Interview Maturity Curve: Hiring Teams

The Interview Maturity Curve for Hiring Teams has five stages, beginning with traditional interviews, moving up through a holistic interview lifecycle where you’ve officially mastered your hiring teams’ ability to hire based on real data, cut your time to hire, provide candidates with an exceptional experience, and remove bias from each and every interview. Our intention is to help you understand your organization's interview maturity today and the opportunities that lie ahead as you mature toward the final stage.

In this post, we'll look at the different stages of the Interview Maturity Curve and offer advice on how to master each level so you can continue to move up the curve until you've reached stage 5, "interview nirvana" as we like to call it!

Before diving into the post, if you haven't taken our Interview Maturity Curve Assessment for Hiring Teams, you may do so here. Looking for the assessment for Recruiting & Search firms instead? You'll find that here.
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Stage 1 - Traditional Interviews

When you’re at Stage 1, interviews are conducted in a more traditional manner. This means you have a fairly structured interview process, and you likely solicit interview feedback via written scorecards, or similar. This feedback can be slow to receive and often requires repeated nudges over several days. Concerns around the quality of this feedback and latency biases are real. These concerns naturally flow over into the final candidate selection process. Is the feedback reliable? Did interviewers forget details as time passed? Am I confident all the critical questions regarding the role were even asked?

For many organizations at Stage 1, the significant changes to the interview process needed in light of global events like, COVID/WFH, BLM, employee empowerment, etc. often haven’t happened.

Some advice for this stage: 

• Consider video recording interviews. By doing so, the interviewer is laser-focused on the candidate, and not on hastily taking notes while missing key parts of the conversation. It also means you have the “perfect” source of truth for both the candidate and the feedback. Both you and the interviewer can review clips to confirm/refresh memories.  
• Create an environment that fosters interview excellence by providing your interviewers with the tools they need to be great! This inevitably translates to a more positive candidate experience, which is crucial in competitive talent markets. For these reasons, and more, the better-skilled your interviewers are, the greater the likelihood of landing the right candidate.
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Stage 2 - Recorded Interviews

When you’re at Stage 2, you’ve begun video recording some interviews. That’s a huge step! The transparency it brings is already obvious. You’ve noticed how having the actual recording helps streamline the entire process. They help reduce redundancies in interviews and make each conversation more productive. And, because the Hiring Manager has access to all interviews, decisions they make are factually based on the entirety of the interview lifecycle, not solely on the single interview they personally conducted with the candidate. The benefits to recording are many (see blog post here!), but let’s dive into our advice for this stage:

• Consider sharing interview recordings. Sharing recordings with relevant members of the hiring team makes for more informed interviews. We’ve even had customers report having abbreviated their hiring cycle by dropping an interview or two, where appropriate. It also cuts out repeated questions, which allows for deeper investigation into a candidate’s background and skill set.  
• Since reviewing an entire 45-minute interview can be time-consuming, start creating short highlight clips of the most critical portions of the interview. They’re quicker to review and easier to share! 
• Because it’s now possible, commit to evaluating and selecting candidates based on facts, not gut feeling or delayed team feedback. Since interviews are recorded, you can review past candidates’ responses to refresh your memory, reinforce team feedback, and compare critical responses. Quite often, the most-liked candidates get hired, not the most qualified or most skilled.
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Stage 3 - Interview & Highlight Sharing

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When you’re at stage 3, the real magic begins! 🧙 You’ve long embraced the power of a deep and referenceable video library of candidates, and you’ve put it to work! You know that by creating and sharing brief highlight clips of the most critical portions of interviews, you’ve fostered a more informed and streamlined experience for both you and your candidates! The hires are more strategic and final selections are based on “live” candidate comparisons, not just interviewer memory.

Some advice for this stage: 

• If you have the ability, make sure interviewers are capturing candidate feedback in real time during each interview. The method of collection should be simple and unobtrusive to not distract your interviewer from the interview itself. By collecting this feedback in real-time, you’ll avoid issues with recency bias. You’re also less likely to select the candidate that’s simply the freshest in your team’s memory. 
• Standardize your interviews with question guides for each role. Determine what skills are most important for the role and then generate your questions to align. Unstructured interviews which lack defined questions are unreliable for predicting job success, which means you could be missing out on the most qualified candidates. It’s also not a great experience for the candidate.
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Stage 4 - In-App Scoring/Feedback

When you’re at stage 4, not only are you recording your interviews and using highlight clips to collaborate with your team on hiring decisions, but your interviewers are submitting real-time, in-interview feedback. You’ve put a stop to recency bias, and you’re empowering your interviewers to ask critical questions to ensure you’re growing your team with the best people possible. This is a stage that VERY few talent teams have reached today, so way to go! 👏

Some advice for this stage: 

• Now that you’re almost to the top of the maturity curve, it’s time to take everything you’ve learned throughout this journey and apply it across your interview processes. Once you’re at the peak, you’ve officially mastered your hiring teams’ ability to hire based on real data, cut your time to hire, provide candidates with an exceptional experience, and remove bias from each and every interview.   
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Stage 5 - Holistic Interview Lifecycle

When you’re at stage 5, you’ve reached interview nirvana! You’ve mastered all four stages of Pillar’s maturity curve, and you’ve earned the envy of talent teams across the world! At this point, you’ve taken all your learnings from the previous stages and applied them collectively across your interview process. Cheers to you! 🥂

At this point, we’re short on advice, so instead we’ll leave you with some inspiration: Great teams start with great interviews. You’re a pioneer in this standard-busting approach to winning the right talent, every time! 

Now go use that PTO you’ve been banking while building your organization’s phenomenal interview infrastructure!
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Conclusion

The interview process might seem daunting, whether you're a small business or a global enterprise. That's because interviewing is at the beginning of a major evolution. We're shifting from a playbook based entirely on traditional interviews to a post-COVID/WFH, post-BLM world where our old face-to-face hiring processes are now outdated and irrelevant

We hope that the Interview Maturity Curve helps you see that you're not alone on your journey. Even when it seems like some organizations have it all figured out, everyone starts small and learns as they grow. What's important is that you just get started, and that you understand what's possible as you grow.

We're still very early in the market's adoption of this new way of interviewing with interview intelligence. That means you still have an incredible opportunity to be ahead of the curve and the envy of talent teams across the world. So, why not start today?