What Is Interview Intelligence?

Interviews are an essential part of the hiring process. It’s a chance for candidates to demonstrate their skills, and it’s also one of your best opportunities to learn more about them as people. But there’s one thing that often gets lost in this process: the valuable data that could be gathered from the interviews to improve the hiring process.

Interview Intelligence is a concept recently coined that encompasses the use of technology such as Chatkick to enhance the interview and feedback experience by relying heavily on machine intelligence and software.

The goal of Interview Intelligence tools is to help improve quality of outcomes, reduce bias and enforce process by automatically identifying gaps and highlights within conversations. This technology is adjacent to similar sales and marketing technologies under the guise of Revenue Intelligence.

How Does Interview Intelligence Work?

Interview intelligence works by collecting data on applicants’ interviews and using it to improve future interviews. Are interviewers:

Asking the right questions?
Giving the interviewee enough time to talk?
Accurately rating candidates?

HR departments can correlate that data with new hire performance, candidate NPS, and tenure to highlight areas for improvement. The goal here is to figure out what is going well and what hasn’t been working so well to make changes that will result in better hires overall.

Tools like Chatkick automatically record interviews and help you track the data you want. Recruiters can also use one of Chatkick’s pre-built plan templates or customize their own to standardize the interview process, and share interview recordings with hiring stakeholders to increase alignment and reduce the need for extra interviews or steps.

What Kinds of Interviews Are Good for Interview Intelligence?

Structured interviews are easiest to get insights from because they are so standardized and straightforward.

A structured interview is a discussion in which an interviewer poses specific, prepared questions in order to the interviewee. Every question is designed around a competency model. This guarantees the interviewer gets the necessary holistic picture of a candidate’s characteristics and qualifications.

As you can imagine, after answering multiple questions based on multiple competencies, interviewers can more objectively tell whether or not a candidate has the potential to fulfill a role’s requirements. And interviewers are expected to keep track of what’s happening during the interview. Throughout the conversation, interviewers note interviewees’ responses and rate them according to an already-decided-upon scoring system.

Using this structured methodology ensures that: (1) each interviewee has as similar of an experience as possible, and (2) interviewers are evaluating candidates based on their true competencies, not just gut feelings.

Why Use Interview Intelligence?

Collecting and analyzing data across multiple candidates and hiring managers, you’ll get a clearer picture of how your interviews are really going and where you can streamline the interview process. Interview Intelligence also enables companies to:

Reduce bias in hiring by reducing reliance on gut instinct
Maintain consistency across interviewers
Improve the candidate experience
Refine job descriptions, competencies and structured interviews to hire the right kinds of people

Another added bonus: collecting this kind of information will allow you to provide better feedback for applicants post-interview. Giving them actionable insights into how they did may encourage them to apply to other open roles in the future.