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Interview guide platforms – giving you the data you know you need
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If you had to pick just one step in talent acquisition as the most important one of all, which step would you choose?
I’d choose the interview. Not only is this where a final decision is made, but it’s also because interviewing is still a bit of a dark art.
But what about this next question: Where in talent acquisition is technology and data collection at its weakest? The answer is also likely to be interviewing.
The technology and data collection gap in interviewing is not new, and there’s now a whole host of vendors like Quintela, VidCruiter and Interviewstream all aiming to fill this gap by creating what’s known as “Interview Guide Platforms” (IGPs).
IGPs do a lot of things – including providing tools for everything from scheduling interviews, preparing interview questions, and integrating data from various assessments. However, what I’m most interested in is improving the quality of interviewing and gathering data about the interview itself.
Technology can help improve the quality of interviewing by ensuring the structured interviewing process genuinely follows the structure. If you’ve done a lot of structured interviewing, you’ll know it takes effort to keep things on track and some interviewers tend to meander away from the plan. As Joel Quintela, founder of Quintela Group says: “Training doesn’t always work as well as expected. It’s much more effective to help hiring managers and panels conduct better interviews and make better decisions in real time.”
IGPs can encourage structure either synchronously (that is, the traditional live interviews), or asynchronously (automated video interviews). With the synchronous approach, the tools allow interviewers to fire up their laptops and be walked through the structured process in a disciplined manner, giving them a place to enter their ratings and take notes. With the asynchronous approach candidates take a standard automated video interview where each candidate is asked the same questions in the same way.
Whichever approach is used, it adds more rigor to interviews which will improve the quality of the decision-making.
Interview Guide Platforms can also gather data on the interview such as
With this data the people analytics team can begin investigating:
Analyzing interview data might seem like a lot of work, but when you consider the importance of hiring decisions then there is a strong justification for doing this kind of data gathering and analysis.
When you look at sales functions, which have much in common with talent acquisition functions, you’ll find them using tools like Chorus.ai and Gong.ai to improve the quality of sales calls.
The talent acquisition team should be doing the same thing. In larger organizations, it’s useful to have a talent acquisition operations manager who can investigate the technology, processes, and data to continually improve the effectiveness of the function.
Interview Guide Platforms are an important part of your talent acquisition technology stack and if you don’t have one, then it’s time to start looking into what they can do for you.