Interview Maturity Curve: Recruiting & Search

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The Interview Maturity Curve for Recruiting & Search has four stages, beginning with traditional interviews, moving up through a holistic interview lifecycle where you’ve officially mastered your teams' ability to maximize recruiter efficiency, speed up candidate placements, and accelerate revenue growth. 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 four, "interview nirvana" as we like to call it!

Before diving into the post, if you haven't taken our Interview Maturity Curve Assessment for Recruiting & Search, you may do so here. Looking for the assessment for Hiring Teams instead? You can find that one 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 taking great notes is a priority in order to craft strong candidate briefs for clients. When the notes are good, the briefs both reflect well on your candidate and plant seeds that inform your client’s selection process. However, at this stage, there are often concerns around the quality of those notes.  “Did I miss anything?” “Am I remembering that right?” Even, “I don’t remember what some of my own notes mean!”  

Are you relying on your memory for candidate briefs versus what the candidate actually said? Are you missing critical nuggets while taking notes?

Some advice for this stage: 

• Consider video recording interviews. By doing so, recruiters are laser focused on the candidate and not on taking notes. It also means you have the “perfect” source of truth for the candidate, and you can review clips to confirm/refresh your memory. 
• Create an environment that fosters interview excellence by providing your recruiters 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 recruiters are, the greater the likelihood of landing the right candidates for your clients and strengthening your client relationships. 
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Stage 2 - Recorded & Transcribed Interviews

When you’re at Stage 2, you’ve begun video recording and auto-transcribing some interviews in real-time. 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. On top of that, the transcription makes writing candidate briefs significantly more efficient, and you no longer have to spend the entire interview taking notes. 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 your clients makes for more informed interviews. We’ve even had customers report that they’re saving their clients time because they don’t need to repeat the initial interview and can watch it instead. 
• 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 with your clients!
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Stage 3 - Interview & Highlight Sharing‍

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! Because of your ability to create and share highlight clips with your clients, you’ve been able to abbreviate or even retire candidate write-ups completely. You’ve also been able to place candidates faster by eliminating unnecessary interviews. This is a stage that VERY few recruiting & search firms 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 providing a better experience to your candidates and clients and you’re saving your recruiters 5-10 hours per week by eliminating the need for candidate write-up’s.

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Stage 4 - Holistic Interview Lifecycle

When you’re at stage 4, you’ve reached interview nirvana! You’ve mastered all three stages of Pillar’s maturity curve, and you’ve earned the envy of recruiting & search firms 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 submitting the right talent to your clients, every time! 

Now go use that PTO you’ve banked while you built a phenomenal interview infrastructure. It’s helping you maximize recruiter efficiency, speed up candidate placements, and accelerate revenue growth!

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Conclusion

The interview process might seem daunting. 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 recruiting & search firms across the world. So, why not start today?