What's great
I appreciate Textio's Lavalier as an interviewer because the hiring process feels so much more clear as I'm using it.
The candidate's info is right in front of me
I know exactly what I'm supposed to cover
I can focus on the candidate and worry less about taking perfect notes
Bookmarking moments for later is easy - and I can tie my feedback directly back to the candidate's words
This is super different from my past experiences of manual notes, scrambling for PDF resumes and prebriefs, and making sure I'm including quotes from the candidate real-time in my notes (which takes away from my ability to actually interview!)
What needs improvement
Right now it does a good job of covering the full candidate evaluation pipeline, but I'd like to see it cover more of what my ATS does.
For example:
Can it help me with the beginning of the funnel to narrow down applicants to people we actually want to interview?
Can it detect "fake" candidates and/or cheaters for me?
I'd love to see these features in the future
vs Alternatives
Lavalier had real-time interview capabilities that guided me through the live experience, and great integration from that live experience through to writing great feedback after the interview was done. I didn't find a competitor that could do that.
Can Lavalier compare candidates on the same skills rubric?
Yes! That's the whole point of generating the role ahead of time directly in Lavalier - to be able to interview and then assess candidates based on that role.
How do teams adopt structured interviews without slowing hiring?
Lavalier helps a lot with this because it has a great role definition process that guides a hiring manager through one question at a time until the role and requirements are super clear, then auto-generates structure including questions for each stage.
It then uses that structure systemically throughout the platform to guide how interviews are performed, both real-time at the time of the interview but also afterward for leaving feedback and comparing candidates.
What happens if transcription quality is poor or noisy?
So far the transcription quality has been good, but if part of the transcription is poor at least the rest is captured and I can add notes to the poor part of the transcription to fill in the data! It sure beats trying to manually type out the whole thing.