SageScreen vs ModernHire

What Happened to Modern Hire (And What It Means for AI Screening)

If you’re reading this because you searched for “Modern Hire,” here’s the short version: Modern Hire no longer exists as an independent company. HireVue acquired them in May 2023. The modernhire.com domain now redirects to HireVue’s website. The brand, the team, and the products were absorbed into an enterprise platform with a very different set of priorities.

But this isn’t just a business transaction worth noting. The Modern Hire story is a cautionary tale about what happens when science-first hiring technology gets swallowed by a scale-first platform. It’s the pattern that keeps repeating in HR tech, and it’s the exact pattern that SageScreen was built to avoid.

The Timeline

What Modern Hire Actually Built

To understand what was lost, you have to understand what Modern Hire was at its peak. This wasn’t a video interviewing company that slapped “AI” onto its marketing. This was a research-driven organization with 50 Ph.D. industrial-organizational psychologists and data scientists who published in peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Applied Psychology and the International Journal of Selection and Assessment.

Their CognitIOn engine wasn’t a marketing name for a prompt wrapper. It was a branded methodology that combined two decades of research in talent selection science, predictive analytics, and ethical AI. Their Automated Interview Scoring system used NLP and deep learning to replicate the judgment of professionally trained interviewers, and they presented validation data at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology showing 89% reliability — nearly half again better than the 60% industry standard.

Their Virtual Job Tryout wasn’t a quiz. It was a simulation-based assessment where candidates experienced realistic scenarios from the actual job, producing work samples that predicted both on-the-job performance and retention. Walmart won a SIOP/SHRM Impact Award for their implementation of it — a custom pre-hire assessment that was developed, validated, and continually recalibrated using rigorous selection science. Their research was published in peer-reviewed journals and helped grow the company from 60 customers to over 400 during the PE ownership period.

Most importantly, Modern Hire championed what they called the “glass-box approach” to AI in hiring: full transparency about what was being measured and how scores were generated. At a time when HireVue was facing FTC complaints over facial analysis and micro-expression scoring, Modern Hire was publishing consent language research and drawing explicit ethical lines about what AI should and shouldn’t evaluate.

The Irony of the Acquisition

In 2019, HireVue was the subject of an EPIC complaint to the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the company’s facial analysis AI caused harm to workers through biometric data collection and bias against different genders, races, and neurological differences. In 2023, a Massachusetts resident sued CVS Health over their use of HireVue’s software to generate “employability scores” based partly on traits like “conscientiousness” and “innate sense of integrity and honor.” The lawsuit settled out of court in 2024.

During this exact period, Modern Hire was publicly differentiating itself on the opposite approach. Their EVP of Innovation, Eric Sydell, told Protocol in 2022: “We only score by the way the words people say that are transcribed, not the way they sound or the way they look. That is a hard line that we draw and have always drawn.”

Then HireVue bought them. The company that scored faces absorbed the company that explicitly refused to. Both parties framed it as complementary. Forrester analysts called it a consolidation of ethical AI practices. HireVue’s FAQ page promised to “continue to sell and support all existing products while we work to seamlessly integrate the product suite.”

Today, modernhire.com is a HireVue landing page. The CognitIOn brand appears nowhere on HireVue’s main website outside of a few legacy blog posts. The 50-person science team was “folded in.” The glass-box methodology is indistinguishable from HireVue’s broader “ethical AI” marketing, which now includes game-based assessments and the same video interviewing infrastructure that drew regulatory scrutiny in the first place.

The Consolidation Pattern

Science-first company builds something rigorous. Private equity grows it. Larger platform acquires it. Science team gets absorbed. Product identity disappears. What remains is features on someone else’s feature list.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

Modern Hire isn’t an isolated case. It’s a recurring pattern in hiring technology:

A company with deep domain expertise builds technology grounded in real science. It gains traction because its approach is genuinely better — validated, transparent, defensible. Private equity notices the revenue trajectory and acquires or invests. The company scales quickly. Then a larger platform, looking to fill gaps in its own product suite, acquires it. The science team gets distributed across the larger org. The product becomes a feature. The original thesis — that hiring decisions deserve rigorous, validated, purpose-built tools — gets diluted into a line item on a capabilities slide.

HireVue acquired AllyO (AI chatbot) in 2020. Modern Hire in 2023. Each acquisition was framed as “expanding our science-backed approach.” Each resulted in the acquired company losing its distinct identity. The pattern isn’t malicious. It’s structural. Scale-first platforms need features. Science-first companies produce features. The acquisition fills a product gap. But something important is lost in the process.

What’s lost is the conviction. The willingness to draw hard lines about what AI should and shouldn’t do in hiring. The scientific team that says “we only score what candidates consciously provide” stops being the voice of the product and becomes an internal advisory function within a platform that also scores video, runs game-based assessments, and generates employability rankings. Industry analyst Josh Bersin noted that Modern Hire was working on “interview intelligence” — a fundamentally different pursuit than video interviewing at scale. That distinction no longer has a home.

Why This Matters If You’re Shopping for AI Screening

If you’re evaluating AI screening tools right now, the Modern Hire story should change the questions you ask. Not just “what does this tool do?” but “what happens to this tool in three years?”

What Modern Hire Got Right (And What SageScreen Learned)

We should be clear: Modern Hire got a lot of things right. Many of their convictions are ones we share. This article is not an attack on their work. It’s an argument that the work deserved to survive on its own terms.

Where SageScreen Goes Further

Modern Hire was good. They were ahead of their time on many fronts. But even at their peak, there were structural limitations that SageScreen’s architecture was specifically designed to solve.

The Structural Difference

Modern Hire’s science was impressive. But it lived inside a traditional enterprise sales model: long implementation cycles, custom-quoted contracts, sales-gated access, and a PE ownership structure designed for exit. The science was real. The business model made it acquirable.

SageScreen is built differently by design. Credit-based pricing with no minimums means a ten-person company pays the same per-interview rate as a ten-thousand-person company. The Sage model — reusable AI interviewers configured once and deployed unlimited times — means customers invest in setup, not perpetual licensing. And the company is self-funded with no PE involvement and no exit timeline.

This isn’t about being small. It’s about being structurally resistant to the pattern that consumed Modern Hire. When there’s no venture capital to return and no exit horizon to hit, product decisions get made for product reasons. Features get built because they make screening better, not because they make a capabilities slide longer. Ethical lines stay where you drew them because nobody’s boardroom pressure can move them.

What SageScreen Would Tell Former Modern Hire Customers

If you used Modern Hire and you’re now on HireVue’s platform by default, you already know what changed. You probably have access to more features than you did before. Your account manager may have changed. The product roadmap is no longer being set by the people who built the tool you originally bought.

If you’re evaluating alternatives, here’s what we’d want you to know:

SageScreen shares Modern Hire’s core conviction that AI in hiring should be transparent, evidence-based, and grounded in what candidates actually say — not how they look, sound, or perform under surveillance. We took that conviction and built it into the architecture itself, not just the marketing. The multi-agent pipeline design, the evaluation isolation, the dynamic question generation, the anti-cheat approach that leads with architecture over surveillance — all of it exists because the principles demanded the engineering, not the other way around.

We’re also built for a different buyer. Modern Hire sold to Fortune 100 enterprises with six-figure contracts and multi-month implementations. SageScreen is designed for companies of any size: buy credits, configure a Sage, start screening. No sales calls required. No minimum commitments. No contracts that bind you to a platform whose priorities might change when the next acquisition happens. And when candidates arrive, they know exactly what they’re walking into — a transparent AI interview that respects their time and tells them the truth about how they’re being evaluated.

The Lesson

Modern Hire proved that there is a market for science-first, ethics-first AI screening. They proved that rigorous I/O psychology research translates into real product innovation. They proved that transparency sells. They proved that hiring managers want to see how the AI reached its conclusions, not just what it concluded.

They also proved that none of that matters if the business model allows the product to be absorbed by a platform with different priorities.

SageScreen exists because we watched this pattern repeat. Not just with Modern Hire, but across HR tech. Good science, built into good products, sold to good customers, consumed by larger platforms chasing scale. Every time it happens, the market loses a voice for rigor and gains another line item on an enterprise feature matrix.

We don’t think the next generation of AI screening should be built inside legacy video platforms that grew by acquisition. We think it should be built from the ground up with modern AI architecture, transparent evaluation, and a business model that doesn’t have a built-in self-destruct sequence.

That’s what we built. Come see how it works.