Woolworths-backed start-up Sapia.ai’s bid to end job application cheating

Applying for a job at Qantas, Woolworths or Starbucks Australia? They’ll know if you cheat on your application.

Companies are obsessed with people cheating on their job applications, says Sapia.ai chief Barb Hyman. Picture: Aaron Francis

Australians applying for jobs at the nation’s largest supermarket as well as Qantas and Starbucks will no longer be able to cheat on their job applications thanks to a new AI tool picking up plagiarised answers.

Sapia.ai, which is backed by Woolworths, has developed a tool which can detect answers generated by artificial intelligence systems.

The business, formerly PredictiveHire – which counts Qantas, Woolworths and Starbucks as customers – does this by having analysed the 12 million responses the 2.5 million jobs candidates have typed into its platform.

The business exists as a bridge between a company and a job candidate in the initial stages of hiring, replacing a recruiter to provide interviews in the first and second rounds of an application.

It uses a type of technology called deep learning to assess the answers of the candidates and provide the potential employer with insights into their personality and behaviour.

Founder and chief executive Barb Hyman said the start-up knew people had been cheating their responses to Sapia.ai’s questions since the platform was first launched.

“We’ve been flagging and identifying plagiarism for 3.5 years,” she said.

But the rate of plagiarism was minuscule in comparison with concerns raised by employers who were “quite obsessed” with candidates stealing answers and information from other people’s resumes and job applications, Ms Hyman said.

“The rate of people who have gone to Google and gotten an answer or copied an answer from someone who’s applied for the same job before is typically around 3 per cent – it’s very low,” Ms Hyman said.

“But what is really interesting is the market, when you talk to customers, they’re quite obsessed about cheating.

“That perception or the belief that people cheat is far greater than what the truth is.”

The new tool would help vet the kind of people who lied on their resumes to get through initial rounds in a job interview, Ms Hyman said.

The recruitment platform began about six years ago after Ms Hyman, who was formerly head of recruitment at REA Group, realised that people wanted more of an ethical and human response when applying for jobs, and that technology was better placed to deliver that.

“The fact that technology can do that better than humans, I guess, shouldn’t surprise us because in so many parts of our life technology can do better than what we can,” she said.

Ms Hyman said she believed people could not be trained out of their biases.

“If you really want to create equity, you have to take the human at least out of that first step,” she said.

Using an AI recruitment platform was not just helpful to recruiters, but also helped to retain customers in consumer industries, Ms Hyman said.

“If you think about a business like Woolworths who we work with, if they were to give everyone an interview and spend the time to give everyone personalised feedback, they’d probably need about 1000 recruiters or more. It just isn’t feasible,” she said.

“In the case of Starbucks, if you have a terrible experience applying for a job there, you may never return to make a purchase from them again.

“Often they’re rejecting 98 per cent of applicants so it would be a really dumb commercial decision to not treat them with the same respect and dignity that you would the people who actually get the job.”

Originally published as Woolworths-backed start-up Sapia.ai’s bid to end job application cheating