A new crop of so-called ‘interview intelligence’ tools have recently sprang up to help employers and hiring managers improve they way they interview candidates.

They promise to do that by recording the interview via audio/video and analyzing the results giving hiring professionals hard data about the questions being asked, time to interview and a host of other data points.

Honeit is perhaps the most well known of these tools which has been around for a number of years now. They have a solid user base of recruiters using it to record phone screens and share that audio with hiring managers. But a new crop of competitors want a pice of the interview platform market. They include startups Metaview, BrightHire and Luma.

Here’s a look at each tool and what they offer.

Luma

Luma is a sidekick for your interview team. Self-described on their website as an “Invaluable tool for coaching, developing, and supporting our newer interviewers on the team,” Luma not only captures and transcribes the phone and video interviews your recruiting and interview teams have, it also provides personalized interview coaching. Luma integrates with a number of applicant tracking systems and Zoom, making it a simple addition to your already-existing workflow.

Before an interview, Luma sends each interviewer a prep email with highlights of core competencies and an overview of what other interviewers have already covered. During the interview, Luma captures and transcribes everything, so you can watch it back, search for keywords, and send video and text clips to HR, other panelists, or, the hiring manager. While interviewing, Luma has your list of interview questions on the screen, so your interviewers are prepared, and they’re asking each candidate the same questions, which allows you to focus on the candidate. Selection team members receive automatically curated highlights from interviews.

Finally, Luma helps you make a decision on reality, instead of opinions. You use facts, not your gut or hazy memory to make a decision. It also offers interview coaching intelligence for teams, to make sure each interview is better than the last. Customers are seeing results. One customer reported they were saving 10 hours per recruiter every week, which gives teams more time to engage with candidates. Another customer reported 50% fewer candidates were needed to fill a role. Other have reported doubled candidate acceptance rates, and slicing time-to-fill numbers.

*Luma breaks down things like time spent speaking.*

Brighthire

BrightHire is an interview platform used to scale teams. They make it easy for everyone to run great interviews, and place evidence at the heart of every decision, for a better, faster and more equitable approach to hiring. BrightHire prompts interviewers to address specific topics to ensure all requisite ground is covered--and not covered repeatedly by different people.

It also creates recordings of conversations with candidates that can be searched and analyzed, which allows interviewers to check their own initial impressions and to present colleagues with backup for their opinions, instead of relying on a piece of paper with scribbled notes that could have been taken weeks ago. The software enables companies to enforce standards in the actual interview by looking at how much the interviewer talks vs. the candidate, ho long is the interview’s longest monologue, and are the interviewers all saying the same information about compensation, or culture? BrightHire customers can also monitor progress towards diversity goals, in one example, by looking at the average talk ratio with male vs. female candidates. What topics come up most when speaking with white candidate vs. candidates of color?

After interviews, BrightHire automatically sends interviewers coaching recommendations to scale interviewer excellence and provides personalized feedback on how they’re running their interviews. After an interview, the interviewer is prompted to automatically enter feedback – no more feedback chasing for the recruiter or hiring manager! Finally, BrightHire reports that Recruiters that run 5+ screens per day save one hour every day using BrightHire.

Honeit

Described as a “recruiting game-changer” on their website, Honeit makes the interviewing process easier from the beginning; you add a Honit scheduling link anywhere in your workflow, which automates your scheduling. The system sends invitations and reminders to everyone involved in the process, from calendar invites to text messages, to reminders. “Phone interviews went from a chore to a pleasure,” says a customer review on their website, and that seems accurate, as Honit automatically records, transcribes, indexes, and stores your phone calls securely in the cloud. The cloud can be a scary space for HR and Legal teams, but Honeit was designed with GDPR, dual-consent, and California laws in mind.

Next, instead of typing summaries after your calls, Honeit creates candidate previews, which you can share via Slack, email, or within your applicant tracking system. Key skills and moments are tagged during your calls, and they’re searchable, so you’re able to pull up candidate responses with ease. One of the cooler and very HR-relevant features of Honeit is the “bias button,” which you click to remove names, photos, and more, to share “blind” candidate previews to hiring managers, which mitigates the chance of bias in your interviewing process. Finally, when your interview is over, you can share highlights of the interview, by selecting 2-3 great answers you heard, attach the resume, LinkedIn profile, and creating a shared link. That shared link is trackable – who viewed it, how many times, and when. This is a great way to hold hiring managers accountable.

Image of Honeit’s Candidate Profile with Audio

Metaview

Metaview is a great option for teams looking to really dig deep into metrics to improve and better understand their interviews. Metaview automatically records and transcribes your interviews on the platforms you’re already using. These recordings help teams discuss, collaborate, and make hiring decisions based on facts; not on feelings, hastily written notes, and foggy memories. After an interview, Metaview delivers personalized interviewer feedback. For example, an interviewer may receive a message like, “You asked a great question, but missed an opportunity to follow-up. A good follow-up question would have been What specifically were you responsible for in this situation?” Your interview teams are immediately, and automatically, coached to make the next interview even better.

Metaview boasts the options to pull a variety of interesting metrics that can actually help teams. The system will generate data like, percent of time an interviewer spoke versus the candidate, how many follow-up questions were asked, the most consistent interviewer on a team, interview quality, which teams are making the most conversions from candidate to employee, and more. This personalized, contextual feedback will make your hiring teams confident, smarter interviewers, and overall, will provide a better candidate experience. When your team comes prepared, the company looks prepared, and it shows they respect the candidate’s time. “Metaview essentially puts interviewer training on auto-pilot,” reports one Metaview customer.

Before an interviewer’s next interview, Metaview will remind them of the coaching received from previous interviews. One Metaview customer achieved a 100% engagement rate with Metaview’s personalized interviewer training.

I reached out to Metaview’s CEO Siadhal Magos to as him a few questions about their tool.

How do interview intelligence tools like Metaview help change the way companies interview?

Interview Intelligence tools like Metaview change the way companies interview by analysing what actually happens in them. Metaview transcribes and analyses audio, to bring fresh data insights to those that are intent on interviewing amazingly well. Unlike traditional methods of improving interviews, Metaview then provides interviewers and Talent Leaders with personalised insights and tips on how to improve.

Whats the best piece of feedback a customer ever said to you about your tool that became an "a-ha" moment for them?

There are two consistent magic moments that our customers almost always experience. Initially, it is the first time they make use of the seamless recording and transcription to come to a different — and more informed — decision on a candidate. The shift from guess-work to evidence-based hiring is palpable in that moment.

The second magic moment is when experienced interviewers themselves — who are often also senior operators within the business — champion the quality of the insights and feedback they are receiving through the tool. They often comment on how actionable and personal the feedback is, and this delights the Talent Leadership because they know they are finally having a tangible effect on interview quality.

interviewIA

interviewIA fills a need to help all interviewers deliver a consistent, non-biased experience driven by structure and real-time analytics to hire a diverse, qualified workforce. interviewIA's founding team established and validated this unique methodology while working together over the last several years on the front lines of innovative talent strategies. Three years ago they built the first version of this interview platform and began to iterate on the value that this could bring to the market.

Will these new tools take off? Remains to be seen. Honeit’s solution appears to be the most practical approach, at least for now. Adding analysis to the interview process is a relatively new idea. Ultimately, employers will decide to embrace it or not.