The head of talent acquisition at hipages Group explains how in-person assessments and fraud detection are reshaping hiring
Australian tech company hipages Group has replaced take-home assessments with in-person testing, as candidates' growing use of AI in recruitment forces employers to rethink how they measure genuine skills.
Jason Lau, the head of talent acquisition at ASX-listed hipages Group, told HRD the company welcomes applicants who use artificial intelligence, but it wants to see exactly how they use it.
hipages runs an online marketplace connecting homeowners and renters in Australia and New Zealand with tradies, alongside a job management platform covering rostering, scheduling, quoting, invoicing and insurance.
Lau said the business employs about 350 people across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Vietnam. He has spent four and a half years with the company, rising from manager to senior manager to head of talent acquisition, and oversees recruitment, employer brand, visas and internal mobility across all four countries.
Why candidate AI use is changing assessment
Lau said AI is the dominant issue facing talent acquisition teams in 2026.
"We see a lot of candidates are using AI at the moment and I think we just saw an article a few months ago, 60% of candidates are using AI at some point during their job applications and that's completely fine. We encourage candidates to use AI," he said.
The challenge, he said, is making sure assessments test what a candidate can actually do.
"The opportunity for us is how do we make sure that we are assessing the candidates in the right way," Lau said. "Instead of take home assessment, we're doing in person assessment. So again we encourage them to use AI, but we want to see how they're using AI."
Guarding against fraud and generic resumes
The same technology has also opened the door to fraudulent and low-quality applications.
"With AI there's a little fraud associated to it, a lot of generic resumes, so to speak as well. So we implemented a software within our system where we can detect frauds, we can detect spam as well," Lau said.
Verifying candidate information has become a wider concern for employers, as HRD has reported in its coverage of how to avoid discrimination when using AI in recruitment, where validation of AI-generated CVs was flagged as a growing priority.
Internally, hipages has gone further than most. Lau said the talent acquisition team uses AI agents to write job advertisements, take job briefs, draft interview scorecards and produce employer brand content.
"AI is our default working model here at hipages," he said. "However human is still at the centre of it."
How talent matching handles high application volumes
Lau said a tougher economic environment has compounded the pressure on recruiters.
"People are holding on their jobs, the good quality candidates are holding on their jobs. What we're seeing is we do have high volume applications, but the quality of candidates are lower than expected. So we take a bit longer to be able to find the right person for the role," he said.
To manage the influx, the team relies on a talent matching function within Greenhouse, its applicant tracking system – software that stores and manages job applications.
"We train the talent matching system with the hiring manager. So when we do our briefing calls with hiring managers, we can calibrate the talent matching model that we want them to be," Lau said.
The model pushes stronger matches to the top of the pile, but Lau stressed it does not make hiring decisions. His team still reviews every application.
"Ultimately it's up to myself and my team to really review the resume before progressing the candidate to the next step and then we'll do a proper interview with the candidates before bringing them into the process," he said.
It is an approach that mirrors other Australian employers weighing automation against candidate experience, including those HRD spoke to on why talent acquisition shouldn't 'AI out the human' in hiring.
"We see AI as an enabler, not a replacement. And ultimately it will help us to be more efficient. But we still need a human in the process because at the end of the day we're dealing with a human," Lau said.
What the future of talent acquisition looks like
Lau does not expect AI to shrink his team, but nor does he expect it to grow.
"From the headcount perspective, I don't think we'll increase the headcount. I think we'll keep where the number of team members that we have," he said. "I think that we will be more efficient and we'll be able to use agents, AI agents to do the repetitive boring tasks."
He sees the bigger gains in quality of hire, with data-driven evidence helping recruiters explain to hiring managers why one candidate should be preferred over another. Automation will also let the team build talent pools from candidates who narrowly miss out.
"If we didn't consider these candidates in this process, we can automatically build them into next talent pool," Lau said. "Because we have those people in our database already for the future roles, we can have a faster time to fill efficiency and hopefully the quality of hire as well."
For HR leaders watching large employers such as Kmart roll out a 'blind' AI hiring tool that cuts time and costs, Lau's message is that scale and human judgement can coexist – provided recruiters stay firmly in control.
