Article by Seedrs
Interviewing candidates can be a time-consuming process, and recruiters and hiring managers are always looking for ways to streamline their workflows and make the most of their limited time. Equitas has created a fairer way to conduct live interviews so companies can hire the right person for each role using interview intelligence software. The whole reason Equitas exists is to create fair hiring. In this blog we explore Top 5 reasons why Equitas is the future of interview intelligence and hiring.
1. How is Equitas different from traditional interview methods and other interview intelligence software?
Traditional interviews involved a super manual approach of taking notes with pen and paper and either having a great conversation with terrible notes, or great notes with a terrible (or at the very least stilted) conversation. Worse yet were the interviews that lacked structure or asked irrelevant questions like “If you were an animal what would you be and why?”… to try and put people under pressure and had no real relevance or ability to predict whether they could do the job or not.
We’ve changed this approach with a focus on fairness and efficiency.
Equitas has created the fairest way to conduct live interviews with a mix of process and technology. Structured interviews are the baseline of what you need to deliver a fair process but it’s the quality of questions that you ask and ensuring your interviewers know how to effectively probe and dig deeper so that they get the best out of every candidate no matter what their background and this is what our product nudges users to do.
Interviews are about effective data capture and delivering an exceptional candidate experience, these days candidates are choosing if they want to work for you as much as you are choosing them, so they want to know a fair hiring process is being used. One of the most critical aspects we offer is helping companies build quality question banks across the Values, Behaviours and Competencies they need to succeed as a business.
The interview intelligence software space is growing rapidly. HireVue was the Netflix of the interviewing space and even used to post webcams to people to record one-way video interviews. One-way video interviews were the first approach to going digital but lacked engagement and didn’t deliver a positive candidate experience. Now we have some incredible companies like Brighthire, MetaView and ScreenLoop helping shape the interview intelligence space with different focuses. There is some overlap in approach and features of capturing and analysing interview data but the main difference is on fair and equitable hiring. It is the whole reason we exist as a company and has shaped the product our users love and now can’t live without. There’s more on how we differentiate below…
2. What are some of the unique features of Equitas that make it a valuable tool for recruiters and hiring managers?
Some of the core product features Equitas offers are:
- Interview question bank creation – hundreds of best practice structured interview questions out of the box for recruiters and hiring managers
- Multi-round interview campaign setup – best practice is to keep it less than 4 rounds. 2 is normally enough with 1x role-related and 1x values interviews
- Candidate scheduling and rescheduling – in-product invites, reschedule, panel interviewer management and status updates (no more back and forth in your inbox all in product)
- Auto-cue for interview on interview delivery screen – best way to deliver interviews
- Interview data capture – audio and transcription = no more note taking
- Interview data capture segmentation – keeping quiet on this one as competitors don’t know what it is yet…
- Anonymous candidate scoring for panel interviews – fairest way to score candidates without group-think, conformity bias or seniority bias coming in to play.
- Visual candidate scoring matrix – washing up on candidates to ensure the right person gets the role while checking any scoring variations from interviewers
- Auto-generated feedback reports for candidates – build your employer brand with the way you treat your candidates post-interview. Give them constructive developmental feedback and they’ll love you for it.
If you’d like to see a high level overview of the product check out the video on our Seedrs campaign page.
3. Can you provide any real-world examples or case studies of companies that have successfully implemented Equitas in their hiring process?
The Irish NHS (HSE), the largest employer in Ireland, has used us for thousands of interviews across multiple entities, hiring 400+ international hires from 30+ countries and opening up a global talent pool. From entry level hires right through to C-suite, we are a core part of the way they interview, whether a campaign has a handful of candidates or an extremely high volume with thousands of candidates. With over 1,000 users and 35% of hospital groups using us, the HSE genuinely cares about using a fair, efficient and innovative approach to hiring the right people, saving thousands of hours, and hundreds of thousands sheets of paper, from a previously analogue process and building diverse teams over the last few years using Equitas.
Branching outside of the Irish NHS and our healthcare niche, we have helped Charles Tyrwhitt reshape their Values interview framework and start to roll out Equitas across their HQ hiring to ensure a fair, accountable and streamlined approach to their interviews while giving their candidates more feedback than ever before.
4. In what ways can Equitas help improve diversity and inclusion in the hiring process, and why is this important for the future of hiring?
DEI is the most important aspect in the future of hiring, speaking to thousands of Talent and Recruitment leaders and our users over the last couple of years has validated the importance of diversity and inclusion.
In the future candidates will only want to work with companies that have built diverse teams; there is already Glassdoor research showing that this requirement has been growing year on year. Diverse teams are more creative, productive and more likely to help a company survive. The case for diversity is understood globally but desire hasn’t always translated into action. The largest enterprises are coming under more pressure now to take action and ensure they are taking whatever steps they can to ensure fairness.
We are predicting that at some point in the future, it will be a legal requirement for companies to capture their interview data to ensure fair and equitable hiring is happening. Until now the last stage of the hiring process, interviews, could be a black hole where no data was captured and decisions made with a lack of relevant information.
Structured interviews is the minimum you need to ensure fairness and consistency at the final hiring stages. Equitas offers that out of the box with best practice structured interviews tailored to the roles that companies are hiring for. We help bring accountability to the process with interview data capture, moderation and building diverse panels of interviewers to encourage a range of decision makers at this critical part of the process.
During onboarding, we teach hiring managers and interviewers best practice interview techniques and get them to understand the future of interviewing with new technology. Focus on the candidates and quality questions during interview delivery, focus on the content and interview data when scoring.
Building diverse teams with the way you hire will be the difference between success or not.
5. What developments or innovations can we expect from Equitas in the future, and how will these shape the future of interview intelligence and hiring?
We have some incredible tracking and analytics features coming down the roadmap that will offer organisations more insight into what is going on in their interviews than ever before. Accountability and moderation are key. There are several features we are developing to keep nudging interviewers and ensuring they are scoring accurately and fairly from anonymous to automated scoring, a co-pilot approach to help interviewers hire the right people will be the future.
We’ve just launched our interview-as-a-service in private Alpha which we are really excited about and the feedback for diversity of thought and accountability for organisations struggling with DEI has been amazing. It’s the perfect way to help organisations who lack diversity or technical expertise with a product + service based approach.
Lastly, never fun but always exciting. We have some of the world’s biggest Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) who dominate the HR tech market wanting to integrate with us so we can help their thousands of clients interview in the fairest possible way. This is our GTM in 2023 and the partnership approach in HR tech is the only way.
The future of hiring will still be human-led but we are optimising every part of interviews to make their life easier and ensure they build diverse and successful teams.