Barb Hyman

Barb Hyman is CEO of Sapia.ai, a company in Melbourne, Australia, that makes AI interviewing software for high-volume hiring. She took over the business, then called Predictive Hire, in 2018. Sapia.ai's customers include Qantas, Woolworths, Bunnings, and Costa Coffee.

Law, consulting, and HR

Hyman grew up in a small town in Zimbabwe, where her family ran the general store, and moved to Perth, Western Australia, as a child. She studied law in Melbourne and worked as a solicitor before winning a Rupert Murdoch Fellowship to study for an MBA. “As a lawyer you execute someone else's ideas,” she told HC Magazine. “I had ideas; I wanted to be heard.”

She went on to Boston Consulting Group, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and REA Group, where she ran HR for about 1,500 people as chief people officer.

Starting over

Hyman joined Predictive Hire to scale it and soon found that the product did not work and the company had six weeks of money left. She let the whole team go, including the founder, and rebuilt the product, she said on the SaaS Club podcast. Qantas became the first large customer after 15 pilots over several years.

She has written that she was an unlikely person to run an AI company. “I am a former CHRO, I am female, I am neither an engineer nor a data scientist,” she wrote for RecruitingDaily.