Tristram Gray, Chief People and Corporate Affairs Officer at Kmart Group in Australia, explains how the retail giant is revolutionizing high-volume hiring with AI. Managing 55,000 employees across 450 stores, Kmart recruits 12,000 people annually while processing hundreds of thousands of applications.

Tristram shares how the company uses Sapia.ai to create a mobile-first, simulation-based AI assessment process that evaluates candidates on culture, values, and behaviors rather than traditional resumes, previous experience, or technical skills.

The results are remarkable: 73% reduction in time-to-hire (from 44 days to 11 days), 2.5 times longer retention, enhanced diversity, significant cost savings, and 9 out of 10 candidate satisfaction – which translates to a better brand and customer perception of the retail company.

Tristram discusses the importance of providing personalized feedback to every candidate, the transformation of recruiter roles from reactive hiring to proactive talent planning, the need for change agility with operations and HR, and his philosophy that AI, when used ethically and responsibly, can create deeply human impact. This conversation offers powerful insights for anyone navigating the introduction of AI in HR.

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Today I discuss the leadership theme of Arrogance vs. Humility. It’s a big topic and covers many parts of a company’s cycle of growth and variations in styles of leadership. Without judgement, I wanted to discuss the topic in this era of massive AI investment, huge bets on the future, and many ongoing layoffs. There are good reasons for arrogance and it also has its problems, so I decided to share my thoughts.

I also discuss our upcoming 2026 Imperatives research coming in January and give you some insights on the new features in Galileo to help transform the way we assess, coach, and develop our leaders. (And we’re all leaders now.)

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In this podcast I describe our newest CHRO Insights research, based on 25,000 CHRO profiles and detailed analysis of their job history by Findem. What you see is that CHRO tenure has dropped by 20% in the last five years, the role is still primarily held by women, and the pay levels of CHROs have not kept pace with the pay of other C-level officers.

Despite these challenges, the scope, role, and importance of the CHRO has rapidly increased, leaving many CHROs to take on roles a Chief Transformation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and even Chief AI Enablement Officers. And the career path to CHRO and from CHRO is changing.

Listen here to understand more. You can download the overview here.

You can get access to the detailed research by licensing Galileo, the essential AI Agent for HR, or by joining our corporate membership.

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Additional Information

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