Enhancing long-term recruitment success through AI-driven interview intelligence

Customer Background

Velde is a specialist in recruitment for commercial, financial, and executive functions as well as leadership assessment, operating across the Dutch, Belgian and German markets for over 35 years. With a focus on long-term return on investment rather than short-term placement, Velde works across sectors such as Private Equity, family businesses, and SMEs.

But Velde aims to set itself apart from the market with something they call the ‘Velde Method’ – an approach to recruitment which challenges convention by shifting focus away from transactional placements, instead focusing on long-term organisational alignment. Instead of simply matching candidates to job descriptions, Velde begins with a deeper set of questions: Who is the organisation at its core? Which needs does it meet? And what kind of individual is needed to realise its long-term vision?

This forward-looking, purpose-led model is especially resonant within public and non-profit sectors, where success is often rooted not just in performance, but in alignment with organisational values and social contribution – though its advantages are clear across almost every industry. In essence, Velde helps their clients attract professionals whose motivations and personal DNA reflect the organisation’s collective ambition. The result is not just a good hire, but a lasting relationship that builds impact over time.

For Velde, recruitment is not about filling vacancies — it’s about building future-ready teams. Their motto, “Start with the end in mind,” speaks to this orientation toward purpose, longevity, and leadership continuity.

Challenge

Velde fills approximately 400 vacancies annually with a team of 35 colleagues. Despite their structured process, they encountered a common issue: the intangible aspects of a candidate – such as motivation, character, and communication style – were being lost between the live interview and the internal sharing process. While core competencies, CVs, and salary expectations were easy to capture, the nuanced personality traits that often emerge during free-flowing conversation didn’t always make it into formal reporting. As a result, opportunities to fully align candidates with the deeper cultural and strategic needs of the client were sometimes missed, leading to potential mismatches that cost time and erode trust.

Solution

Velde adopted In2Dialog to support a more structured interview process, but most crucially, a holistic one, which captured all dimensions of the candidate in both a quantitative and qualitative form. They leverage In2Dialog’s AI-powered tool to record live candidate conversations and automatically generate detailed, structured reports. These include psycholinguistic insights and soft skill indicators – even latent qualities that may only emerge in informal parts of the interview. The tool not only preserves critical nuances, but makes it visible and shareable across the recruitment team.

Results

In2Dialog has enabled Velde to retain the human element of recruitment while enriching it with data-driven precision. Recruiters no longer lose the qualitative richness of interviews, and collaboration between colleagues is now supported by consistent, objective summaries. For clients, the benefits are clear: stronger alignment between candidate and company culture, fewer mismatches, and long-term success in leadership placements. Velde’s motto, “Start with the end in mind,” is now even more achievable – because the recruitment journey begins with a full understanding of both the candidate and the organisation’s future vision.

Future Plans

Velde plans to deepen its integration of In2Dialog across all recruitment teams, rolling the tool out across the board. But what will be of particular importance to Velde in their future implementation is ‘the flip side of the coin’, where In2Dialog takes its powerful analytical tools and turns them inward, using its analytical capabilities to assess interviewer style and leverage this for team development, setting benchmarks and harmonising strategy. As the company scales its operations and expands advisory services, In2Dialog will support its mission to provide not just recruitment, but lasting leadership impact.

Why In2Dialog Was Chosen by Velde

For Velde, In2Dialog was not primarily about saving time – though this proved to be an important benefit for the company. It was about capturing meaning. The platform allows them to retain and share the full picture of a candidate’s potential, especially soft skills and motivational indicators that are difficult to quantify. As CEO Paul Bettonviel indicates, even hobbies can be crucial in making a determination –  not because of the hobby specifically – but how the candidate talks about it, what skills they take from it, and what passion they hold for it. With In2Dialog, this vital information is not lost, but instead summarised into a digestible and relevant form. Ultimately, In2Dialog was able to support Velde’s long-term, values-led approach — and aligns with their belief that successful placements come from understanding the human behind the CV.

“A lot of the most important things about a candidate – their mindset, their energy, the way they connect — can be lost if you’re just reading notes. Indeed, our analysis of the market shows that as much as 50% of working relationships in the Netherlands can fail within the first year – sometimes because expectations weren’t communicated clearly enough, sometimes because the candidate’s ambition didn’t match entirely with the role.
A lot of this can fall to simply issues of miscommunication – taking facts at their face value rather than understanding their nuance and underlying meaning. In2Dialog allows us to capture these more complex elements, whilst still retaining the efficiency and objectivity that’s needed from a good report, which can be easily disseminated to key decision makers.
Ultimately, we have a strong belief at Velde that ‘people buy from people’. With In2Dialog, we can share the whole person, not just the summary. That helps us and our clients make better decisions.”

— Paul Bettonviel, CEO, Velde