Customer Story

How Structure and Data Redefined Interview Excellence

Smart Interview Professional

man smiling with glasses wearing smart clothes sitting outside on steps with tablet in hand

Winning talent through better interviewing

This global SaaS organization transformed interviewing from inconsistent and inefficient, to structured, data-driven, and candidate-centric using Smart Interview Professional.

Serving more than 10,000 customers with operations across 20+ global offices, the organization recognized the need to attract and retain exceptional talent to sustain its competitive advantage.

A review of the hiring process pinpointed interviewing as a key opportunity for improvement. To maintain market agility, hiring top candidates faster while delivering an engaging experience that reflected the company’s culture and values was imperative.

About the Company

Industry
Software

Company Size
2,500+ employees

Region
Global

The challenge:

Inefficiencies cause frustration for hiring managers and candidates

Reviewing the interviewing process highlighted four key challenges that the organization wanted to overcome:

1 Slow speed to hire

Conducting 1,000+ interviews a year, the interview process was slowed by manual scheduling and tracking, with poor handoffs and clunky workflows. Only 60% of feedback was captured in the HR system so teams had to piece together insights from emails, chats, and ad-hoc conversations to make a decision, delaying offers and losing top candidates to faster-moving competitors.

2 Inconsistent candidate experience

Inconsistency in interviewing journeys made it difficult to know if a candidate was accurately evaluated or understand if they were satisfied with the process.

3 Hiring quality and outcomes

Without consistent questions or scoring criteria, hiring managers ran very different conversations with each candidate. This made it difficult to compare candidates objectively or accelerate offers with confidence.

4 No visibility, no path to improvement

Talent Acquisition (TA) teams had limited visibility into what actually happened in interviews, beyond basic outcomes. They couldn’t reliably assess interview quality, understand interviewer behavior, measure candidate engagement, or credibly show improvement to executive stakeholders.

The solution:

Putting Smart Interview Professional at the heart of every interview

To address these challenges, the organization deployed SHL’s Smart Interview Professional as the core interview solution across the hiring journey. The objective was simple: embed structure, capture rich data, and use analytics to drive continuous business improvement and candidate experience.

With Smart Interview Professional, the organization gained:

Structured interview guides with standardized questions and scoring to evaluate candidates fairly and consistently
Embedded note-taking and scoring within live interviews, making feedback mandatory and in-the-moment
Centralized interview dashboard to enable a single view for guides, candidates, scores, notes, and progression decisions
Analytics on interviewer and candidate behavior to compare, benchmark and optimize interviewing

“Smart Interview Professional gives us the metrics we were missing, interview quality, candidate engagement, and process bottlenecks, so we can finally measure, coach and continuously improve at scale.”

Head of Talent Acquisition

The outcome:

Smarter interviews, faster hires, happier candidates

With more than 800 interviews conducted through Smart Interview Professional, the organization has seen the interviewing process elevated and benefit the end-to-end hiring process.

Automated scheduling syncs interviewer calendars allowing candidates to choose suitable interview times, reducing admin and early drop-out.

60% of interviewers submit their recommendation within two hours of the interview ending so TA teams no longer need to chase feedback, and candidates move forward much quicker.

Consistent two-way candidate feedback now happens effortlessly, with every candidate receiving timely updates on their progress and sharing feedback about their experience in return. This improvement has driven a 21% uplift in Candidate Net Promoter Score (NPS) since inception, rising from 70 (good) to 85 (excellent).

“We can now offer candidates an engaging experience that reflects the importance we place in our people and use interview analytics to ensure our hiring managers are selecting the best candidates fairly and quickly.”

Head of Talent Acquisition

Within interviews, structured guides help hiring managers ask relevant questions and evaluate candidates against the same criteria, empowering teams to make more accurate, confident hiring decisions.

Functionality such as the ability to replay interview recordings together with advanced analytics can feed data-driven coaching, such as pinpointing interviewers who consistently score too leniently or too harshly, or tweaking questions to give candidates more time to speak when interviewers were found to be taking too much airtime.

96%

96% of candidates felt they gained a better understanding of the company and role during the interview

A benchmark to move forward with confidence

To date, 88% of interviews have been completed within the platform with notes, scores and feedback visible to all stakeholders—streamlining handoffs, avoiding repetition, and enabling real-time monitoring of the progression of all interviews.

Now with Smart Interview Professional, this global organization has turned interviews from unmeasured conversations into a measurable layer of the hiring process that underpins how it assesses talent.

Explore our Smart Interview Professional solution to see how you can elevate interview quality, differentiate on candidate experience, and bring true analytics into interviewing.