00:00 – Welcome to The Score
01:05 – Ice-breaker question
02:27 – Balancing growth, product innovation, and scientific integrity
Why solid foundations matter, and why skipping them is the fastest way to fail.
04:22 – The CEO’s role in fairness and culture
How leaders set the tone for inclusive, transparent hiring.
05:31 – The overlooked ingredient in HR tech success
Why building for users (not just buyers) determines adoption and long-term growth.
07:47 – Why adoption is everything
SaaS reality: adoption drives renewals.
08:46 – Candidate experience as a CEO-level strategy
Darren’s three reasons why candidate experience signals culture and impacts brand reputation.
12:19 – AI in hiring: hype vs reality
What actually works (adaptive testing, bias detection, personalised feedback), and what doesn’t (predicting personality from video or voice).
15:36 – The future of assessments (next 3–5 years)
Agentic AI, consumer-grade experiences, and scaling work samples for real predictive power.
18:38 – Science or Fiction?
A rapid-fire game on hiring myths, from candidate experience “nice-to-have” to whether CEOs really need to understand psychometrics.
22:57 – Darren’s final takeaway
Why the future of hiring is immersive, predictive, and bright, if we get the foundations right.
Nicola Tatham (00:00) Hello and welcome to the score where we make sense of hiring trends, we sort science from fiction and we find out what's new in talent acquisition from top experts in the field. I'm Nicola Tatham, I'm the chief IO psychologist here at Sova with over two decades of experience designing fair, predictive and science-backed talent assessments. I'm here to cut through the noise and talk about what actually works in hiring.
Caroline Fry (00:24) And I'm Caroline Fry, Head of Product. I spend my time turning smart assessment ideas of Nic’s into tools that work scalable, inclusive, and ready for whatever AI throws at us next.
Nicola Tatham (00:35) So each episode we're joined by a guest to unpack a big question in hiring.
Caroline Fry (00:40) Because talent deserves better than guesswork. And today we are joined by Darren Jaffrey, CEO of Sova. Darren has spent his career at the intersection of technology and talent, from running global teams in some of the biggest HR tech firms in the world to now leading Sova. He brings a rare mix of commercial leadership and deep understanding of the science behind great hiring. And he's here to share his insights on the future of talent assessment. Welcome, Darren.
Darren Jaffrey (01:05) Good morning, how are you?
Caroline Fry (01:06) Well, thank you.
Darren Jaffrey (01:07) Good, good.
Nicola Tatham (01:08) Thanks for joining us Darren. We always like to start the podcast with something quite light just to warm things up. So my question to you is, my first question to you is what's the most unexpected thing that you've ever been asked during an interview? It might be funny, weird or just one of those moments that stuck with you. Anything spring to mind.
Darren Jaffrey (01:29) So when I was a much younger man than I am now, I interviewed with Unilever for a role to deploy a technology platform for them globally. And in the interview, which was clearly going quite well at the time, I was asked, would I be prepared to spend the next 12 months traveling the world? Working for Unilever, deploying this technology to which I very enthusiastically said, yes, of course I would. And then I was asked which countries I'd been banned from entering and couldn't visit as part of that journey, to which I was happy to report at the time and still now, that is none. So got the job and actually was my first foray into the talent management space loosely, working for what was and still is an absolutely outstanding brand.
Caroline Fry (02:18) Wonder about the quality of the candidates if they're asking that kind of question in the interview process.
Nicola Tatham (02:23) Or what research they've done ahead of Darren arriving.
Darren Jaffrey (02:25) Yeah.
Caroline Fry (02:27) Okay, all right, thank you, Darren. That's an interesting one. Not one we've heard before. So getting into the more in-depth part of the conversation now. In your experience, how does a CEO think about the balance between commercial growth, product innovation, and scientific integrity?
Darren Jaffrey (02:44) So I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking, I spent a lot of time thinking about this early on in my career. Now I don't need to because I have what I consider to be the code, the answer that works for me and for the firms that I've run. And I'm basically a big believer in foundations. Doesn't really matter if you're building a house, a business, your life. It's all based on solid foundations and the foundation element of what we do at Sova is scientific integrity. On top of that, you can layer product innovation. You can only do that once the scientific integrity has been achieved, has been proven, is demonstrable. Then you layer on the innovation. Once you've got those two things in place, the commercial growth will take care of itself. So that's the building blocks that I have. You know, the converse of that is if you focused on initially on commercial growth only and some startups do, I appreciate that. They need to get to revenue relatively quickly. Don't put the right foundations in place and as sure as eggs is eggs, eventually that business will stumble and fail to scale. So for me, it's crystal clear. Is scientific integrity, then it's innovation and then... The rest will look after itself.
Nicola Tatham (04:00) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And good to hear that scientific integrity is at the bottom of that foundation. The building block isn't at the first port of call. So moving on a little from that, we have talked about the science behind what we do. So in your view, what role should CEOs play in shaping the fairness and the integrity of the hiring process?
Darren Jaffrey (04:22) Think that I could give you a similar answer to many questions actually around this in terms of the role of the CEO. First and foremost, the role of a CEO is to set the tone. You, I always feel like I should lead by example and in this case establish the cultural and ethical expectations that I have of the organization. You know, it's not lost on me that the attitude that I demonstrate towards fairness and transparency will percolate and resonate throughout the firm. So I just try to be consistent inside our own firm, but also when I'm working with our customers and with my shareholders and with our partners by just articulating our values on inclusivity and equitable hiring and just set the precedent. Know, CEOs are not just figureheads. Are to a degree that culture carriers in an organisation. And so carry that culture and lead from the front.
Nicola Tatham (05:18) So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I guess kind of related to that. In your opinion, what's the most overlooked ingredient in building a successful HR tech company?
Darren Jaffrey (05:31) I think probably, as I thought, I think about this quite often because it obviously predicates what we're trying to do from a product perspective. I, in my time in the space, I've just seen probably an under investment in the user. There's an overemphasis sometimes in, designing technology, particularly for startups. And I get it. I do get it because they're looking for, they're looking to make revenue and they're looking for customers. And so they place an unnatural degree of emphasis on the buyer and not the user. You know, building a piece of technology for HR leadership or procurement is a surefire way to... Not see that technology get adopted. And so that in and of itself then prohibits the expansion of the technology. So products need to feel intuitive. They've got to solve daily plays. They just have to be sticky. And too often, I don't think that design principle is built in at core. You know, in a nutshell, you know, investing the users, not the buyers. And that's... Bit controversial because you know, everybody's after the buyer, but actually, they're not they're not our constituents, our constituents are our users, they can be recruiters, they can be hiring managers, they can definitely be candidates, spend your time worrying about their lives, not the global head of talent for a Fortune 500 company, because that's not your customer.
Nicola Tatham (06:59) I think this links to a conversation we've previously on the podcast where those sort of, what are your measures of success when you're working with a client and it's going to be things like adoption, isn't it? You know, just not making the sale and walking away. It's ensuring that the people that you've designed the system for actually choose to use it and actually enjoy that experience.
Darren Jaffrey (07:11) Always.
Darren Jaffrey (07:20) Well, absolutely. The reality is, you know, we live in a world now that might have worked 20 years ago when large companies were selling on premise systems where it was a one time massive great big check and then you walk away and whether it got adopted or not didn't matter. We live in a world of software as a service every 12 months. We have to we have to earn the right to renew the contract that we sold 12 months ago. And the number one driver behind that is adoption, full stop. You can look at that a million different ways and I will tell you we'll always, always come back to adoption. So if you get that right, then you're halfway towards having that positive conversation every 12 months and that's a good place to be.
Caroline Fry (08:03) Think, yeah, obviously, leading a product team, I wholeheartedly agree. Think that's how you prove value, right? Like that's the metric for value ongoing, which is what we all need to strive to. And I think, yeah, you're right as well. There are many users and that's something I have to worry about a lot across our product, which is actually effectively multiple products, depending on the user that you're working with. And I think we hear probably less about the... Client uses the administrators, the HR managers than we do at the moment about candidate experience. And I did want to ask you about candidate experience, which I think has traditionally been seen as a sort of operational issue. But do you think it's becoming a strategic concern at the C level? And if so, why?
Darren Jaffrey (08:46) I it is, I think it always has been, and certainly has been in my mind. If you were to break it down, there's probably three principal reasons, probably more, but three that really come to mind. I first of all, talent is a competitive advantage for any brand, right, for any company. So the people in your business are massively important because in a knowledge and innovation economy, Companies don't win because of the assets they've got. They win because of the people that they hire. Yeah, of course candidate experience is important in that respect. A good candidate experience will obviously positively affect your ability to attract higher top talent. And that matters because we're all, you know, all companies, you know, my little company all the way up to the Unilever business world are looking for that top talent. So talent is a competitive advantage.
Secondly, You know, candidates, not only are they customers of the brand, and they've always been a customer of a brand, and there's always been this thing in the talent management space of treat your candidates like customers. Well, they're also influencers, and they're also investors potentially in your brand. You know, it's hugely important that you create a good experience because those candidates are now rating and reviewing you. In the same way as they do products, be it on Glassdoor or LinkedIn or TikTok or, you know, this experience that they have will go viral, will get amplified. And it's important that you absolutely get it right.
And I think the final one is, and this sometimes gets lost a little bit, but for me is actually really important. Candidate experience just signals culture. You know, this is the first engagement that a candidate is going to have with your organization and the hiring process is fundamentally a proxy for the company's values and how it behaves. If it's a clunky, laborious, unengaging experience, that just signals what the experience is going to be like post-hire, right? And that can be a massive red flag for candidates. So, you know, the culture that you're trying to set in your organization starts before day one. It starts as part of the hiring process. So signal it correctly, signal it positively, and just deliver a world-class candidate experience wherever you can. Something I really fixate on, I know you do Caroline as well, but it's often overlooked and potentially undervalued, and I think that's just a massive mistake.
Caroline Fry (11:14) I agree. As you've already said, think, I think actually it's something that the talent assessment industry has been a bit guilty of doing poorly and being behind the times. We talk so much about consumer grade and I think once the candidates get actually into those assessment experiences, they're not very exciting. They're not very engaging for the most part, even with the biggest unicorns in the industry. Think possibly in the last couple of years with AI, of course, like everything is leveling up. But I think for a long time, probably not because of the science, but because the science has been so powerful and important and actually predictive and useful. That's the experience I think has become secondary to that. When I think you can just have both, I think quite frankly. Slightly related when you're talking about your path and probably defining your path. — that's easier than said than done. I think we know that, you know, you can get blown off course, industry trends change. And predicting the future is difficult. And I mentioned AI briefly earlier, of course, — it's everywhere at the moment and there is a lot of hype. What do you see with AI as genuinely transformative and what's just noise?
Darren Jaffrey (12:19) So generally transformative in our category that I've seen, things like adaptive testing. — I like that. I've seen that come to the fore where AI can of dynamically adjust question types and difficulties based on prior candidate responses. I don't think that's been historically that achievable. I think it's... Generic name for it is CAT, isn't it? Computerized Adaptive Testing. I think that's really cool. And I like that. Bias detection at scale. That's really real and achievable. And historically was always an issue. There is inherently bias built into every type of assessment. And we can talk about, you know, if there is such a thing as a bias reassessment a bit later on. But the detection of it in terms of doing assessment audits using AI. I think that's really powerful and I like that. The other thing, maybe the final thing that I've really seen manifest itself so far is it's beginning AI to allow for enhanced feedback and personalization of an assessment experience. So it takes us all the way back to that candidate experience of trying to make it consumer grade, engaging, immersive.
Darren Jaffrey (13:28) Not feel like you're going through a process, but actually feel like you're having an experience that absolutely I've seen happening. Just at the end of that process, the way that AI can sort of turn raw scores into kind of rich, personalized insights for an individual, that's really attractive and appealing. So I think that's some areas that have been generally transformative. Mean, there's plenty that... Plenty of hype out there.
Darren Jaffrey (13:55) Want to talk about the hype? Mean, I'm a big, I've come from a world where I've seen, I've seen a lot of pronouncements made and, and the reality not quite match up to that. And I think the biggest culprit of that probably that I've seen is around the area of personality prediction from video or voice or social media and the use of — those technologies to be able to do a personality prediction. Mean, first of all, it's just fraught with cultural bias, right? That kind of stuff. But I just don't think it works. I think people say that it does, but I don't think it does, honestly. So, you know, it's a minefield. There's good and bad. We are navigating at the moment through the minefield. At some point on this AI journey that we as a company are on and our industry and frankly, humanity is on will be somewhat the other side of it and be able to look back and go, well, we got through that minefield. But right now I feel like we're still in the minefield.
Nicola Tatham (14:55) Agreed. Exciting times and creating more opportunities for more interdisciplinary projects and work now where IOs aren't sitting, you know, not leading the way in all of the assessment design. There's so many different people that are inputting to enable us to great assessments that retain the rigor, the candidate experience and make the most of the technology that's now. Available to us. I guess just building on that and our last question to you in this section is what's your vision for where the assessment industry should be heading in the next three to five years?
Darren Jaffrey (15:36) Well, having just had a bit of a rant about — AI, clearly. So where do I see it? Well, I think a few things. I think it's almost inevitable, as with every other industry that I look at and I interact with on a daily basis, just as me, that we will move to more of an agentic experience within assessment.
Nicola Tatham (15:38) All right. Yeah.
Darren Jaffrey (15:58) The assessments themselves will be and feel like it's agentic AI. And I think we've all lived and breathed in those, know, it doesn't matter whether you're moving house and you want to kind of speak to British gas or Centrica or whoever it is, you're going through that agentic experience as your point of engagement. I think that's sort of inevitable. We really need to crack the code, I think, on how to make the experience more engaging, more immersive. And I'm a big believer in the concept of work samples. You'll be familiar with those Nicola from the work that you do, which, know, work samples are, and I think a university recognized as the most scientifically valid way to predict job performance. So how can we embrace the concept of work samples and bring them into the assessment experience?
Historically, it's been quite hard. Because they tend to be fairly nuanced and then scale terribly well. Well, maybe with AI there's a way to make that, to break that down into its constituent parts and actually deliver individual work samples for individual roles, so candidates who applying for positions. Because at the end of the day, people are applying to positions generally, even if they're applying to a graduate program at a Fortune 500 firm. There are things that they are going to do within that organization, within the culture of that organisation that are fairly nuanced and fairly specific. Well, why not find out what their capabilities are like about those tasks rather than just, how numerous are they? What's their verbal reasoning like? Yeah, all that stuff's great. I get it. And it's predictive, but there are better ways of doing this. And then, you know, if we're delivering this agentic experience and we're leaning in on work samples, please, please, please deliver it in a consumer grade experience. Our candidates, our customers' candidates, their future talent is the Netflix generation. They are used to an experience that historically assessments haven't delivered, and we absolutely have to lean in on that. So I guess at the transition of those three things feels like the Holy Grail for me, and that's where... — I know we spend a lot of time as a company thinking about how we want to address those three challenges. We can bring them all together. I think we're on the cusp of a new way of assessing individuals that feels more engaging, more immersive, frankly more enjoyable, and is even more predictive. So that's good, good, right?
Nicola Tatham (18:31) Mm. Mm. Yeah, watch this space then.
Darren Jaffrey (18:37) Watch this space.
Nicola Tatham (18:38) Thank you. So as we head towards the end of the episode, we're going to play a quick game called science or fiction. We will read out a few claims and then it's up to you to decide which are backed by evidence and which are just plain old assessment myths. So don't worry, all in good fun, no right or wrong answers. So the first question is, candidate experience is a nice to have, not a must have.
Darren Jaffrey (19:01) Fiction.
Nicola Tatham (19:04) It's no surprise that you've answered that — as fiction and that we have talked about that quite a lot, you know, over the last few minutes. Is there anything that you wanted to add to that just to support that argument even more?
Darren Jaffrey (19:17) No, I would just refer the learned listeners to the previous 30 minutes worth of content. That is, of all the statements you're going to give me, can't imagine I'm going to think anything is more fiction than that one.
Caroline Fry (19:30) Okay, controversial considering Nic's is right here. The next one is: you don't need IO psychologists if you have data scientists.
Darren Jaffrey (19:38) Easy, fiction.
Nicola Tatham (19:39) Good answer.
Caroline Fry (19:39) Yeah.
Darren Jaffrey (19:40) Yeah, two different skills. That's like saying...
Darren Jaffrey (19:44) Desperately trying to come up with an analogy on the floor. If you're going to an operating theater, there's a surgeon and somebody that controls the... And anaesthetist, that's not easy to say on a podcast. They do very different things, right? They're part of a team that are ultimately delivering, you hope, a successful outcome. Our IO psychologists and data scientists are different beasts, and so that's absolutely fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Nicola Tatham (20:07) Okay, so next one, data without context is worse than no data at all.
Darren Jaffrey (20:13) Data without context is worse than no data at all. Probably science on that. Mean, no data at all. Nobody's making any decisions on it. Data without context, people are going to be making decisions on it and probably making incorrect decisions. So I would say that's science, actually.
Nicola Tatham (20:29) Yeah, so it'd be false, false negatives, false positives. I'm going to start kicking in at that point.
Darren Jaffrey (20:31) Yeah.
Caroline Fry (20:34) Okay, next one. Diverse inclusive hiring starts long before the assessment.
Darren Jaffrey (20:39) Definitely science. Definitely. We could take you all the way back to the conversation we had earlier about candidate experience signaling culture. Even before you get into the interview process or the assessment process, there's work that's been going on in an organization to kind of signal who they are. So no, science, all day long science. Yes, I'm very comfortable with my answer there.
Nicola Tatham (21:03) Yeah. And finally, CEOs don't need to understand psychometrics. That's what the experts are for.
Darren Jaffrey (21:17) Goodness me. Okay, here's curveball. That's science and fiction. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. Because I think if the CEO is the founder, or the founder of the company is the CEO, at a point in time through the company's growth, I think it's really, really, really important that the CEO
Darren Jaffrey (21:39) Understands the core proposition, the foundation. So early stage startup founder led CEO, founder led businesses where the founder becomes the CEO. Really important, I think really important. I think at a point in time when you're beginning to want to scale the organization, then actually you want a different type of CEO. You want perhaps someone that's more commercially savvy and who relies on the experts empowers them and gets out of their way and lets them bring their expertise. So I think the answer to that depends very much where you are on the kind of the growth curve. And I can see an argument for both. Where we are right now at Sova, we're a little bit further along the growth curve. I'm fortunate I've got some wonderful colleagues that I can lean in on. To help me understand your product and psychometric direction. And that's what I do. And think that's what most CEOs do.
Caroline Fry (22:37) Thank you, Darren. Think that's quite a nice final thought, we say, or near final thought as we come to the end of our episode. Thank you so much for joining us. And you have given us a lot to think about from strategy to science to AI and lots in between. If you had to leave our listeners with one takeaway about the future of hiring, what would it be?
Darren Jaffrey (23:17) I think it's bright. I think it's about to become a much more engaging, immersive, predictive experience. And our category and our little piece of the technology world in which we exist is going through one of the biggest periods of revolutionary change that we've seen in probably 20, 30 years. I think it's super exciting where we're at right now, but it's not exciting just for the sake of it. Think what's on the other side of it is great for candidates, is great for customers, is great for just both sides of the, both constituent parties. And that feels like a really good place to be for me. So I think it's bright and super exciting.
Nicola Tatham (24:02) Agreed. Slightly terrifying at times as well. That's why we're here. That's why we're here. Well, thank you. That's been a really interesting session. Think in terms of some of my takeaways from this conversation, a key theme that's come across from a lot of your responses has been that the foundations matter.
Darren Jaffrey (24:05) Exciting things.
Nicola Tatham (24:25) So those foundations might be about the way that you start your business, the sort of direction of travel when it comes to your business. It might be about your team and how you build that team and build a team that you can trust to get on with the job. And then you can also apply those, the foundations matter element to your assessments and how you design your assessments and your platforms as well. So regardless of what AI does, the ways of working within a business. Go, the foundations remain the key element for attaining those success measures that we've talked about, they may be basically. So yeah, Caroline, is there anything you wanted to add today?
Caroline Fry (25:05) Think alongside that, which yeah, I agree, has come through pretty much everything that Darren said. I think the other thing that I find contagious is the optimism that you still have Darren for the industry generally. You've had a career in talent assessment spanning decades and that experience and what you've worked through in your career, you're still engaged, you're looking forward. You're saying the future's bright, you think we're actually at quite a pivotal time within the industry. And, you know, I don't have decades, but I have probably at least a decade. And I've seen that change too. And I can, you know, it really aligns to my experience where I think even in the last decade, we've come a really long way in terms of some of those elements around technology, candidate experience. And, yes. I agree Nick AI can be scary. We've talked about that in previous podcasts. It can feel really overwhelming, but there's really useful, true areas of application that are really exciting for our industry. Yeah, I, you know, I really respond to the whole futures bright idea because I think I really, I can see that playing out in, you know, our day to day work and what our clients are doing. — so yeah, thanks for your continued optimism, Darren.
Nicola Tatham (26:17) Thank you.
Darren Jaffrey (26:17) It's pleasure. Well, thank you for having me today. I really appreciate it.
Nicola Tatham (26:20) Fabulous. And thanks to everyone for hanging out with us on the score. If you enjoyed this look behind the scenes of how leadership, science and candidate experience come together, don't miss what's coming next. So new episodes drop every two weeks on YouTube, on Spotify or wherever you get your talent assessment insights. Thanks for listening.
In this episode of The Score, Sova’s Chief IO Psychologist, Nicola Tatham, and Head of Product, Caroline Fry, sat down with Sova's CEO Darren Jaffrey to talk about the future of hiring. From balancing commercial growth with scientific integrity, to separating AI hype from real innovation, Darren shared what he sees as the building blocks for lasting success in talent assessment.
For Darren, the recipe for success is clear: start with scientific integrity, then layer on product innovation, and only then does commercial growth follow. Many HR tech start-ups focus first on revenue, but without solid foundations they eventually struggle to scale. His message is simple: science first, growth second.
When it comes to building a culture of fairness and transparency, Darren emphasised that the CEO’s role is crucial. Leaders are more than figureheads; they are “culture carriers.” The way a CEO demonstrates values such as inclusivity and equitable hiring sets the tone for the whole organisation. Fairness in hiring isn’t just an operational issue, it’s a leadership responsibility.
One of the most overlooked ingredients in HR tech success, according to Darren, is the user experience. Too many platforms are designed with the buyer in mind (often HR leadership or procurement) rather than the people who actually use the tools. Recruiters, hiring managers, and especially candidates need products that are intuitive, useful, and engaging. Without adoption at the user level, even the best technology fails to deliver.
Candidate experience has long been treated as a “nice-to-have,” but Darren argued it is now a strategic concern at the C-suite level. His reasoning comes down to three factors:
A poor assessment experience can be a red flag that turns top talent away.
AI is reshaping talent assessment, but not all innovations are created equal. Darren pointed to three areas where AI is genuinely transformative:
By contrast, he flagged personality prediction from video, voice, or social media data as hype, a space fraught with bias and lacking scientific evidence.
Looking ahead three to five years, Darren sees assessments evolving into more agentic AI experiences: interactive, personalised, and engaging. Work samples are the most predictive form of assessment, and AI may finally allow them to scale. Combined with consumer-grade design, assessments will look less like tests and more like experiences, aligning with the expectations of today’s “Netflix generation” candidates.
His takeaway: the future of hiring is immersive, predictive, and bright, but only if organisations put the right foundations in place.
For talent leaders and HR professionals, these insights point to a clear direction: invest in science, design for adoption, and never underestimate the cultural impact of candidate experience. With AI opening new possibilities, the opportunity is to create fair, engaging hiring processes that benefit both organisations and candidates.
Sova is a talent assessment platform that provides the right tools to evaluate candidates faster, fairer and more accurately than ever.
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