Name: Hiring Smarter: The Power of Structured Interviews in Talent Selection
Uploaded: 2025-04-29T17:46:05.166Z
Duration: 29 min 32 s
Description: Hiring Smarter: The Power of Structured Interviews in Talent Selection

Transcript for "Hiring Smarter: The Power of Structured Interviews in Talent Selection": Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are very excited to get started on this demo day. We have a really big audience today. I see all of you are starting to put in the chat where you're from, what your role is. I saw Pennsylvania, California, Texas, Toronto. That's fantastic. So let's jump right into our day here. So thank you again for joining us. We know all of you are busy, and we really appreciate the time that you take to, take a few moments to take a look at what Employ is offering here and to learn a little bit more about structured interviewing. So we're really excited to be featuring Pillar, which is our new AI interview companion within the Employ portfolio. So we are going to talk about structured interviews and not only how they improve your hiring outcomes, but also how they create a more consistent, fair, and engaging experience for recruiters, for candidates, and also to really empower that hiring team. So before we jump in, just some housekeeping items. We always have an active chat here, which has been active for the last few minutes, so I really appreciate all of you for that. We'd love to keep it that way, so add in your questions or any commentary, so that we can hear from you. We'll get to as many questions as we can. Any questions that we can't answer, we'll try to answer offline as well. Especially if you have a CSM with Employ, we'll ensure that they have access to any of your questions. So for starters, I see that all of you have dropped in where you're dialing in from. If you haven't yet, please go ahead and let us know where you're from. We'll also be sharing a poll today, so be sure to participate because we'd love to hear a little bit more about that interview process you have today. And finally, this webinar is being recorded. It will be shared with you via email after this session along with a few additional resources so that you'll have it to reference and also to share with anyone else on your team who maybe wasn't able to make it today. So first, let me introduce myself. My name is Christine. I'm your host and director of product marketing here at Employ, and I am calling in, from New Jersey. So if there's any Jersey folks out there, I wanna hear from you. I'm here with Mark, who is the founder of Pillar. Mark, let me turn it over to you to introduce yourself. Yeah. Thank you, Christine. And thank you everyone for joining today. Just to reiterate Christine's comments, it's, it's always lovely to see so many people. Thank you for taking some time out of your day. I'm Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Pillar, now part of Employ, very proudly. I have had quite a checkered, career. I founded three three companies now for b to b SaaS businesses. All have spent the last eighteen years working in machine learning and and AI, culminating with Pillar, and building Pillar as an interview intelligence platform. And I'm really excited to be, talking with you, Christine, and, and hearing, all the questions that no doubt are gonna come through the the the chat today. So please feel free to reach out with any questions as, as as we go through the, the the questions and the demo and everything else we're gonna be doing. Alright. Thank you. So I know all of you may have, come to this webinar maybe through an employee ATS, maybe, through pillar. So first, I wanted to share a little bit more about Employ. So, with our three ATSs and Pillar, we have over 23,000 customers. And what's really unique is that in that 23,000 customers, we really see all hiring challenges across every industry, company size, regional area, and we have noticed that every company has very unique hiring needs, especially over the last few years. We do see a lot of HR teams frustrated with solutions that are a one size fits all, and don't really flex with them as their business changes. And Employ is the only intelligent hiring suite that does flex with your needs, no one only for today, but for where you're looking to go. So, as I mentioned, the unique thing about Employ is our three powerful ATS solutions, JazzHR, Lever, and Jobvite. If you are a customer of any of those, I'd love to hear, which product that you are using today. Each of these solutions fit different hiring needs. So when you come to employ, we're able to assess with you what your situation is, what you're trying to achieve, and then, we can match you to the best ATS solution for that. So whether you're, a start up that's scaling really fast, you're a Fortune 100 company, have a lot of complexity, we're able to meet you where you are and keep evolving with you. So now let's jump into the addition into our portfolio, which is Pillar. So for, our customers, you may have remembered that just a few weeks ago, we had announced our acquisition of Pillar, which is the leading AI interview intelligence platform in the market. And we're very excited to have Mark and his team join us. So how did we get here? We had taken a hard look at that entire hiring journey, and we've spoke to our customers about what are all the different challenges that are happening along the way. Your recruiters are buried in busy work. Hiring managers are chasing resumes, candidates are stuck in the dark, and but a really key pinpoint that was interesting was one of the most important steps of the hiring process, interviews and candidate selection. And it really seems like a lot of the solutions within the market were going deep on that and solving that for recruiters and for candidates alike. So by bringing Pillar into that, employee product portfolio, we're helping customers take control, make decisions based on data instead of gut instinct, a lot less chasing down hiring managers, asking them for their candidate scorecards, or, you know, trying to cobble together all of the assessments coming out of that, those interviews. So we are natively embedding, pillar across our three ATSs. So that includes access to AI powered transcriptions, smart summaries, structured interview guides, so that your hiring teams can focus on the people first. They can remain present within that interview process. There is consistency within your interviews, and as I mentioned before, making decisions based on data versus gut instinct. So that is how that is what led us to Pillar and and Mark's team, and we've had such a fantastic reaction to bringing Pillar on. So, now I want to, first start off with a poll to get a sense of where you are at today. So how would you describe your team's current approach to interviews? We have some options. So are you using fully structured interviews, semi structured approach? You're feeling like that's it's mostly unstructured, interviewers are are doing what they do best based on their training, or you're not really sure where everybody's at. You're starting to define a process. So we have a little bit of a mixed bag here. I see votes are still coming in. So semi structured approach seems to be the most popular. Some consistency, but it varies by interviewer, which makes sense because all of these hiring team members are coming in with different experiences and different training that they've had. And I see we have some comments in the chat as well, which is awesome. Structured panel interviews. Fantastic. Okay. So that is very helpful to us, to help all of you today with structured interviewing. So now I really wanna give Mark the floor. Ask some common questions that we've gotten from customers. Not only custom questions that Mark has answered over the years as he set up Pillar, but as we brought into the portfolio, we've gotten quite a few questions about structured interviews. And Mark has really been the expert here. So, Mark, to start off, why is now the right moment to focus on structured interviews? So what makes them more important than ever in today's hiring landscape? Yeah. I I don't know I don't know whether there's a there's a now is the right time or yesterday was the right time or or tomorrow. But I think, I think it it's important maybe to have a have a sit back and have a think about what's happening in your interviews today. Because, you know, if you if you think and ask yourself, you know, what are my interviewers doing and what are they saying? And do you know for certain what they're saying in in their interviews? Because if you can't answer sort of a yes to knowing with certainty, about how people are going about their interviews, what they're asking candidates, what they're saying to candidates, then I think there's there's certainly opportunities for companies to, to do better, to to make sure they're hiring better people and make sure the the process is is right is running smoother. So, and I say that based on, you know, all the things that we we've seen over the years, but that we we also still see today when, when customers come come into us. We see issues all the time of, I don't know, people asking questions based on what they wanna find out. You know, interviewers going into interviews thinking I wanna find this out about a candidate or asking different questions to different candidates so there's no consistency or or just going in and having a conversation around what whatever they want. And it's those conversations that really cause the issue for hiring managers and making sure that you're getting the best people on on your teams and you're and you're doing so in in a timely way. So, so for me, it's, it's not necessarily a timing thing. It's a it's a what's happening in in your business and is now is now, you know, the right moment to do something about it. The only other thing I would add to that as well is when when I have these conversations in the past, people will, you know, automatically assume that it's, you know, maybe junior interviews, first time interviews, first time managers that that need more help. But, actually, we see this across the organization. Actually, some of the most senior people in organizations, you know, think they know how to interview, think they know what they're doing, and they go in and have a conversation about, you know, the school they went to or with because it was calling with a candidate or something like that, which which just just is is not not the right way to approach things. So, so we we really see it, you know, quite extensively throughout all organizations. And, you know, I think just having structure is is a common sense thing to do to help, to help your interviewers, to help your hiring managers, and to help organizations get the best people into them. That's fantastic. So then what are those core components that make up a truly structured interview process? Well, the the the process really starts with kind of the planning side of things. You know, typically, you know, it could be an intake or a kickoff meeting happening between the talent acquisition team and the hiring manager. And that act that meeting is actually probably the key meeting to making a success of, you know, the whole process, the the the entire process, you know. So, you know, in in that meeting, you know, taking in and formulating the right job description and then taking that job description and converting that into in the skills or competencies and the experience that you're looking for in the person that that you want to hire into the roles, that that you're you're looking to hire into. Once you've done that, actually, things become, slightly easier, and it's then it's just making sure you have a really solid process that people follow exactly what you want what want them to do. So you have to make sure that those skills competencies, that experiences are being tested throughout the interview process. So you're passing those elements out to your interviewers through good questions and through scorecards, to get feedback around those questions, from your interview team. And then, you know, making sure that process is followed in in the interviews. You know, people are filling out scorecards. People are asking those questions, and then making that sort of fail safe so that that has to happen in order for kind of next stage to happen and and offers to to be put out to to individuals. So, so I think the you know, if you get the intake meeting right, you get the skills, the competencies, experience you you want right, and then make sure that things are served up to interviewers at the right time and in the right way and scorecards are filled out. The process is actually, not as hard as as many companies, have, have made it historically. Are there any common mistakes that you see companies make when they start setting up structured interview process? Like, what are the pitfalls, for hiring teams to avoid? Yeah. There there are, I'm sure I think that there's there's mistake there's we there's mistakes we see all the time and mistakes that that that happens throughout. I'm trying to think of of kind of the the the biggest one. Most frustrating mistakes that that we see, around we see a lot of companies put in a lot of effort, and feel that they're doing the right thing. And it must be so frustrating for TA teams that put in efforts to come up with interview guides, come up with interview questions, and for those not to not to actually be used. And it's those kind of fail safes that I mentioned in in I'm the answer. The last question I think is actually key there because we do see, you know, we see companies spending a lot of time putting structure in place. We see larger organizations even using kind of biopsychologists at teams to formulate questions and people putting a lot of time and effort in and producing lovely word documents of interview guides and rubrics that get circulated around. They send them out to interviewers three days before, a day before their interview, what have you. And then all that work quite often gets ignored. And interviewers are going into interviews because they're rushing from the last meeting and they may be taking a cursory look at a resume and ignoring all that work and and just going in and doing whatever interview that they they they want to do. And from a, you know, from a person sitting in talent acquisition, it must be the most frustrating thing to see. So, so I I think that one of the one of the most common opportunities for companies is actually just making sure the interviewer actually does what you want them to do. All the work you put in, do do all the what you want them to do. So serving those guides to them in the in at the right moment, in the right time, getting their their questions, you know, where where they want to use them so that those interviews run how you want them to rerun rather than sort of interviewers having a scramble and, not not necessarily know know what they want to do. That's that's that's that's kind of a a crucial opportunity that we see time and time again. I totally agree with that. I think no matter what area of the business you work in, you'll probably agree that sending around a static PDF of guidelines will most likely get lost. So having it in the flow of work is really crucial. So one last question, Mark, before I hand it over to you to share how Pillar, actually works because I know that that's why everybody is here today. What kind of results are companies seeing by implementing this structured process? Yeah. I mean, really significant. It actually affects quite a variety of of metrics. You know, quality of hire is obviously the the big one, the the obvious one. We actually struggle a little bit sometimes to get that that that measure consistent across our across our our customers. Everyone measures it in a slightly different way. So, you know, it can filter out with things like seeing positive movements and things like manager feedback and assessments, you know, whether that's a ninety day assessment of who they've hired, a six month assessment, or what have you having we see very positive movements in in those assessments. Fundamentally, you know, some of the things we we we are able to measure are things like first year turnover decreases in some companies by as much as about 32%. It's really significant. We see time to hire drop because, you know, you're just collecting feedback a lot faster and not doing all the chasing you have to do. We've seen time to hire drop 25%. And then, you know, the really pleasing one actually that we see is hiring manager satisfaction dramatically increases, particularly with companies that are doing NPS scores around hiring manager satisfaction around the the interview process. We see that we see that, increasing significantly as well. That's fantastic. And I know that you have some case studies to share a little bit later. But so let me hand it over to you to jump into the platform. And then I just wanna remind everybody, feel free to drop any questions within the chat because we have a team behind the scenes who can answer for you, and then we'll also answer some at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Please please, please hit hit me hit me with those questions as I go through this. I I won't I won't be looking at them, but, the team will answer them, and I'll I'll make sure I answer what you want answered afterwards as well. So, so hopefully, you can you can see my screen. What I'm gonna do here is, start with, you know, put yourself in the situation of being in the intake meeting. So we're we're gonna start with that. I I mentioned it's kind of the key stage of all of this. And, within Employ, we have the ability, to run a very standardized intake meeting so that the process runs really well from here on out. And that starts I mean, firstly, you can record your intake meetings. Just as an aside, if you record your intake meetings, you know, it's very, very easy to get, you know, a a summary of them. You can always go back as a reference to what the hiring manager want, what the skills, and what have you they want. We'll automatically write them up. We'll automatically summarize them. Our AI will do all that work for you. It's a really good reference point to go back to making sure that the hiring manager stays with what they've been asking you for as well. But outside of that, you know, when you're actually running those intake meetings, you know, the the first step is, obviously, formulate a job description. And within Pillar here, you can just upload a job description. I'm just gonna upload and save a job description, into Pillar, right here live. When I hit save, our AI is now doing all the work and analyzing that job description to try and then help you create interview guides. And we can import import these from Lever and and Jobvite and and the like, but our AI can also formulate them from scratch as well if these aren't standardized roles you're interviewing for. So that when I click on guides, we already have guides made for, in this case here, a three stage interview process. These can be edited. You know, they've got the the the skills that we've we've extracted here and experience, can be altered, adapted. They can be moved around to different interviewers so that it's really, really simple to then build guides out for every interview stage that you have through your interview process. The idea here, obviously, that you're trying to get all of your interviewers to do exactly what you and the hiring manager want them to do. So once, once you've formulated those guides and have your interview plan, from from the intake meeting, the key is to get these guides used. And as I mentioned in answer to one of the questions is we see so many times, companies formulating fantastic guides and they're never, never used. The secret to getting to getting guides used is to make sure that, to make sure that those guides are being served where the interviewer is living for the interview. So I'm just gonna I'm just gonna share, an interview, an interview now. I'm gonna share a Zoom meeting. The way we like to go about about doing this, is serving them into the interview themselves. So you you see here when I click on the Pillar app, Pillar will just pop up into the interview itself and serve the guide that that that has been formulated in the intake meeting. So now interviewers have no excuse not to know that they're coming in, they're asking questions around skills like leadership and flexibility and, initiative and so on and so forth. They've got good interview questions that serve them to be asked. And they also have the ability to leave feedback, and the and the and the the the scorecard within their interview as well. So now talent acquisition teams know and hiring managers know that your interview team are gonna be asking questions on in the right way. But, also, you're not gonna have to do any chasing for feedback either because, your interview team are gonna go into the interview. They're gonna put their scores in there. They're gonna put their comments, and they can jump out the interview, and they don't need to do anything else. They don't need to remember at the end at the end of the day, or I need to write up my interview, or I need to go into Lever and fill out my scorecard, because Pillar will just manage that whole process for you. It will this will not just come back into Pillar, which I'll show you what it looks like in just a second, but it will also sync back with, with your applicant tracking system, with Jobvite, with with Lever, with Jazz, so that, everything your interviewer has done will sit within the ATS in an in an automated way. It's really a very sort of neat way of just saving a ton of time from chasing, you know, your interview team to give feedback and, and to fill out scorecards and so on and so forth. So within Pillar, once once once you once you've done that, if I just go go back and, and just sort of show you how how that that starts coming coming together. When I go into, when I I go into kind of the interview, I can see the scores and the comments that that that have been written, up against that interview. And when I go into a Canada and his interviews have built up over time, you can start seeing here on the right hand side, you know, after these five interviews have been done here for Ava, you know, how my interview team has scored the various different skills, that I need as a hiring manager to be able to compare candidates, side by side, for, for this role I'm hiring for. So, and as I say, all of this can feed back into, into the applicant tracking system as well. I'm I'm gonna just maybe finish with, a a case study. So if I, if I stop sharing my screen and and just sort of show, just maybe explain how how this come this comes together. So everything that I've explained now, has come together for many, many customers. One of them is, a very, very large, IT product company, And they had the issue of, exactly, you know, interviewers going in, doing interviews. They didn't know what was going on, and then chasing literally for days and days afterwards, sometimes weeks, to get feedback, so that the next interviewers and so the hiring managers could get detail on, on how the interview team felt about those candidates. In implementing this structured method, you know, from the intake meeting through serving those those interview guides, it became it it it was almost a direct switch overnight. When this was turned on and teams were were trained to do this, it was almost a direct switch overnight to getting completed scorecards and to to to getting, significant feedback from interviews. You know, 90% of scorecards were were were completed. Feedback was given within forty eight hours, without fail. And, and and it was just a a real sort of night and day situation. I actually asked the talent acquisition team, after they've they've been working with us for about six months, you just succinctly just tell me what is it the pillar does for you? What what what what what do we do? And they came out with a really nice line and maybe something that, that the the, that I'd love for you to take out out of this session today. They have they their words were Pillar is the only platform that we have for interviews that gets thousands of people to do exactly what we want them to do. And I suppose a really nice way of summing up how having, you know, having the right process in place, you know, serving things in the right way where people are actually active, just it really empowers you to get people to do what you want them to do. They follow the process rather than doing their own thing, and you get far, far better results because of it. So, Christine, I'm gonna pause there. I did wanna leave five minutes for questions. I think I've just about done that. So, happy to hand back, to you and and to to anyone that's listening to to please post your questions, and, I'd be very, very happy to answer them. Yeah. Absolutely. So I know that Alexa has been backstage answering some of the questions. I'm looking at some of the other ones within q and a. So any advice for getting buy in from stakeholders who may be resistant to changing how they've always interviewed? Yeah. Absolutely. So, so we we've we've done we've done this a lot. And, obviously, your, your customer success team and your account managers with Employ can help and and guide you through the through this process as well. The the the really nice thing about this, versus, other technologies that talent acquisition have had to sort of push out into the organizations is there's a significant amount of benefit for the hiring managers here. Because hiring managers are getting much better data to be able to make decisions with, and they will become your biggest advocates. So I would say that the the best way to do this is roll this out within with a portion of your organization, whether that's your recruiting team, the sales team, you know, or or part of the part of the organization country by country, whatever it might be. And you will find that very quickly, the use as a Pillar will become your champions. Because the hiring manager's getting better data, the interviewers are being guided, but they're also putting their feedback in once and then not having to be chased ever again. So they're they're kind of like level of hassle that that they have in in interviewing, their level of admin around interviewing, has decreased significantly because they never have to go back, they never have to rethink, they don't have to turn up at debrief meetings and and start thinking, well, who did I interview and did I like Christine or did I did I not like Mark or whatever it might be. So, so the whole process actually works not just for talent acquisition, but for hiring managers and the interview team itself. The the adoption is far less hard than you might think. That's great. So now let's talk about, the candidate side of things. I saw a few questions about candidate consent. Do candidates have to consent to being recorded? How do they feel about that? Yeah. So everything I've showed you today doesn't require recordings at all. So you can serve those guide, you can formulate those guides, you can create them, you can serve those guides into your interviewers, and you can you can collect that feedback from the interviewers along those side panels of interviews and so on and so forth with no recordings happening. So there's no consent that Canvas need to have because it's literally like having, you know, an old school piece of paper at your desk that you're following kind of the the the the the format of of of the interview. Now we can obviously record interviews, and do all the automated write ups and and things around that as well. And for that, we do need Canva consent, and we manage that process for you. So there's opt ins and there and there's opt outs and there's emails that go out. But for the actual kinda guided part of the process, that's actually not necessary. That's great. Thank you so much. I believe we are we only have a few minutes left. Looking at some of the other questions. So I just want to, repeat that if you are existing employee customers, so that's Jaz HR, Lever, or JobFyte. You can add pillar and everything that Mark showed here today, as an add on to your current package. So please reach out though to your, CSM. If you don't have a name CSM, you can certainly, request a demo through the website. I did see some questions on that as well. We have upcoming webinars, for customers on the upcoming releases. So please join those webinars as well so you could see other product innovations coming to those product lines. So if we didn't get any of your questions today, we're going to take a look at them, make sure that we bring that back to the customer success team. But I really want to thank all of you, for joining us today. Thank you so Mark so much Mark for, showing the pillar platform, giving some insight into how customers are using it, some best practices on structured interviews as well. You will get the recording of this, via email after the session, so you will have access to that as well as some other resources. So thank you again, everybody. Hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you, everyone.