The insight
The best predictor of selling is selling.
Interviews are a performance. Reps rehearse stories, smooth out edges, and say what hiring managers want to hear. That tells you who interviews well. It does not tell you who can sell.
The hiring interview is a performance. Rehearsed stories, polished answers, practiced handshakes. The candidate who “crushed the interview” was good at interviewing. Whether they can sell your product to a skeptical VP with a competing vendor and a shrinking budget? That’s a different question entirely — and one the interview never answers.
Study after study confirms it: unstructured interviews predict job performance at roughly the same rate as a coin flip. Yet every company still makes six-figure hiring decisions based on 45 minutes of small talk and a gut feeling.
The fix was obvious: don’t ask candidates if they can sell. Make them sell. But you can’t put every candidate in front of a real customer — you’d burn pipeline and relationships. You’d need an AI that behaves like a real buyer, with real objections, real resistance, real decision-making patterns.
So that’s what we built. Miki creates the AI version of your customer — not a generic chatbot, but a buyer with your ICP’s pain points, your competitive landscape, your objections. Candidates sell to it in chat, on the phone, or face to face via video. You see who can discover needs, handle objections, control conversations, and close — before you spend $250K finding out the hard way.