If you're reading this, you've likely realized the importance of having a robust and data-driven interview process. Now, the challenge is finding the right Interview Intelligence Platform to suit your unique hiring needs. This guide will walk you through key considerations to help you make an informed decision.

Structure vs. Flexibility: Striking the Balance

Do you want all interviewers to ask the same set of questions, or should they have the freedom to adapt based on their expertise?

• Pro-Structure: Research shows that structured interviews are significantly better at predicting job performance.
• Pro-Flexibility: Interviewers often value autonomy to customize questions and apply their expertise.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Opt for an Interview Intelligence Platform that primarily supports a structured approach but allows flexibility to add and score custom questions.

Skills-Based vs. Holistic: What Should You Focus On?

Some platforms are skills-based, providing tailored questions to assess specific skills. Others take a holistic approach, focusing on a candidate's overall experience, education, and workplace behaviors.

• Pro Skills-Based: Offers deep insights into a candidate's current abilities, potential, and upskilling needs.
• Pro Holistic: Helps form a high-level impression of how candidates think and act in a professional setting.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Skills-based is definitely the way to go. The building blocks of the future of work are skills, and to truly understand a candidate's capabilities, potential, and upskilling needs, the skills-based approach provides that granular information. The holistic approach may leave you with only high-level impressions, which are less actionable.

Off-the-Shelf vs. Customized: Ready-Made or Tailored?

Some Interview Intelligence Platforms provide off-the-shelf question banks, while others offer fully customized questions tailored to your organization.

• Pro Off-the-Shelf: Quick setup, minimal effort, and pre-tested in similar organizations.
• Pro Customized: Questions reflect real-world challenges, preventing rehearsed answers and providing a realistic job preview.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Go hybrid. If you want to get started quickly, use off-the-shelf questions and templates initially while gradually incorporating customized questions tailored to your organization’s specific roles and needs. Alternatively, use customized questions for senior or high-stakes roles and off-the-shelf options for lower-stakes positions.

AI-Generated vs. Expert-Created Questions

Vendors often offer either AI-generated questions or those crafted by subject matter experts.

• Pro AI-Generated: Faster implementation and frequent updates.
• Con AI-Generated: Most large language models (LLMs) are trained on public data, meaning many AI-generated questions are based on outdated or commonly available templates. These questions often lack diagnostic value and are easier for candidates to game because they’re widely known.
• Pro Expert-Created: Backed by over a century of research, expert-created questions leverage proven methodologies to assess candidates effectively. These questions are crafted to yield insightful, unscripted responses and to differentiate between low and top-performing candidates.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: While AI has its strengths, crafting high-quality, diagnostic, and ethical interview questions remains a task best left to experts. Subject matter experts ensure that questions are tailored to specific roles and aligned with organizational goals, while also being robust enough to prevent bias and maintain fairness.

Numeric Scoring vs. Textual and Visual Summaries

Platforms vary in how they evaluate interview responses, offering numeric scales, textual summaries, or visual representations like stars or thumbs.

• Numeric Scales: These platforms allow interviewers to assign a score (e.g., 1-5, 1-7, or 1-10) to each response based on pre-defined criteria. Numeric scoring enables precise candidate comparisons, highlights strengths and weaknesses, and creates quantitative data for deeper analysis.
• Textual and Visual Summaries: These use AI to summarize key points of the interview in text or provide visual cues (e.g., thumbs up, stars) to indicate overall impressions. While engaging, these are often subjective and lack the granularity of numeric scoring.

Pro Textual/Visual Summaries: Easier for decision-makers to digest at a glance, offering quick insights into the interview. 

Pro Numeric Scoring: Provides an accurate, measurable framework to compare candidates, analyze interviewer consistency, and evaluate the effectiveness of interview questions.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Choose a platform that supports numeric scoring for objective accuracy and uses textual summaries for added context, ensuring a balance of precision and readability.

Individual vs. Aggregated Interview Insights

Most Interview Intelligence Platforms provide aggregated insights across all interviews, but a few also offer individual feedback tailored to specific interviewers. Each approach serves different, but equally important, purposes:

• Pro Aggregated Insights: Aggregated insights provide high-level data on trends such as candidate and interviewer speaking time, the types of questions asked, and overall interview efficiency. This data helps hiring teams identify process inefficiencies and refine interview frameworks over time.
• Pro Individual Insights: Individual feedback focuses on specific interviewers, offering detailed, actionable guidance on their techniques. For example, it might highlight whether an interviewer speaks too much, asks unstructured questions, or fails to probe candidates effectively.

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Both types of insights are critical. Aggregated insights enable talent acquisition leaders to make data-driven improvements at an organizational level, while individual insights hold interviewers accountable and drive personal development. Together, they ensure continuous improvement in interview practices and hiring outcomes.

Candidate Feedback: A Critical Feature

Providing candidates with meaningful feedback is a vital yet often overlooked component of the interview process. Look for platforms that enable detailed, shareable feedback that highlights strengths, areas for improvement, and overall interview performance. Effective candidate feedback can boost your employer brand, as candidates appreciate transparency and actionable insights into their performance. Whether through email or phone, ensure the platform you choose makes it easy to share personalized and constructive feedback.

Ethical AI: Due Diligence is Key

With AI playing a growing role in Interview Intelligence Platforms, ensuring ethical practices is critical to maintaining fairness, transparency, and trust in your hiring processes. To evaluate a vendor’s commitment to ethical AI, ask the following:

• How are candidates assessed and scored? (Avoid black-box systems where scoring mechanisms are opaque and cannot be explained.)
• Are group differences in questions or recommendations analyzed for bias? (Vendors should actively monitor and minimize potential bias across gender, ethnicity, age, and other demographics.)
• Who makes the final decision? (Ensure that AI assists interviewers but does not replace human oversight, as accountability lies with people, not machines.)

Informed Decisions Recommendation: Choose platforms that prioritize ethical AI practices by providing transparency in their scoring processes, actively auditing for bias, and ensuring human involvement in all decision-making processes. These measures will help you build a hiring process that is fair, inclusive, and compliant with ethical standards.

Stand-Alone vs. Integrated into Your ATS

If the platform doesn’t replace your ATS, integration is vital for a seamless hiring process and centralized candidate data.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right Interview Intelligence Platform can transform your hiring process. By considering these factors and prioritizing structured, skills-based, and ethical practices, you'll be well-equipped to make a data-driven decision that improves interview quality and hiring outcomes.