Denver’s interviewIA Drives Interviews with Data

Initial Lightbulb:

Founder and CEO Joe Thurman has seen the pain points involved with job interviews firsthand.

Through his 15-year career in human resources, Thurman came to realize the interviewing process was fundamentally broken at most companies. “This largely unmanaged yet expensive process that is interviewing is where we spent a lot of time,” he says, “There was more need there than you can deliver as a consultancy, so there was always a vision or a thought of one day solving this problem at scale to help improve decision quality for companies across the board.”

Now nine employees, interviewIA was founded in mid-2020. “There’s a lot of need,” Thurman says. “There’s a big talent issue right now.”

In a Nutshell:

Launched in early 2021, interviewIA’s platform helps bring data-driven order to the often chaotic interviewing process.

“Most companies are trying to manage this in spreadsheets and documents,” Thurman says. “We are basically building a SaaS [software as a service] platform that helps manage the interview process for the business and for talent. The whole focus is: Can we make interviewing more effective and more equitable?”

Minimizing the bias of interviewers is a focal point, Thurman says. “You will spend hours and dollars on this high-stakes decision, so we look for both qualitative and quantitative data around interviews, interview processes, interviewer behavior to ultimately drive and improve the process of hiring across an organization.”

He adds, “If you’re an employer who treats people equitably, you’re in better position for creating diversity.”

The interviewIA platform offers templates for interviews, 1,500 pre-loaded questions, and an automated scorecard to rigorously rank candidates. “It’s all around question structure,” Thurman explains. “We think of questions as a prompt, and that prompt should have a framework around what you intend to measure and how you intend to quantify the responses to that question.”

The end result is interviewIA’s Smart Scorecard to “create and track data from every response,” Thurman says. “If you have 10 candidates, you’ll start to see an overall score, an ability score, and alignment score, and a growth-based score for every candidate you’ve interviewed.”

The platform has about 150 customers of all sizes. The focus is on higher-skill jobs; many clients are in health care or tech, or any industry’s sales departments, Thurman says. “The largest customer is a 35,000-employee company,” he says. “Depending on team size and the scale of hiring, customers have had up to $200,000 in savings for the first nine months of usage.”

The newly launched freemium model elevates to paid versions for individuals ($6 per month), teams ($13.49 per user per month) as well as enterprises (price varies). Paid features include tracking interviewers’ demographics and adherence to processes as well as tools for collaboration and onboarding. “Our goal [in 2022] is to truly scale,” Thurman says. “Now we’re focused more on teams within a client.”

Case studies of interviewIA users show impressive results. One mid-sized health-care company reduced turnover by 25 percent in six months. Another, a 1,000-employee growth-stage company, immediately hired top-performing salespeople with the help of the platform.

Andreya Blake, director of human resources for Pacific Medical Data Solutions in Greenwood Village, says interviewIA’s platform has “helped immensely” with the 120-employee company’s interviewing procedures since 2019.

“When it came to interviewing, our hiring managers were all over the place — there was no standardization whatsoever,” Blake says. “With interviewIA, it’s definitely standardized all of that and given us a single platform we can go into for a structured interview process.”

The Market:

Fortune Business Insights forecasts the global market for talent intelligence software will grow from $7 billion in 2021 to $13.2 billion in 2028. “There is an emergence of people-management tools that are built for business,” Thurman says.

Financing:

After interviewIA closed on $2.8 million of funding to date, Thurman says the company is aiming to raise a second seed round in 2022.