In this month’s blog we explore how breaking into the recruitment black box can improve your recruitment outcomes across the board: saving time during interviews, gaining deeper insight on your individual candidates, empowering management, and fostering an environment of consistency, transparency and continuous improvement for your entire team.

What is the recruitment black box?

In any field, the concept of a ‘black box’ refers to a system where you can see the inputs and the outputs, but the process of transformation in-between is completely hidden. Sometimes this can refer to a process that literally cannot be seen or examined, but more often it refers to one that is opaque and unclear in terms of how it operates and delivers results.

Unfortunately, in the field of recruitment, the interview element can be a bit of a black box. That’s not to say that it’s entirely secretive and unobservable (though interviews are, by their nature, usually a more private undertaking). Instead, we mean that gaining real, meaningful and predictable insight into how the interview process yields results has historically been something of a challenge.

The interview as the block box of recruitment

Why is it a black box? Well, candidates walk in, and then candidates walk out – either as future employees or continuing job seekers. Or worse, as effective employees, or mistaken hires. What separates the two? That’s not always clear. Interviewing is generally personal in nature: a significant amount of subjectivity and intangibility exists in the interview room. The information gained is qualitative – difficult to measure as metrics or concrete data. And as a result, difficult to use for effective comparison.

The irony is that the very weakness of interviewing – its focus on ‘the human dimension’ – is also its very strength. Interviews need to preserve a sense of the character, attitude, energy and personality of the interviewee. But since those elements exist in the connection forged between interviewer and interviewee, they can be difficult to convey effectively in a report to other decision-makers in the organisation. And it can be difficult to give every candidate the same opportunity to shine, since your interviewers all bring their own distinct personality into the interview room too.

This means that in ‘dealing with the black box problem’ of interviewing, there needs to be a way to maintain the human dimension that is crucial in elevating interviews beyond a mere tick-box exercise, whilst at the same time increasing both transparency and consistency.

In the next blog we highlight all the benefits delivered by opening the black box of recruitment.

What to do if you want to break the box

If you want to make your interview process more efficient, more effective and more aligned with your hiring strategy and goals; if you want to break the black box and grant managers the insight needed to improve the interview process on a continuous basis, why not get in contact with In2Dialog?

In just thirty minutes we can show you the transformative power of our AI-driven conversation analysis tool, and improve your recruitment outcomes, for good.