Sapia.ai has launched experience scoring for professional hiring, a tool designed to measure candidates' work history through structured interviews rather than CV screening.
The feature sits within the company's chat-based interview process and scores candidates on the work they describe. It assesses the depth of ownership, the scale of outcomes linked to a candidate's decisions, and how closely that experience matches the role.
The scoring is separate from the behavioural competency measures already used on the platform. Recruiters and hiring managers can view both behavioural and experience scores together without relying on a CV sift.
The launch targets a growing recruitment concern: the use of generative artificial intelligence in CV writing. Research cited by Sapia.ai found that large language models preferred AI-generated CVs over human-written ones 68% to 92% of the time, even when the underlying content quality was the same.
That raises the risk that application screening reflects the quality of AI prompts and writing tools rather than the strength of a candidate's actual work record. Sapia.ai's approach instead asks candidates to describe the most significant work they have been responsible for and scores those responses against role-specific criteria.
Barb Hyman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Sapia.ai, outlined the rationale for the launch.
"The CV rewards whoever writes the best summary of their career, not whoever did the best work in it, and generative AI has made that easier to embellish and harder to catch. As our clients proved it, a fair, structured conversation beats pedigree every time. Professional and leadership hiring depends on experience, and until now, nobody had built a rigorous way to measure it. Experience scoring is that missing piece," Hyman said.
Hiring shift
Sapia.ai is best known for replacing CV screening with structured interviews in high-volume hiring, particularly in sectors such as retail, aviation, hospitality and contact centres. Its customers include Costa Coffee, Starbucks and Qantas.
For those roles, the company argues that mindset and work ethic often matter more than the previous employers listed on a CV. Professional and leadership hiring has been harder to move away from CV-based screening because employers still need a consistent way to assess experience.
Experience scoring is intended to close that gap by giving recruiters a repeatable method for evaluating what candidates have actually done. The system can also be used with its recruiter agent, Tia, to search and compare candidates by measured experience.
Research base
Sapia.ai linked the launch to wider evidence on bias and prediction in hiring. Research led by UCL's Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities, based on application data from 17 large UK employers, found that graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds were 32% less likely to receive an offer for entry-level professional roles than their more advantaged peers, despite being well represented in applicant pools.
About half of that gap emerged during the initial online sift and psychometric testing, before any employer had spoken to the candidate. The finding has added to scrutiny of early-stage filtering methods that rely heavily on credentials and presentation.
The company also pointed to long-running research on the effectiveness of structured interviews. It cited a review by Sackett and colleagues that ranked structured interviews above common hiring methods for predicting job performance, with a score of 0.42, while years of experience scored 0.07. It also referred to evidence suggesting that questions about past behaviour are better predictors of performance than hypothetical questions.
More than 10 million candidates have completed a Sapia.ai interview since 2018, according to the company. The platform is used by organisations including Costa Coffee, Holland & Barrett, Qantas and Target Australia to manage hiring at scale through scored, structured interviews.