Although one of the most crucial parts of the hiring process, interviews are typically a black box. Hiring teams can align on skills to test and questions to ask, but there’s little insight into what actually goes on when interviewers and candidates get into a room together, be it in-person or virtually. And debriefs and scorecards can only reveal so much. All of this poses challenges for hiring managers trying to make informed, fair decisions about who should join their team.
Interview Intelligence is the best way to break through this opaque process. With the ability to record, transcribe, and analyze interviews, hiring managers can gain deeper insight into these signal-rich conversations and leverage the data to make sure an interview process is consistent, fair, fast, and most importantly—high quality.
When it comes to late-stage interviews—the ones where you are assessing candidates’ technical chops or digging into the details of how they demonstrated impact in previous roles—Interview Intelligence is especially powerful. This is where critical insights emerge on candidate and interview quality and where technology can most effectively complement the human aspect of hiring.
But hiring managers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from pulling back the curtain on later rounds of the interview process. There’s also immense value that can be unlocked by recruiters, too.
Improve recruiters’ ability to calibrate and deliver a great candidate experience
Though a recruiter’s role in actually interviewing a candidate typically ends after initial screening calls, they continue to be a candidate’s main point-of-contact with your organization and a guide throughout the end-to-end experience. And each candidate that passes through the process for a particular role, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, is an opportunity for recruiters to gain more data points about what hiring managers are looking for in a successful candidate.
More efficient and precise calibration
When given a window into later-stage interviews, recruiters can reference real-world interactions between interviewers and candidates to calibrate on what good looks like much more quickly. Knowing what key qualities and skills actually look like in practice, recruiters can use this insight to improve early-stage screening and avoid frustrating disqualification of candidates late in the game.
Júlia Esteban Edo, Recruiting Lead at Metaview, says that access to recordings of interviews can be a game-changer for technical interviews:
“When you review a recording of a technical interview, you can see where it may become apparent that a candidate lacks necessary problem-solving abilities. It’s easy for a recruiter to then translate that into screening questions that test for the same skill earlier on.”
The same principle applies to non-technical testing, too. It allows recruiters to better grasp how hiring managers define amorphous concepts like “drive” and “impact". For example, in values interviews Júlia takes note of the questions interviewers ask that often reveal information that ultimately influences hiring decisions. She then makes sure to implement these as screening questions earlier in the process.
Bob Snellenburg, Senior Tech Recruiter at Catawiki, also leverages Metaview to better analyze the nuances of how interviewers approach the role they’re hiring for. He says, “Metaview helps me to understand a role as the interviewer sees it: How do they talk about the role? How do they sell it? What types of questions do they ask?” This insight allows him to see how a role is evaluated in practice and where there might be room for constructive feedback.
Identify areas for process improvement
By enabling a big-picture view of how a hiring process is unfolding, Interview Intelligence can also help recruiters uncover inconsistencies and opportunities for process-level improvements. For example, after reviewing interviews captured by Metaview, Bob identified that there was an opportunity to optimize the level of “fact-based” hiring amongst interviewers at Catawiki to ensure that feedback was rooted in empirical evidence rather than gut-feel.
As a result, the recruitment team worked with hiring managers to develop a scorecard system that empowered teams to consistently evaluate candidates against a set of defined attributes. Without Interview Intelligence, this level of insight could only have been gleaned by physically attending interviews, which is not only time-consuming but also has the potential to degrade the candidate experience.
Helpful and authentic candidate relationships
Another, perhaps less obvious, benefit of recruiters having visibility into all stages of the interview process is that it can improve the helpfulness and authenticity of the recruiter-candidate relationship. For example, it can facilitate higher-quality candidate prep. Júlia says, “If you can watch recordings of interviews, you can prep candidates much better, which is key to what leads to success at the end of the day. It’s very different if you’re repeating what someone else told you is going to happen in an interview versus seeing what actually happens for yourself.”
And when it comes time to relay hiring decisions, visibility into advanced stages of the process can equip recruiters with the necessary context to give candidates honest and genuine feedback about what led to a particular decision. Overall, recruiters’ increased understanding of what’s going on throughout the interview process can authentically preserve the essential human element of hiring.
Interview Intelligence drives value for everyone on a hiring team
While deeper visibility into later-stage interviews may seem like a no-brainer for interviewers and hiring managers, don’t overlook the strategic benefit it can have for recruiters, too. Recruiters can leverage insights to inform up-front screening that quickly identifies candidates with the best chance of success and also enables a birds-eye view that can uncover opportunities for step-change process improvements. The result? Increased efficiency, happier candidates, and more high-quality hires.
