287. What if A.I. is Fairer Than Humans? The Truth About Bias in Recruitment, with Kate Young, Head of People Science at Sapia.ai

About this episode

This episode explores the impact of AI on recruitment and how it can lead to fairer hiring practices.

Welcome back to Truth, Lies & Work, the award-winning workplace podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. This week, we’re diving into the high-stakes world of recruitment. If you’ve ever hired someone who looked perfect on paper but failed on day one, this episode is for you. Most businesses are making hiring decisions based on fundamentally broken data: the CV. This week, we are joined by Kate Young, Head of People Science at Sapia.ai. As an occupational psychologist, Kate is on a mission to move recruitment away from "gut instinct" and toward a valid, fair, and defensible science. We dive into the "painful" reality of traditional job analysis—like Kate’s 6:00 AM flight to Munich to shuffle cards with 30 stakeholders for eight hours—and how AI has condensed that process into 90 minutes of high-precision data. In this episode, we explore: The Job Analysis Revolution: Why "measuring what matters" is the only way to avoid doubling down on hiring errors. The Death of the CV: Why Sapia.ai prefers "blind" chat interviews where every candidate gets an equal shot to tell their story. De-biasing the Process: How to strip "ableist" and majority-group language out of job…

People in this episode

Host: HubSpot Podcast Network

Guest: Kate Young

Topics covered

• recruitment
• AI in hiring
• bias in recruitment
• candidate experience
• job analysis

Keywords

• AI
• recruitment
• bias
• job analysis
• candidate experience
• Sapia.ai

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Sapia.ai, HubSpot Podcast Network

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