At a Brisbane roundtable on AI and hiring, Indeed's Lauren Anderson made the case for honest reviews as a genuine trust sign
A group of senior People leaders gathered in Brisbane on 23 July 2026 for a facilitated roundtable hosted by HRD Australia in partnership with global job platform Indeed, examining how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the candidate experience.
The session, titled The Artificial Applicant: How Hiring Changed the Candidate, was built around Indeed's latest research into how AI is changing the way candidates search for, apply to and present themselves for roles.
One of the sharpest threads to emerge from the day's discussion had little to do with algorithms at all – it centred on stay interviews, employer reviews, and the growing gap between what an organisation says about itself and what candidates can actually verify.
Leading that part of the conversation was Lauren Anderson, senior talent strategy advisor at Indeed, who told attendees the shift is being driven by a maturing approach to employer brand.
Why stay interviews are having a moment
"There's a renewed focus on employer brand right now. Credit to some excellent practitioners in the Australian employer branding space for pushing it in the right direction, it's moved away from being about a catchy slogan and much more into genuine EVP work," Anderson said, referring to an organisation's Employee Value Proposition (EVP) – the combination of pay, culture and opportunity it offers in exchange for someone's work.
That deeper EVP work, she explained, means actually getting under the hood of an organisation and speaking to the people who work there, not just the boardroom. A stay interview – a structured conversation with a current employee about what's keeping them there and what might push them to leave – is, in her words, "a really natural outcome of that kind of deeper work." Once an organisation commits to listening to its people, she told the room, stay interviews become the obvious next step.
The reviews misconception the data doesn't support
Attendees also worked through a common assumption about workplace reviews: that they're mostly left by disgruntled former staff. Anderson pushed back on that directly, pointing to Indeed data from the past 12 months showing 48.7 per cent of workplace reviews sit at four or five stars, 14.5 per cent are neutral at three stars, and 36.8 per cent fall at one or two stars – meaning positive reviews outnumber negative ones.
"There's a broad belief that reviews are only left by unhappy people, but think about your local coffee shop or your favourite restaurant, there are plenty of five-star reviews out there, and the same holds true for workplace and employer reviews," she said. "There's an assumption at play that the data doesn't support, and it's one worth challenging."
The discussion connected this to why how workplace reputation shapes recruitment decisions has become such a live issue for HR teams – candidates are reading reviews whether or not an employer engages with them.
Anderson framed the stakes in terms of perceived risk: with the average person spending around 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime, a bad job decision carries more weight than a bad dinner booking, and candidates reduce that risk by seeking social proof from people who've already worked somewhere. Ninety-seven per cent of job seekers research a company before applying, and 57 per cent say positive reviews specifically make them more likely to apply, according to Indeed.
Her advice on generating more of that honest signal, without asking anyone to be anything other than truthful: be deliberate about who is asked. "Are you reaching out to your happiest, most engaged, highest-contributing people for their thoughts? The industry has done a great job educating businesses on the value of referrals, great people know great people, but there's been far less attention paid to the value of a review," she said.
That theme dovetailed with an earlier part of the day's conversation on candidate expectations, echoing why candidates increasingly expect a customer-grade hiring experience – reviews function for job seekers much the way they do for any other purchase decision.
Closing the gap between what's true and what's findable
Asked what single piece of advice she'd give employers on connecting employee feedback to reputation, Anderson kept it simple: "Close the gap between what's true and what's findable." Every organisation has genuinely good things going for it, she said – the real question is whether candidates can find them, which starts with an honest internal audit of what people are actually experiencing day to day.
The point landed alongside a separate strand of the day's discussion on why salary transparency has become a deal-breaker for candidates, reinforcing a consistent message from the room: candidates are hunting for verifiable, human signal wherever an AI-mediated hiring process makes everything else feel harder to trust.
On whether stay interviews will ever rival exit interviews in importance, Anderson was candid rather than triumphant. "I think that's aspirational, if I'm honest, given how much everyone is being asked to do with less right now," she said.
Her hope is more modest but still ambitious in practice – that more organisations adopt them for the first time, that larger ones add real structure to existing programs, and that the insights get used for more than internal reporting. "Actually letting those insights influence other parts of the talent pipeline too," she said, is where the real value sits.
