Textio is a leader in building tools that help high-growth companies recruit and coach high-performing teams. Our latest innovation is Lavalier, an interview intelligence tool that helps you make confident hiring decisions by turning interviews into comparable evidence about skills and ability to do the job.
Founded in 2014, People leaders at companies like Bloomberg, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, and Spotify choose Textio to help them recruit and develop the top 1% of talent.
This is the 2nd launch from Textio. View more
Lavalier AI
Launching today
Lavalier AI helps you raise your hiring bar with interview intelligence that drives better hiring decisions in more than half the time.
Easily define the role you're hiring for. Generate interview questions designed to evaluate skills. Compare candidates against the same job criteria. Get to a confident hiring decision — faster than ever.
🎁 Click Visit above to sign up for Lavalier, unlock 500 bonus credits, and hire for your next 5+ roles for free. 🎁
Free
Launch Team / Built With
Workable
Textio
Hi Product Hunt! 👋 I'm Jensen Harris, one of the founders of Textio, and I've lost a lot of sleep over the last year waiting for this day 🤞
Here's the deal: I hate many parts of the standard job interview process SO MUCH.
Don't get me wrong, I love hiring people. Meeting smart, engaged humans and figuring out how they could thrive—that part is genuinely wonderful. But all the make-work and drudgery that goes into a standard interview process? It fills my heart with dread.
First the prework, where I think about what I intend to ask and then promptly forget during the interview. Then the endless notes I have to take that make the candidate think I'm multitasking. Don't forget the post-interview feedback essay I'd put off writing for days because I had an actual job to do, by which point I'd forgotten half of what we talked about. Oh, and the debrief meeting a week later where everyone shares half-remembered observations and their most visceral gut feelings.
Candidates who receive job offers are 12x more likely to be described as having "a great personality" than rejected candidates. No wonder, it's probably all most people remember. Great way to make hiring decisions! 🤮
Here's a story I've been embarrassed to tell publicly: I've never successfully been hired for a job as an adult.
I started at Microsoft through a college intern program and just never left. When I was ready for my first big career change, I was rejected dozens of times. Seven full onsites, zero offers. For one, I prepped for weeks, flew a thousand miles, bought and put on the scratchy wool suit they required (!!!). Spent two days with them, felt optimistic. And when the rejection call eventually came weeks later, they described conversations I know for a fact I never had. They'd mixed up my feedback with someone else's.
After all that effort, they'd lost track of who I even was.
That feeling—"they didn't actually hear my words!"—still sits in the pit of my stomach over a decade later.
It was in Chicago, digesting a (mediocre, honestly) deep dish pizza with the team when what became Lavalier showed up suddenly like a hot fire in my brain. What if we centered the entire interview process on the candidate's own words? Not the game of telephone from interview to notes to feedback form to verbal debrief, but what the candidate ACTUALLY SAID!
I wrote the very first lines of code at the Alaska Airlines gate in Chicago's Terminal 2 as the core parts of the platform started to form in my mind: role intake that helps recruiters define what actually matters in minutes instead of meetings. Interviewers who can actually be present in the conversation instead of focus on transcribing it. Recruiters who can ask something like "which candidates have deep experience mentoring" and instantly get back answers across 40 hours of interviews, linked directly to the candidate's own words. Hiring decisions based on evidence, available in hours—instead of on weeks of fading memory and half-remembered vibes.
Now, Lavalier doesn't make hiring decisions—we believe humans should make hiring decisions. And Lavalier supports those human decisions by giving hiring teams the data they need to make intelligent, informed decisions based on what actually happened during the interview.
This is the most exciting product I've built in my career. It's the first thing at Textio I've personally written a substantial percentage of the code for since the original product back in 2014. For our company, it feels like a rebirth—a second chance to think boldly about how to take a really hard set of hiring problems and make them radically, magically better.
We built one of the first products to bring AI to HR over a decade ago. Since then, companies like Bloomberg, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, and Spotify have relied on our products every day, and we've picked up some cool recognition along the way (Fast Company Most Innovative Companies, Forbes AI 50 list).
We're launching today at lavalier.ai and could really use your feedback! I'd love to hear everything you have to say, and our team will be iterating fast on what we learn because we want Lavalier to be the most indispensable software in your hiring process. I'll be here in the comments throughout the day!
Oh, and if you click the Visit button on this page to sign up for Lavalier, special deal—we're unlocking 500 bonus credits for you (enough to hire for your next 5+ roles for free.)
So let's start here: what is the one thing that makes interviewing—as a candidate or an interviewer—most painful for you today?
I can see the value for teams running dozens of interviews a week — consistency across that many hiring managers is a real problem. But for a team of 3-4 people who interview maybe twice a week, we already piece this together with Teams recordings and AI summaries. What would Lavalier give us that that workflow doesn't?
Textio
@klara_minarikova I love this question!
Sure, Teams and Copilot can transcribe your interviews and summarize what happened. But a transcript of a bad interview is still a bad interview. If the interviewer asked the wrong questions, skipped key competencies, or never probed on what actually matters for the role, no AI summary fixes that — you just get a cleaner version of bad data.
Transcription tools have been widely available for years. One in three hires still fails within 18 months. That's because the problem was never capturing what was said. The problem is that most interviews aren't designed to surface the right evidence in the first place.
Lavalier works across the entire interview lifecycle — aligning your team on competencies before the interview, guiding interviewers to stay on-criteria during it, and giving you comparable, evidence-based candidate summaries after. We're not just showing you what happened. We're helping you run the kind of interviews that lead to better hiring decisions, AND at a price point every team loves (free for the hiring velocity you mentioned).
Textio
I'm Colleen, CEO of Textio (and yes, I can attest that @jensenharris is not lying about not sleeping!)
I was also in Chicago for that pizza — and for the record, it was excellent deep dish, I'll hear no slander. What Jensen described as a hot fire in his brain started in a conference room in one of the greatest cities in the world (I'm from Chicago, I can confidently say that).
I mapped out the entire landscape of how hiring actually works — every step, every handoff, every place where signal gets lost. Where our customers were telling us the most friction lives. Why all the ways people have tried to fix it keep failing. And it kept coming back to the same thing: the fixes all depend on making another human do something that's either not their top priority or something they're just not that good at — remembering everything from a conversation, assessing it against job requirements they may not have even read, and then writing it all down in a way that's clear and useful. That's a lot to ask of someone who has an actual day job on top of interviewing.
That's where Lavalier started. Not with the technology, but with that problem.
I'm using it right now to hire for a role on my own team. It's changed how I show up in interviews — I actually listen instead of frantically typing, and afterwards I can see whether I assessed what I said mattered or just followed the conversation wherever it went. That honesty is uncomfortable but it's the whole point.
Try it and tell us what you think — we're building this fast and your feedback matters.
It's cool!!!
Is there any version for interviewee?
Textio
@khanh1992 Not...yet :-) But giving candidates a great experience is central to this product's life and existence. Curious what you want to see for interviewees?
I was in the room when this product was first imagined — what an honor. I’ve been along for the journey from the very beginning.
I watched the hours. The hard conversations. The relentless work. The heart and soul poured into this build. And what stood out to me most was the insistence that if we were going to create something new, it had to genuinely respect the humans in the process.
That’s why this launch hits differently for me.
Yes, I’m excited about the solution.
Yes, I’m proud of what the team has built.
But I’m even more excited for the recruiters and hiring leaders who will use it.
Because this won’t just help them move faster.
It will help them hire better.
But more importantly, it will create a better experience for the most important humans in the process, the candidates.
And after 30 years in recruitment, that’s the part that matters most to me.
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Congratulations, Team Lavalier! It has been magic watching this come to life. I had the honor of leading Textio through the augmented writing wave, building a team that was thinking about practical outcomes in AI (and bias in AI) before foundation models were broadly available. As you've created Lavalier to solve modern recruiter problems, I've watched from afar as you systematically think through 1. what makes a great experience for candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters alike, 2. how to place fairness and auditability at the center of the interviewing process, and 3. making sure the process is AI-enabled but led by human decisions and interactions throughout. Excited for more people to benefit from what you have created!
Loving using Lavalier! We use it extensively at Cowboy Ventures when we are doing internal hiring, and have noticed improvements in our hiring process from higher quality deliberations to faster decision making. Can't imagine hiring without it now.