Building Interview Intelligence at SAP: Insights from Ilka Sagner-David
In this episode of Hiring Excellence, Johnny Campbell speaks with Ilka Sagner-David, Global Head of Talent Discovery Solutions and Innovations at SAP. Together, they explore how SAP is transforming its hiring processes with interview intelligence, candidate feedback, and ethical AI to create a fairer and more human experience across a workforce of 110,000 people in more than 180 countries.
SAP hires around 25,000 people every year from over 1.3 million applicants. As Ilka explains, making the process more consistent, insightful, and candidate-focused is both a massive challenge and a powerful opportunity for change.
1. Turning Feedback Into Insight
At SAP, interview feedback is mandatory. But as Ilka points out, collecting feedback is not the same as getting insight.
“While we have made interview feedback mandatory from a system perspective, we are still struggling with getting meaningful feedback into the system,” she says. “Our recruiters have a lot more meaningful things to do than chasing hiring managers for information.”
With thousands of interviews taking place each week, Ilka’s team is exploring interview intelligence tools to make feedback more structured and useful. By automatically capturing key moments, they hope to free recruiters to focus on higher-value work and help hiring managers make faster, fairer decisions.
2. Learning From Early AI Experiments
Ilka’s team began experimenting with AI tools such as Copilot to summarize interviews. The results were promising but imperfect.
“It produced 30-plus page transcripts but not really any real insights,” she recalls. “People didn’t want to copy and paste all that text back into the recruiting system.”
The lesson was clear: technology should simplify work, not add complexity. SAP now prioritizes integration and usability, ensuring that every new tool fits naturally into existing systems and supports human decision-making, rather than overwhelming it.
3. Giving Every Candidate Meaningful Feedback
For Ilka, improving the candidate experience is just as important as improving efficiency. She believes feedback should help every candidate grow, whether they are hired or not.
“Candidates really want to get something meaningful no matter if they get hired,” she says. “Even more so, the people that get rejected, they want feedback to develop, to make it better next time.”
Her vision is to use AI-generated summaries, reviewed by recruiters, to make feedback more personalized and actionable. The goal is not automation for its own sake, but scaling the human touch, so every candidate walks away with a sense of value and fairness.
4. Balancing Innovation With Privacy and Trust
Operating under strict European data protection laws, SAP is taking a cautious and transparent approach to AI in hiring.
“It’s not only the legal aspect,” Ilka explains. “We also have social partners who play a big role. They want to help increase the candidate experience, but consent is key.”
Every candidate will be asked to opt in before interviews are recorded. SAP also plans to clearly communicate the benefits: faster feedback, greater fairness, and more transparency. Recordings will not only help recruiters learn but can also be used to ensure compliance and investigate any claims of bias or unfairness.
5. The Future of Ethical AI in Hiring
As AI becomes part of everyday recruitment, Ilka believes both sides, candidates and recruiters, must be equipped to use it responsibly.
“Candidates are using it, so we also need to equip the other stakeholders with tools to help them focus on the conversation,” she says. “We’ve issued guidelines around ethical usage of AI in recruiting to create fairness and balance across all stakeholders.”
SAP’s internal guidelines define how AI should support, not replace, human decisions. By making these principles transparent, SAP aims to build trust across candidates, recruiters, and business leaders and set a model for responsible AI adoption in hiring.
Conclusion: Keeping Hiring Human
For Ilka Sagner-David and her team, the goal of interview intelligence is not automation, it is connection. By combining structured data with ethical technology, SAP is creating a fairer, more consistent process where people feel heard and respected.
“Don’t lose sight of the human aspect,” Ilka says. “Technology should help us focus on the conversation, the part that really matters.”
Want more conversations like this? Listen to the full Hiring Excellence episode with Ilka Sagner-David, or explore more expert-led insights at SocialTalent.com!
