AI is becoming more embedded across recruiting tools, but there is a meaningful difference between AI that automates workflows behind the scenes and AI that talks directly to candidates. When AI conducts the conversation, the stakes are higher; the first interaction shapes how candidates perceive the employer and the role. That is why many talent acquisition teams remain cautious about AI interviews, even as they adopt AI everywhere else. A growing number of enterprises are now running AI interviews at scale in high-volume hiring, and the data coming back on candidate experience and quality of hire improvements is difficult to ignore.
So what does that evidence show, and what should it mean for how the industry thinks about AI in hiring?
My guest this week is Dave Vu, Co-Founder and COO of Ribbon, who spent 15 years in talent and people leadership before co-founding the AI interview platform. In our conversation, Dave shares what enterprises are reporting from deploying AI interviews across thousands of candidates, how those candidates are responding, and what this could mean for the future of hiring.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The shift from AI experimentation to enterprise deployment
- The difference between back-office AI and candidate-facing AI
- Moving from chatbots to natural conversations
- The impact on the candidate experience
- Building candidate trust and AI interviewing
- Improving speed, efficiency and quality of hire
- Detecting cheating and protecting interview integrity
- How will AI interviewing evolve over the next few years
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Key takeaways
- According to Dave Vu, enterprise employers have moved past the experimentation phase with AI in hiring and are now deploying AI interviews as a core part of their process, with some routing more than 85% of candidates through them.
- Candidate satisfaction with AI interviews is consistently high in Ribbon’s data, with ratings above 4.5 out of five, largely because the interviews offer speed, accessibility and a chance to go beyond a resume.
- A quarter of AI interviews are being completed between 10pm and 2am, suggesting that traditional screening schedules structurally exclude candidates who cannot interview during working hours.
- Employers using AI interviews at scale are reporting retention improvements of 10 to 30 percent at the 180-day mark, which Dave Vu attributes to better accessibility, faster processes and more recruiter time for relationship-building with the strongest candidates.
- Candidate-facing AI carries a higher bar than back-office automation because the interview becomes an extension of the employer brand, requiring the AI to probe naturally, ask role-specific follow-up questions and answer candidate queries about the company and role.
Transcript
Advert 0:00
Support for this podcast comes from Ribbon, the AI recruiting platform built for enterprise hiring at scale. Ribbon brings candidate sourcing, outreach, screening and interviewing together in one workflow, helping recruiting teams find and engage talent, uncover deeper candidate insights and identify hidden gems who might otherwise be overlooked. Ribbon takes repetitive work off recruiters’ plates, giving them more time to build candidate relationships and make informed hiring decisions, while making the process faster and more accessible for everyone. Go to ribbon.cool to find out more.
Matt Alder 0:41
There’s some scepticism in talent acquisition about letting an AI conduct the first conversation with a candidate. However, the enterprises that have deployed AI interviewing at scale are reporting improved candidate satisfaction, faster hiring, and better retention. Results that are becoming hard to ignore. So what are they seeing? And should it change how the industry thinks about AI and hiring? Keep listening to find out.
Matt Alder 1:28
Hi there, welcome to episode 826 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. AI is becoming more and more embedded across recruiting tools, but there’s a meaningful difference between AI that automates workflows behind the scenes and AI that talks directly to candidates. When AI conducts a conversation, the stakes are much higher. That first interaction shapes how the candidates perceive the employer and the role. That’s why many talent acquisition teams remain cautious about AI interviewing, even as they adopt AI elsewhere in the hiring process. However, a growing number of enterprises are now running AI interviews at scale, and the data coming back on candidate experience and quality of hire improvement is difficult to ignore. So what does this evidence show, and what should it mean for how the industry thinks about AI in hiring? My guest this week is Dave Vu, co-founder and COO of Ribbon. Dave spent 15 years in talent and people leadership before co-founding this AI interviewing platform. In our conversation, he shares what enterprises are reporting from deploying AI interviews across thousands of candidate interactions, how the candidates themselves are responding, and what this could all mean for the future of hiring.
Matt Alder 2:48
Hi Dave and welcome to the podcast.
Dave Vu 2:50
Hey Matt, well it’s great to be here.
Matt Alder 2:52
A pleasure to be talking to you on the show. Just to start with could you quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Dave Vu 2:59
I’m Dave Vu, I’m one of the co-founders and COO of Ribbon, and essentially for the last 15 years I’ve led talent and people teams helping companies grow from early stage startup into scaled organisations. You know, I was the first employee at Ezra where I helped build the talent function and operations there. And, you know, my experience over the last 15 years in a variety of different capacities in the talent side, you know, gave me a really deep expertise and firsthand experience just to understand how difficult it is to recruit, especially in this day and age where, you know, talent movement is, you know, people are moving around so much.
Matt Alder 3:41
Tell us a little bit about what you’re building at Ribbon.
Dave Vu 3:43
So Ribbon, essentially, we build out agentic AI recruiters. So it enables recruiters to build custom AI recruiting agents for their roles. These agents can interview candidates anytime, engage with them in a two-way conversation, assess their skill and experience at the top of the funnel mainly. And we work with large enterprise customers doing high volume hiring. At the same time, you know, Ribbon also helps recruiters source and rediscover their qualified candidates in their pipeline. So it allows, you know, recruiters to save a lot of time, spend time where it’s most important for them, which is really building that relationship with those candidates, you know, selling them and engaging with them about the opportunity itself. And so our tool essentially is saving recruiters a lot of unnecessary manual time in their process.
Matt Alder 4:38
What are you seeing from the enterprises that you’re working with? How are they thinking about AI? How is that changing? What does the landscape look like out there at the moment?
Dave Vu 4:48
I think things are changing quite a bit. If you were to ask me the same question one year ago, I would say enterprise companies weren’t really ready. They were thinking about it, but they weren’t really necessarily ready to adopt. But that shift has rapidly changed over the last year, year and a half. You know, the biggest shift that we see with enterprise customers is that they’ve moved beyond the experimentation phase. And so they’re no longer asking, like, should we be using AI? I think it’s kind of a given. Most companies are already thinking about how do we adopt this? You know, how do we successfully roll this out? And how do our recruiting teams use it in order to improve their workflows? And so their mindset has shifted from that perspective into more practical sense of using the AI. So we’re seeing it move away from simple automation tools into more how does this fit into their current recruiting workflows. So things that are really important for them is really speed, so they see this solution speeding up their process. They’re also just making sure that it’s creating the outcomes that they’re looking for and the experience for the candidate, to maintain their employer brand.
Matt Alder 6:03
It’s kind of interesting how things are evolving and I think sometimes we sort of talk about AI and recruiting and kind of lump it into one big thing. But there’s a real difference here between software that people might be buying for automation and efficiency and AI software that is going to be talking directly to candidates. What are the differences and what should employers be thinking about when they’re looking at that type of application?
Dave Vu 6:28
When the AI interacts directly with the candidates, I would say the standard is much higher because it becomes an extension of the company’s brand and employer brand specifically. So the experience needs to feel very real. It needs to be smooth, right? And so those are things that we optimise for to make sure that it is as closely simulated to a top recruiting conversation that one of your recruiters would have. So the AI must be able to listen, must be able to pause naturally, must be able to continue to probe and ask relevant follow-up questions, for example, you know, accurately answer what candidates want to know about the role, about the company, about the culture as best as possible. And that creates a great experience for the candidate. It also needs to be able to have deep role-specific knowledge and context, right? And that’s where the recruiting team is able to provide that additional information and context for the recruiter so that it can ask really meaningful questions specifically about the role. So, for example, you know, we have a customer, a large automotive company where there are very specific questions about engineering and the inner workings of an automobile. And so it has to be able to ask those very specific questions in order to ensure that they’re qualifying those candidates as best as possible.
Matt Alder 7:59
I think one of the interesting things is I’ve spoken to this type of AI interviewer before, and I think that there are lots of people out there who haven’t, who still perhaps are under the impression that this is like an old school chatbot, but just with a voice. I mean, this is something very different, isn’t it?
Dave Vu 8:15
Absolutely. It is very different. It is very conversational. It’s very natural. And you’ll see that it is not a one-way conversation where the AI is asking a question, the candidate is just responding. It’s really engaging and it’s able to probe. So for example, if it was to ask a very specific question and a candidate answered, it’s not going to just jump to the next question. It’s going to be able to go deeper specifically to ask the relevant question to what the answer was provided by the candidate, specifically pertaining to the role. So its aim and its goal is constantly to be able to dig deeper and deeper, just like a really good recruiter on your team would.
Matt Alder 8:58
Switching to the candidate side of things, there’s a sort of a huge narrative out there that candidates don’t like AI in their recruitment process. There’s a lot of mistrust and it’s kind of a very difficult situation. What’s the reality from your perspective with the candidates that your system’s dealing with? You know, how do they feel about it? What are you seeing happen?
Dave Vu 9:22
So candidates, you know, we’re seeing very positive feedback from the candidates. It’s getting more positive on a day-to-day basis because what we’re seeing — the main thing we’re seeing is basically candidates, it’s not that they don’t like AI, they dislike slow processes, right? Unclear expectations, applying for a job and never hearing back and not having an opportunity to present themselves in the best light possible. Well, usually when you’re applying for a job, you’re just putting up a résumé. So you’re not really sharing who you are. Somebody has to make that determination on a piece of paper. And in this day and age, everybody’s using, you know, GPT and other tools to be able to maximise their résumé. This is an opportunity to present themselves. How are they like in person and how are they like when they communicate and provide additional context? Yeah, candidates love that because it gives them an opportunity to present themselves in another light, but also it gives them immediate access to an interview and also a consistent opportunity to, you know, tell their story. So the rating that we typically see coming out of candidates these days is it’s above 4.5 to 5 when we ask the feedback from each candidate after their interview. One of the most interesting signals that we’re seeing candidates choose AI interviews is that 25% of the Ribbon interviews typically happen between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. And it makes sense, right? If you think about specific jobs where you’re on the floor constantly, or you don’t have the ability to step away for an interview for 45 minutes, this gives you that access. And so everybody has that equal access where they can interview at any point that makes it most convenient for them.
Matt Alder 11:13
It’s kind of really interesting. And obviously, when people use the system, they’re having a great experience. How do you advise employers in sort of building up that trust in the first place to get people to want to do this? How can they sort of tackle that lack of trust or that lack of information that’s out there because people haven’t experienced this before?
Dave Vu 11:36
Yeah, I think the messaging coming from the employer is really important. A lot of the brands, they get a lot of applicants. The brands that we work with are getting between 5 to 10 million applicants per year. So they’re swamped by the sheer number of volume of applicants because of their brand and people recognise it and they’re constantly applying for jobs. And so they do a great job of marketing themselves. The main thing is really to use our tool and communicate to them that this is going to speed up that process for them, gives them the accessibility that they’re looking for so that they can basically skip the queue and be able to have one of the recruiting members interview them much faster. I think presenting them with also, you know, assets that we have to show them that is a natural conversational AI interview, I think is really important as well. But most of it is going to come down to the employer and how they present that message to the candidate.
Matt Alder 12:39
And what kind of results are your clients getting from this? Where is it driving value for employers?
Dave Vu 12:47
Yeah. So a great example I always like to use is one of our customers, it’s the world’s largest leading automaker, and they’re using us in a variety of different capacities. But overall, what we’re seeing the data come out is that hiring is about 35% faster for them. So they’re saving on average 22 hours of screen time for every single role per recruiter. And that’s quite significant. And we’re hearing that from their team. One of the recruiters that we were talking to on that team mentioned that they were able to find all the roles that they filled in the last quarter through Ribbon. And so it saved a tremendous amount of time for them to be able to focus on building that relationship with the candidate, also selling the opportunity, and managing the rest of the pipeline and using opportunities to go out there and hunt and find other candidates as well, while the recruiter is doing all the manual process. So we’re also seeing that Ribbon becomes the core part of the hiring process for a lot of these enterprise customers. So like Extra Space Storage, for example, one of our customers, approximately 85% of the hiring flows through the Ribbon interviews at this point. Our goal is obviously to get to 100, but it shows that it is a major core component of the recruiting process for these large enterprise teams because they’re seeing the result, the return to them in time savings, in efficiency, and a better conversation with the candidates. The other thing we’re seeing is also at the end of the day for recruiters and hiring teams, the main result is really on the ability to find great candidates. So, you know, we’ve seen that over the last 180-day employee retention has improved roughly 10% to 30% depending on the role as well. So we’re seeing a retention result on the backside from the candidates that end up joining those companies.
Matt Alder 14:49
What is it that’s driving that? Do you think it’s the quality of the candidate experience? Is it that the recruiters have got more time to build relationships? Or is the AI finding new employees who might have been kind of overlooked in the previous process?
Dave Vu 15:03
You know, the truth is, I think it’s a combination of all those things. So, for example, the accessibility piece allows candidates that, let’s say, they were interested, they saw the posting, and at that time, they can’t do it. Well, you know, if their time is busy, they’re not going to be able to do it, and sometimes they end up not doing it at all. So, you lose those opportunities from great candidates. This allows a candidate to do it right away. So the ability to do it right away opens up a whole new pool of available candidates. Also the speed. So let’s say the candidate’s interested, they saw the posting, they’re doing the AI interview with Ribbon. So the recruiter sees that interview, they can reach out to that candidate right away versus, you know, they would have to schedule that candidate in at their convenience, you know, typically a nine to six from Monday to Friday, candidate’s calendar might be filled up. So you might not have that confidential conversation for three weeks from now, you lose that opportunity and that momentum. The other piece I would say is also the AI does a great job of just being able to ask all the relevant questions that you would input for that candidate so that the recruiter can observe that list of candidates and then prioritise the best candidates first. Again, going back to speed and making sure that you’re reaching out to the right people faster. By doing that and doing that across multiple roles for a recruiter, a recruiter now can spend the most amount of time with the best candidate and reprioritise those candidates faster on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Matt Alder 16:38
Are there a couple of example clients you could talk us through in terms of what they’ve done and what they’ve achieved?
Dave Vu 16:43
Yeah, absolutely. You know, Cartesia comes to mind. So they need to hire contractors, evaluators across, you know, roughly 20 different languages. And scheduling is a nightmare, right? Because of the time zone difference. So their hiring manager, you know, ran 43 Ribbon interviews in four weeks and personally interviewed every single one of them. So they ended up hiring 20 people without getting into, you know, 43 live calls because they’re able to then prioritise, look at those candidates and decide which ones that they want to interview first. So that’s an immediate result that we saw from those guys. And that’s the type of result and scale that we expect to see from our customers is that as they start implementing this, it will save them a tremendous amount of time interviewing people from all around the globe, and giving the capacity back to the talent team to be able to take that next step with the best candidates possible. You know, one of the quotes that stuck with us from the hiring manager, Jonathan, is that the biggest value to us is scale. You know, I would not have been able to conduct 43 mini interviews, you know, even at 15 minutes in a live setting in a very rapid amount of time to be able to get the results that they needed in a short period of time. So I think, you know, for me, I love those types of stories because it shows that the team still stays in control. They make the final decision, but they’re able to see results on a day-to-day basis and allow them to focus the time where it’s best for them to sell and move those candidates to the next stage. The other customer that we have that I want to highlight is Rando Reilly. So they hire drivers and technicians. People are mostly never sitting at their desks for those types of roles. I think for those types of roles, it’s very important to be able to give them access to a fair opportunity to be able to do an interview and identify really good candidates. You know, their director, Matt O’Donnell, told us that in one stretch, nine of the 11 hires came from candidates who did their Ribbon interviews outside of normal working hours. So think of like 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight, you know, anything beyond the normal standard business hours that a recruiter would be able to have those conversations. They were able to give that opportunity to those drivers and technicians. And so it sped up that process for them tremendously and cut the interview time that they would have typically taken months into weeks. So in his words, basically, Ribbon helped them connect with candidates outside recruiters’ normal working hours. And that was a really massive difference in their hiring and recruiting process. The main practical effect that we see is like recruiters would show up in the morning and, you know, four or five completed interviews already at their disposal. And so they’re able to then prioritise those candidates, have a conversation with them, and then jump on to the next stage immediately.
Matt Alder 19:56
As a final question for you, how do you see this all developing? What does the future look like? What are you kind of planning for in terms of what you’re building? How is AI interviewing and hiring going to evolve over the next two or three years?
Dave Vu 20:11
We see the AI interviewing conversation with candidates becoming more specialised, right? Becoming more deeply integrated with the entire hiring process end to end. You know, right now we’re specialising at the top of the funnel and we’re seeing great results in between that as well from our customers using it in a variety of different stages. But we see this AI recruiting agent be able to be — every, it will be with the recruiting team every step of the way, so that it can help with all the manual process, be able to surface all the key information that a recruiting team would need including context. So the person that would do the initial screening call and interview after our Ribbon interview will have specific context. Might not be in a second interview, but now the AI is the only one that has context throughout the whole process, we’ll be able to give the overall assessment for the candidate for every single team member that’s part of that process end to end. We also see a world where we will be able to use the AI to help improve cheating and integrity, right? That’s something that’s going to be coming out a lot more. We’ve already built that as one of our features, but we’re going to continue to improve that just to make sure that we avoid candidates that are, you know, trying to circumvent the interview process. Our AI is going to be able to identify certain patterns based on the interview just to be able to flag that, and we’re going to continue to improve that. It’s also — we also see a world where recruiting is that there’s two stages to it, there’s intake and there’s outbound hunting. That’s an area that we are diving right into right now. We’re going to continue to improve that, which is be able to continue to source candidates, rediscover them in a pipeline to make sure that if they’re not good for another role, they might be good for this particular role in real time and with the data that we have from them from a previous interview that they’ve conducted with the AI interview. I think all that data is going to be very rich that we can tap into. I see a very exciting world where the AI is going to be involved in every part of the hiring process end to end with a recruiter and a hiring team.
Matt Alder 22:38
Dave, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dave Vu 22:39
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder 22:40
My thanks to Dave. You can follow this podcast on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also sign up for our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
