The way that many businesses conduct interviews today is simply outdated, inefficient, and unfair. The problem is that the interviewing process has not been updated in decades and it still relies on interviewers to rely on their gut feelings and instincts to make the “right” hiring decisions. Unfortunately, this perpetuates the biases that these interviewing professionals have — even if they are unconscious biases.

One of the biggest struggles with the current (and previous) interviewing approaches that many businesses use is that there is no fully standardized and fair interview process that focuses on mitigating bias. But, in order to make the smartest and best hires, it is important to create an equal opportunity for all candidates and rely on unbiased, completely objective, and data-driven hiring decisions. To help companies make these objective hiring decisions, new interview software, called interview intelligence software was developed.

One leading interview intelligence platform is Pillar. Pillar helps businesses to bring in the best people by implementing interview intelligence to help with recruiting and hiring professionals to efficiently and equitably make hiring decisions. Adding intelligence to your interview process means making more well-informed and equitable decisions about which candidates to hire so that you can ensure that you are hiring the right talent — not based on a “gut feeling.” So, what exactly is interview intelligence? Interview intelligence is more than just knowing which interview questions to ask in an interview. It is the use of technology to record and transcribe interviews and then the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate highlight reels and surface the most qualified candidates so that your hiring teams can effectively and equally compare their answers and skills. In addition to these merit-based recommendations, interview intelligence provides guidance and coaching to help interviewers give consistent, high-quality interviews and candidate experiences as well.

Interviewing Techniques For Interviewers

One huge problem that many businesses are facing in today’s incredibly competitive job market is that their interviewers are not prepared to provide a great candidate experience or an effective and fair interview. This is because they have never been trained in how to do this. With interview intelligence, however, you can ensure that your interviewers are properly trained and have access to all of the resources that they need to ensure an equitable and objective interview that does not fall victim to interview bias or lack of preparation.

But, of course, simply adopting an interview intelligence system without putting in any effort will not be enough to ensure that your candidates are getting a fair, equal opportunity to impress you with their experiences and skills. Interviewers need to ensure that they are using the techniques and skills that they have developed to ensure an effective interview process. But what are these important interviewer techniques that recruiting professionals should be doing for each interview?

There are a number of best practices in interviewing and all interviewers should ensure that they are following this 4 part checklist for each interview in order to give candidates the most consistent and equitable interview experience. The first item on this checklist is to prepare for the interview. Review the candidate’s resume and know the questions you want to ask before you begin the interview — an interview is a two-way street. You are competing for their talent as much as they are competing for your open position. Next is to be punctual. If you expect your candidates to be on time then you also need to be on time.

The third is to make sure that you are answering the candidate’s questions. This means both being prepared for questions they may ask and following up with any groups after the interview to address any questions that you were unable to answer during the interview. And finally, you want to be sure that during the interview, the interviewer is assessing the candidate’s responses. There are many different ways to do this, but a scoring system, like the one Pillar uses, can be extremely useful in helping you to best assess a candidate’s performance. Additionally, this immediate feedback is a very effective way of reflecting on the candidate’s performance and skills before unconscious bias can begin affecting your decisions.

Video Interviewing Platform

Especially during and following the events of the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide lockdown that many countries have faced in the past few years, video interviewing has become more and more popular. Video interviews allow candidates and interviewers to still get the feeling of being in a traditional interview, without needing to physically be in the same location. This has the added benefit of making interviews more accessible to people who may already be working that are looking for a better opportunity or those who simply are not able to make it to a job location for an interview due to other circumstances.

But accessibility is not the only benefit of these types of interviews for businesses today. Businesses that implement interview intelligence can actually record these interviews and assess candidate qualifications using AI technology. This can help businesses to mitigate video interview bias and focus more on the video interview questions and answers. Interview intelligence can transcribe these questions and answers and easily highlight the most qualified candidates based on their answers. 

These AI-generated highlights take into account only the fact-based insights that come from the interview data, so they are an objective view of a candidate’s qualifications. This makes it a very effective video interview assessment tool that is completely objective and data-based so that you can feel confident that you are basing your hiring decisions on qualifications and skills rather than personal feelings or biases.