Sapia.ai, an artificial intelligence hiring platform, has unveiled an experience scoring capability designed to evaluate candidates’ previous work without relying on conventional CV screening. The tool assesses the depth and relevance of professional experience independently from behavioural competencies, with a particular focus on professional and leadership recruitment. Integrated into the company’s structured Chat Interview, the feature aims to give employers a more reliable signal of what candidates have actually achieved.
How the New Capability Works
Candidates using the structured Chat Interview are asked about significant work they have previously been responsible for. Their responses are then assessed against role-specific measures, including level of ownership, the scale of outcomes attributable to their decisions, and how directly the experience relates to the role in question. The resulting experience scores sit alongside Sapia.ai’s existing behavioural competency assessments, allowing recruiters and hiring managers to compare candidates on both dimensions without conducting an initial CV sift.
Why Traditional CV Screening Is Under Pressure
The launch comes amid growing concerns about the impact of generative AI on CV screening. Research cited by Sapia.ai found that large language models preferred CVs generated by themselves over human-written versions between 68 percent and 92 percent of the time, even when content quality was held constant. This pattern has made it increasingly difficult for employers to trust the document as a fair representation of a candidate’s career.
Research Highlights Persistent Hiring Disparities
Separate research led by UCL’s Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities found that graduates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were 32 percent less likely to receive an offer for entry-level professional roles than their most advantaged peers. Around half of this gap emerged during initial online screening and psychometric testing, before candidates had spoken to an employer. The findings underscore the need for tools that can reduce early-stage bias and broaden access to professional opportunities.
A Structured Alternative for Professional Hiring
Sapia.ai positions experience scoring as a rigorous way to measure what has traditionally been difficult to quantify in professional and leadership hiring. Recruiters and hiring managers can assess professional experience through structured conversation rather than relying on self-reported career summaries that may overstate or obscure actual contributions. This approach shifts attention toward candidates’ responsibilities, decisions, and measurable outcomes rather than the quality of a single written CV alone.
Executive Perspective
Barb Hyman, CEO and founder of Sapia.ai, said 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. She added that a fair, structured conversation beats pedigree every time. Hyman noted that professional and leadership hiring depends on experience, and until now nobody had built a rigorous way to measure it.
The introduction of experience scoring reflects a broader effort to make professional recruitment more evidence-based and less dependent on documents that can be manipulated or generated by artificial intelligence. By combining structured conversational insights with existing behavioural assessments, Sapia.ai hopes to offer a fairer and more transparent basis for comparing candidates. As generative AI continues to reshape how job applications are produced, such tools may become increasingly important for employers seeking reliable signals of future potential and real-world capability.