Pillar Wants to Solve Your Interview Problems

There’s a new HR tech player in town and its name is Pillar.hr….Pillar is all about the interview process and interviewer coaching which they say is key to providing better candidate experiences & increasing acceptance rates. Joining me on this episode is their CEO and Founder Mark Simpson.

Pillar is offering a limited number of free trials to Rec Tech listeners. If your organization is interested, schedule a demo at pillar.hr/rectech.

Q&A

How's the relaunch going and tell us with the response has been from clients, and prospects?

Yeah. We've had a fantastic response, actually. Obviously, this has been a long time in the making, we've been building this technology for the past 18 months or so. Internally, there's a mixture of excitement and relief, that we're public and launched. And excellently, we just had great reception. Our customers have really appreciated the new branding and the positioning. We're getting a lot of incoming interest, based around the launch. Things couldn't have gone better. I have a very good team to thank for that.

Why is Pillar a necessary tool for hiring teams, in your opinion?

Here at Pillar, we believe people are the most important part of a business and hiring the best people will grow the best companies. We've spent the last, as I say, 18 months building an interview intelligence platform that's solely focused around hiring faster, hiring better and hiring more equitably.

For those who haven't seen us yet, we record and transcribe interviews. And then, we layer on intelligence to create highlights, to recommend top candidates, to coordinate the interview process. And, to provide a coaching network to interviewers, to make sure that they're trained to interview better and get the best out of the interviews that they run.

We firmly sit alongside hiring managers to enable them to hire the best people more efficiently and more effectively, that is our purpose.

You record the interview, I guess it's audio and video?

It can be either. We can record just audio or audio and video. Now, every interview is able to be replayed, and we create highlight clips and highlight reels from those interviews. And, sit alongside the interviewer to not just coach them but also take their feedback live and in the process around candidates, so that hiring managers have much more data and much more intelligence in order to make a better decision around the hires they make.

How do the candidates react to this technology?

The feedback we've had is largely positive, actually. We obviously give the candidates the opportunity to opt out of being recorded, as you would. The opt out rates we have are around 1%.

I think candidates are appreciating, I think, being able to represent themselves, and being able to represent themselves equitably within the interview process. Rather than them having an interview, which nobody else sees or listens to, and then them being represented by whoever's interviewing them, to other third parties within the organization. It really gives candidates the best opportunity, I think, to show themselves what they can do for the roles they're going for.

Why do you think the product is relevant for today's talent marketplace?

Yeah. I think if you look at it from a macro level, all the stats our there suggest that 50% of people that are hired into a company are not in their roles 12 months later. That costs businesses billions of dollars, thousands of hours of interviewing let alone time in the role as well. It's just a real problem.

Our mission is to solve this. A 50-50 success rate of hiring someone and them being in a role 12 months later is not a good success rate. Our mission is to solve this problem. We believe it starts with the interview. It starts with finding the best candidates, when you're going through the interview process, to do the role. To make sure that they are doing the right role and the best role, both for them and for the business itself. We feel we can have a very, very dramatic impact in saving companies billions of dollars in the work that we're doing.

What makes Pillar different, do you think?

Yeah. It is a new space and there are a few players, I guess, in the space now. We are very, very focused on three key areas of business.

One is providing intelligence for hiring managers to make better decisions. I think that we are unique in that aspect, that we are doing a great deal of work around that and hiring managers are getting much more confidence in the hires they have.

The second thing that we're focused on is providing a coaching network to make interviewers better. And, nobody really receives interview training but we can do that by default actually, within the interview itself and also after interviews have happened.

And thirdly, we really unlock the black box of the interview for DE&I teams. And, are providing DE&I teams feedback as to when goals aren't being met, and when things are going off track, based around the goals that they have for businesses as well.

I don't think that our competitors have those three very large goals and purposes. But, it remains to be seen, it's a young industry. It's a young category that is emerging at the moment.

What are some of the typical mistakes companies typically make in the interview process?

Yeah. I think a number of mistakes are made across the board within companies. Some companies are definitely better than others.

But if you look at an average company, the interview process is not as coordinated as it should be. And, that is bad for both the company, in really finding out in-depth around the candidate and whether they're suitable for a job, but it's also pretty bad for the candidate as well.

We're growing very fast as a team. I'm hearing and getting feedback from the people we're interviewing that other roles that they're going for are asking them the same question five times, in five different interviews. The experience just isn't a coordinated experience. I think that's one really big problem that we solve, just making sure that everybody has a purpose in an interview team, and people know exactly their role, and the skills that their interviewing and what have you.

The second thing that I think is really huge that we are providing, and the mistakes company make, are feedback around interviews. For so long, people have been interviewing, an interviewer does their interview one day. And a hiring manager will email them the next day and say, "What did you think of that candidate?" And, they'll get a few bullet points back over email. Well, over a 45 minute interview, you can understand where the hiring process goes wrong if that's really the process that's happening there.

Just the ability to take feedback and reactions live within an interview, so you're getting that immediate feedback and data point around all the different skills people are hiring for, is actually really important. The hiring manager has a good quality and quantity of data to be able to make the right call as to who to hire.

I think just those two elements themselves would improve a hiring process to no end for any company, either with or without Pillar.

With your current customers, what are they seeing as far as benefits go?

Yeah, absolutely. Because we've been working with customers for a while now, we've actually got some good stats around the benefits we'll bring them and also some anecdotal elements as well.

We've been given feedback that we're, on average, saving companies five hours per role they hire. So dramatically less time in interviewing, but over archingly shortening the interview process as well by a matter of maybe a week or two, or even more in some cases, in order to get that time to hire much, much less. Our customers are having about a 36% increase in candidate acceptance rates because they're just getting a more coordinated experience. They're getting a better experience with the companies that they're interviewing for, which turns them onto those companies, rather than all the other competing companies that they're going out interviewing with. We're saving around $36,000 for every single hire that is being made within companies. Just on the stats side, we're having a really big impact on companies.

I think the thing that really, I get warmth from, is that hiring managers, the feedback they're giving is they love using Pillar. They love it because they are much more confident that they're hiring the best people in the process. They're no longer putting an effort out, and crossing their fingers and hoping that that person is going to work out in their role. They know they're hiring the best candidate, as they go through the interview process. That's the feedback that I really love from our clients.

ATS Integrations with Pillar?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We have customers that are integrated with Greenhouse, and Lever, with Jobvite, with iCIMS. So the big ATSs that you can think of, as well as moving down to some of the smaller ones as well. I can't say that we have integrations with every single ATS yet, there are a lot out there obviously. But, as customers come to us with different ATSs, we're pretty good and pretty efficient about bringing them into the platform.

How you see Pillar fitting into the whole HR tech stack. Is it just a feature?

I've never thought about this, that we're a feature within a suite. I think we are solving a really big problem that's out there. I think our purpose is to fundamentally help both talent acquisition teams, but hiring managers themselves as well. We want to help and just sit alongside them, and help them do a better job.

I see this as very different to a lot of other technologies that are out there, that truly are features. I think that, when we look back in three years time, or five years time, we'll see the process that we go through now in interviewing is archaic. No wonder that we had problems in hiring, as probably won't matter in a few years time, just because of the data, the intelligence, the efficiency, the equitability that companies like Pillar are now providing into the process.

I think it's a really big problem to fix and I think that we're going quite some way already into fixing it.