How Interview Intelligence Software Improves Your Hiring
At Hireguide, we believe great companies are built from great hires — and your hires are only as good as your interviews. Not everyone is an interview expert, but with interview intelligence software, you don’t have to be.
So, what is interview intelligence? How can it improve interviewing and hiring, and how can you adopt it at your company? Here’s what every hiring professional needs to know.
Interview Intelligence at Hireguide
The Problem With Traditional Interviewing
Simply put, interviewing is so last century. Work cultures, candidates, and technology have changed rapidly over the past few decades. Interviewing and hiring practices, on the other hand, have not.
If you’ve ever been in charge of the process, you know the pain points we’re talking about: go-with-the-flow conversations, inconsistent questions, messy notes — and decisions based on fuzzy recall, unfair comparisons, gut feel, or likability. (“Oh yeah — Jane Jones was the candidate who went to my college! She’s hired. Go Tigers!”) The unconscious bias that drives these decisions compounds the problem. Competitive hires slip through the cracks, and the lack of workplace diversity has a ripple effect on morale and even financial productivity.
Outdated approaches are costly (to the tune of about $4,700 per hire) and time-consuming (42 days on average to fill a role). The kicker? The estimated cost of a poor-fit hire is about one-third of the role’s first-year salary (and substantially more for senior roles).
Now that we understand the problem, let’s talk about the solution: interview intelligence.
Interview Intelligence, Defined
Interview intelligence tools help you make fair, data-driven hiring decisions while streamlining your hiring process. Using advanced artificial intelligence, these tools capture and analyze evidence from candidate conversations, providing valuable insights to help you find the right hire for your team. These tools rely on the science of structured interviews: research-backed approaches to conducting successful interviews.
By applying a set of practices and techniques that involve consistent questioning and meaningful engagement, interview intelligence tools help identify best-fit candidates for a given job role. The benefits of interview intelligence include improved workplace diversity, increased employee satisfaction, and higher overall business performance.
How Interview Intelligence Improves Hiring
Interview intelligence software is purpose-built to provide immediate, long-term, and measurable benefits, including:
- Better-fit hires. With skills-based, science-backed questions, candidates can be assessed on meaningful qualifications and attributes that are better predictors of on-the-job performance..
- Reduced stress. There’s a lot riding on every hire — not just time and money, but the stress on hiring teams and coworkers involved in onboarding. When outcomes are more likely to be accurate, you can hire with confidence.
- Streamlined interviews. Interview intelligence platforms often have ready-made templates from major corporations. Features such as transcription save time and frustration on manual note taking, and make it easy to share candidate performance across teams.
- Reduced cost and time to hire. All that time saved? All that reduced stress? Modern interview software makes it easier, faster, and less expensive to fill a role.
- Happier candidates. With interviews that are organized, efficient, meaningful, and compliant, candidates can also focus on performing their best and finding the perfect fit for their skillset.
What to Look for in an Interview Intelligence Platform
For the best results, these are the interview intelligence platform features you should look for.
Automatic recording
The magic word: “automatic.” You won’t accidentally forget to record the conversation. These recordings act as both a safety net (proof of compliance, if needed) and a play-by-play to help you upskill your hiring managers or TA teams.
Automatic transcription
Human memory isn’t always reliable. Automatic transcription keeps unconscious bias in check so you make more accurate hires. Every conversation is captured verbatim so assessments are accurate, candidate comparisons are 1:1, and teams can easily review and decide based on facts — not games of memory and “telephone.” Plus, there’s no more manual note taking, allowing you to focus on the candidate in a way only a human can.
Interview templates
Chances are, you aren’t the first person to interview for a given role. Look for a platform with ready-to-use templates to interview like an expert. Instead of starting from scratch or wasting time searching online, you can start interviewing in minutes with evidence-based, compliant questions. Hireguide, for example, offers dozens of job titles from the world’s most competitive companies (think Google, Accenture, Sony, and Deloitte).
Structured interview builder
Your chosen platform should have the option to customize your interview outline or even build one from scratch. Look for features such as the ability to select desired skills, tweak wording, and swap out questions. Keep in mind that not all question banks are created equally. If you’re committed to reducing bias as well as finding the best-fit hires the first time (which is what we all want!), look for an I/O psych-certified question bank. This will offer science-backed questions that are shown to result in better-fit hires.
Every hiring manager and TA team can benefit from an interview intelligence platform to make the process easier, faster, and fairer. Whether you choose Hireguide or another platform, interview intelligence software will not only change your hiring game, but it will also change businesses for the better through more transparent, unbiased hiring.
