Hiring at a new scale
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) plays a critical role in operating Australia’s electricity and gas markets. That responsibility comes with high standards around governance, privacy, and security—expectations that extend to every technology the organization adopts, including AI.
Four years ago, AEMO’s graduate recruitment program attracted around 500 applications.
Today, that number has grown to nearly 10,000.
For Annabelle Nielson, Senior Consultant, Early Careers at AEMO, that growth created a challenge familiar to many recruiting teams: how do you evaluate significantly more candidates without compromising fairness, consistency, or the candidate experience?
Adding recruiter headcount would have been costly, and it still wouldn’t have solved the underlying challenge. The team needed a way to evaluate thousands of candidates consistently while maintaining the high standards expected across the organization.
Why AEMO chose BrightHire Screen
By the time AEMO began exploring BrightHire Screen, the recruiting team had already introduced online assessments to help manage the growing number of applications.
Those assessments helped reduce the volume, but they still needed a better way to understand candidates before deciding who should move forward.
For Annabelle, the goal wasn’t simply to make screening more efficient. It was to create a more consistent, equitable process while giving candidates another opportunity to demonstrate what they could do beyond their resumes.
Unlike one-way video interviews, BrightHire Screen gave candidates a more conversational way to share their experience while giving recruiters a structured, consistent way to evaluate every interview.
Just as importantly, it aligned with AEMO’s governance, privacy, and security requirements and fit the way Annabelle wanted the team to hire.
Rather than introducing technology for technology’s sake, the team focused on whether it would improve the hiring process for both recruiters and candidates.
Once they felt confident BrightHire Screen aligned with both AEMO’s hiring philosophy and governance requirements, the team’s focus shifted to implementation.
Rolling out BrightHire Screen with intention
Rather than launching BrightHire Screen across every hiring process, the team started with graduate hiring because it was an ideal environment to learn. Application volumes were high, candidates were generally comfortable with technology, and the recruiting team could gather feedback before expanding further.
Annabelle spent time carefully designing the interview experience.
Questions were intentionally simple and focused on gathering the information recruiters needed at that stage of the hiring process. As the team learned what worked, they continued refining the interview design and candidate experience with each hiring campaign.
She also credits BrightHire’s implementation approach with helping make the rollout successful.
Having led several technology implementations throughout her career, Annabelle appreciated that the rollout happened in phases rather than all at once. New capabilities were introduced over time, feedback was incorporated throughout the process, and the team always understood what was changing and why.
The result was one of the smoothest software implementations she’d experienced.
“We didn’t have any major technical issues. That was a first for me.”
– Annabelle Nielson, Senior Consultant, Early Careers, AEMO
Rather than spending time troubleshooting, the recruiting team was able to stay focused on hiring while continuing to improve the experience over time.
Building confidence through validation
The recruiting team built its own validation process, reviewing candidates across every score band and comparing BrightHire’s evaluations alongside recruiter assessments.
They also looked closely at groups they wanted to protect, including candidates with English as a second language, visa holders, gender representation, and candidates across different technical disciplines.
The goal was to ensure candidates were being evaluated consistently and fairly. What they found gave the team confidence to continue.
BrightHire’s evaluations were consistent across the groups they reviewed and, in several cases, surfaced candidates the recruiting team believes may have otherwise been overlooked simply because of the volume of applications they were managing.
Those findings became an important part of conversations with leaders across the organization and helped demonstrate that AI interviewing could support a fair and thoughtful hiring process while maintaining AEMO’s standards.
Creating more opportunity for candidates
As application numbers continued to climb, recruiter capacity naturally became more limited.
For Annabelle, the biggest impact of BrightHire Screen wasn’t simply efficiency.
It was opportunity.
With BrightHire Screen, the team could evaluate two to three times more candidates than before. That meant significantly more people had the opportunity to move into assessment centers, where they could demonstrate their skills beyond what a resume alone could show.
Instead of recruiter capacity determining how many candidates moved forward, more candidates had the opportunity to continue in the process.
Candidates also heard back sooner because recruiters weren’t spending time working through thousands of applications before scheduling conversations.
“Every candidate deserves the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.”
– Annabelle Nielson, Senior Consultant, Early Careers, AEMO
That belief became one of the guiding principles behind AEMO’s rollout.
Bringing the business along
Introducing AI interviewing meant bringing the broader business along on the journey.
Some stakeholders weren’t entirely confident that candidates would embrace the experience. Others wondered how AI interviewing would perform for technical roles.
Rather than asking the business to simply trust the technology, Annabelle shared the team’s findings, demonstrated how BrightHire Screen worked, and focused conversations on the outcomes they were seeing.
She also presented the rollout to senior leaders, including AEMO’s CEO, helping build confidence that the technology supported the organization’s hiring goals.
Over time, those conversations became easier because they were grounded in evidence.
Rethinking the purpose of AI interviewing
One of the biggest shifts for Annabelle wasn’t introducing AI. It was rethinking what screening is supposed to accomplish.
She believes many hiring teams expect too much from an initial screen. Rather than trying to determine whether someone should be hired, the goal is to understand whether they’ve shown enough potential to justify the next conversation.
“The purpose of screening isn’t to make the hiring decision. It’s to gather enough information to confidently move someone to the next stage.”
– Annabelle Nielson, Senior Consultant, Early Careers, AEMO
That way of thinking influenced everything from how AEMO designed its interviews to how recruiters reviewed results. It also helped keep early-stage interviews focused on what they were intended to do: identify promising candidates and give more people the opportunity to continue through the hiring process.
The Impact
In just five months, AEMO has completed more than 1,100 AI interviews through BrightHire Screen, primarily supporting graduate hiring, with candidates giving the experience an average rating of 4.3 out of 5.
For Annabelle, though, the numbers only tell part of the story.
The bigger achievement has been building a hiring process that’s scalable, thoughtful, and fair—one that gives more candidates the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do while giving recruiters more consistent information to make well-informed decisions.
As AEMO continues exploring where AI can add value across the organization, that same philosophy will continue to guide the team
Advice for other talent leaders
Annabelle encourages other talent leaders to think about the hiring process before the technology.
Before introducing AI interviewing, be clear on what you’re trying to achieve, where it fits in your hiring process, and how you’ll know it’s working.
She also recommends:
- Bring the right stakeholders in early. Involve legal, procurement, security, and governance teams from the beginning. Building alignment upfront makes implementation much smoother.
- Define success before you launch. Look beyond adoption. Consider recruiter capacity, hiring manager feedback, candidate experience, and whether you’re creating more opportunities for candidates to move forward.
- Validate the results yourself. Review outcomes across different candidate groups, compare AI evaluations with human assessments, and use the data to build confidence across the business.
- Remember what screening is meant to do. A screen isn’t the hiring decision. It’s one data point that helps determine whether someone has shown enough potential to move to the next stage.
For Annabelle, confidence in AI interviewing came from testing it, measuring it, and giving the business evidence they could trust.
“BrightHire Screen helped us create more opportunities for candidates while giving our team a more consistent way to evaluate them.”
– Annabelle Nielson, Senior Consultant, Early Careers, AEMO
