We’re thrilled to announce that Talvin AI has been named a winner of the prestigious Vapi Build Challenge 2025, a global voice AI hackathon that attracted over 300 submissions from developers worldwide. Our winning entry? The newly released Job Tryouts feature that’s revolutionizing how companies assess candidates for customer-facing roles.
What makes this win particularly special is that our team conceptualized, built, and refined this feature in just two weeks—a testament to both our team’s dedication and the powerful capabilities of Vapi’s voice AI platform.
But this story isn’t just about winning a hackathon. It’s about our obsession with solving one of the most persistent problems in hiring, and how voice AI is finally making it possible.
The Problem We’re Obsessed With Solving
If you’ve been following Talvin AI’s journey, you know we’re on a mission to transform hiring from a process plagued by bias and inefficiency into one that truly identifies the best talent for each role.
Traditional hiring methods are fundamentally flawed. Resumes tell you about a candidate’s past, not their potential. Standard interviews reward confidence and preparation more than actual capability. And when it comes to customer-facing roles, these limitations become even more problematic.
How do you know if someone can handle an angry customer? Defuse a tense situation? Think on their feet when faced with an unexpected question?
You can’t—at least not reliably—using traditional methods.
This challenge has become our team’s obsession. We’ve spent countless hours analyzing where hiring breaks down, speaking with frustrated HR leaders, and hearing stories from candidates who felt their true abilities were never properly assessed.
When we learned about the Vapi Build Challenge, we immediately saw an opportunity to tackle this problem in a new way, leveraging the power of voice AI to create realistic job simulations that reveal how candidates would actually perform in role-specific scenarios.
The Hackathon Challenge
The Vapi Build Challenge posed a compelling question to developers: “What happens when you give hundreds of developers a production-grade voice platform?” With $20K in prizes and the chance to showcase innovation in voice AI, the competition attracted submissions across various industries and use cases.
Our team was particularly excited by the challenge because it aligned perfectly with our mission. We’ve always believed that voice is the most natural and revealing form of human communication—far more insightful than text-based assessments or even video interviews.
The hackathon’s format—emphasizing real-world applications that solve specific, high-friction problems—pushed us to focus on creating something that companies could implement immediately to improve their hiring outcomes.
With the challenge parameters set, we assembled a small but mighty team of engineers, UX designers, and recruitment experts to bring Job Tryouts to life in just 14 days.
Building Job Tryouts in Just Two Weeks
When we tell people we built Job Tryouts in two weeks, the reaction is usually disbelief. But constraints often breed creativity, and our team thrives under pressure.
Here’s how we did it:
Days 1-2: Concept and Planning: We started with an intensive brainstorming session, mapping out the core functionality and user experience. Our product team conducted rapid interviews with HR leaders to validate our approach and refine our focus.
Days 3-7: Core Development: With our concept solidified, our engineering team began building the foundation of Job Tryouts, leveraging Vapi’s voice AI SDK to create realistic conversational scenarios. We focused on creating a flexible framework that could simulate different types of customer interactions.
Days 8-10: Scenario Development: Our content team developed a library of realistic customer service scenarios, each designed to test specific skills like problem-solving, empathy, and communication under pressure. These scenarios were refined through multiple iterations based on feedback from industry experts.
Days 11-13: Testing and Refinement: We conducted intensive testing, identifying and fixing bugs, optimizing performance, and refining the user experience. Our team worked around the clock, fueled by a shared belief in the potential impact of what we were building.
Day 14: Final Submission After a final round of quality assurance and video recordings, we submitted our entry to the Vapi Build Challenge—exhausted but excited about what we’d accomplished.
The rapid development timeline forced us to focus on what truly mattered: creating a tool that would give hiring managers unprecedented insight into how candidates would actually perform in customer-facing roles.
How Vapi AI Enabled Our Success
None of this would have been possible without Vapi’s powerful voice AI platform. As we’ve discussed in our previous blog on “How does an AI Interview Work?”, the quality and capabilities of the underlying voice technology are critical to creating authentic assessment experiences.
Vapi’s platform provided several key advantages that were crucial to our development process:
- Production-Ready Voice Infrastructure: Vapi’s robust voice processing capabilities allowed us to focus on building our application logic rather than worrying about the underlying voice technology.
- Natural Language Understanding: The platform’s advanced NLU capabilities enabled our simulations to understand and respond to a wide range of candidate responses, creating truly interactive scenarios.
- Voice Analysis Tools: Vapi’s voice analysis features helped us extract meaningful insights from candidate responses, including tone, pace, and other paralinguistic features that reveal how candidates communicate under pressure.
- Scalable Architecture: The platform’s scalability ensured that our solution could handle multiple simultaneous assessments without performance degradation.
- Rapid Integration: Vapi’s well-documented APIs and SDKs allowed for quick integration with our existing Talvin AI platform, saving precious development time.
As our team put it: “Building Job Tryouts without Vapi would have taken months, not days. Their platform gave us enterprise-grade voice capabilities out of the box, allowing us to focus on creating value for our users rather than reinventing the wheel.”
Introducing Job Tryouts
So what exactly is the feature that won the hackathon? Job Tryouts are virtual job simulations that let candidates experience real customer interactions and automatically evaluate how they respond—giving hiring managers clear, contextual insights into their people skills before making a hiring decision.
Here’s how it works:
- Scenario Selection: Hiring managers select from a library of industry-specific scenarios or create custom scenarios that reflect their company’s unique challenges.
- Candidate Invitation: Candidates receive an invitation to complete a Job Tryout on their own time, from any place.
- Interactive Simulation: Candidates engage in realistic voice conversations with AI-powered virtual customers, handling questions, complaints, and unexpected situations.
- Automated Assessment: Our AI analyzes not just what candidates say, but how they say it—evaluating factors like empathy, problem-solving, adaptability, and communication clarity.
- Comprehensive Insights: Hiring managers receive detailed reports highlighting each candidate’s strengths and areas for development, with specific examples from the simulation.
Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. One beta tester, a hiring manager at a fast-growing SaaS company, told us: “After using Job Tryouts with our last cohort of customer success candidates, we saw a 40% improvement in new hire performance during their first 90 days. We’re finally hiring based on actual capabilities, not just interview skills.”
Job Tryouts integrates seamlessly with our existing AI recruitment platform, complementing our voice interview technology to provide a comprehensive assessment solution.
What This Means for Hiring in the AI Age
Our hackathon win represents more than just recognition for Talvin AI—it signals a fundamental shift in how companies will assess talent in the AI age.
As we’ve seen in our customer success stories, organizations that embrace AI-powered assessment tools gain a significant competitive advantage in the talent market. They make better hiring decisions, reduce time-to-hire, and create more equitable assessment processes.
Job Tryouts takes this to the next level by focusing on what matters most: how candidates will actually perform in specific job scenarios. It’s not about where they went to school or where they’ve worked—it’s about what they can do.
This approach aligns perfectly with our broader AI recruitment philosophy: using technology not to replace human judgment, but to enhance it by providing deeper, more relevant insights.
As voice AI continues to evolve, we expect to see even more innovative applications in the recruitment space. The ability to analyze natural conversations opens up new possibilities for understanding candidates’ true capabilities in ways that traditional assessments simply cannot match.
What’s Next for Talvin AI
Winning the Vapi Build Challenge is just the beginning. We’re already working on expanding Job Tryouts to cover more roles and industries, developing new scenarios based on feedback from our early adopters.
We’re also exploring ways to further personalize the experience, allowing companies to create simulations that perfectly match their unique customer interactions and company culture.
If you’re struggling with assessing candidates for customer-facing roles, we invite you to experience Job Tryouts for yourself. See firsthand how this innovative approach can transform your hiring process and help you build stronger, more capable teams.
Our obsession with solving hiring problems isn’t going away. If anything, this hackathon win has energized our team to push even further, finding new ways to make hiring more efficient, effective, and fair for everyone involved.
Thank you to Vapi for hosting this incredible challenge and providing the technology that made our innovation possible. And thank you to our users and supporters who continue to inspire us with their feedback and ideas.
The future of hiring is here—and it sounds a lot like a natural conversation.
Ready to revolutionize your hiring process with Job Tryouts? Book a demo today and see how our award-winning feature can help you identify top talent for your customer-facing roles.
