

“Our technology discovers people’s soft skills, their behavioural competencies and their communication skills through a short chat. It’s what we call smart chat,” said Ms Hyman.

AI can assist in identifying a candidate’s people skills, qualities that aren’t typically listed on CVs.

“When you think about hiring into many roles, take entry level roles, graduate roles, even leadership roles, what really matters is who you are. Are you someone that has a high degree of humility? Do you have an insatiable appetite for learning? Are you someone that can look around corners and inspire and lead teams to go there, even if it feels a bit scary? It’s those qualities and attributes that really make you someone who’s going to make the difference in your organisation,” explained Ms Hyman.

“The challenge is, how do you see that? What does the résumé tell you about that? How will you discover that? That’s the superpower of our tech, is that we can discover around about 80 different things about you in those areas from just five questions. So, we’ve really invented new signs that bring together both advances in natural language processing … and a dataset that we’ve collected over time.”

Adopting AI into the recruitment process can also assist with bias, helping to accommodate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Ms Hyman continued: “When used in the HR space, we’re not using any third-party data. We don’t use any CV data, social media data, where you risk bias. And we don’t use any demographic data about you when you’re being assessed, when you’re going through the interview.”

“The impact on the organisation that’s using it is immediate when it comes to diversity … We’ve given you a shortlist that’s completely commensurate with your application pool, so you can achieve a level of diversity,” she said.

The use of technology also eases the pressure on candidates as well, as the automated process can assist with interview anxiety.

“The chat itself is blind and it’s untimed, and that has made such a difference to people who struggle with video and people with anxiety and who might struggle with neurodiverse challenges,” Ms Hyman said.

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation with Barb Hyman on 31 August 2022 is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.