BrightHire Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2022

BrightHire presents a seamless integration with the major ATS platforms, helping teams leverage deep analytics for their interviews without needing to go to another platform. Their tech can record and transcribe interviews to create a set of highlights you can revisit and share, right within the ATS.

BrightHire’s mission is to improve the quality of each hire at the companies that use their product. They know that extracting analytics from video interviews is only one part of the equation. The real value comes from how those analytics are presented, the conclusions they help derive, and the actions they set in motion.

That’s the philosophy behind the product they started creating in 2019, which we recently had the pleasure of demoing. BrightHire is made for teams that are already doing a great portion of their interview process digitally, and thus recognize that this presents challenges, but also opportunities.

The challenge is that setting up interviews, providing feedback on candidates, and sending them off to another interviewer can be a time-consuming process. Often, as Alexis LaFleur, a Sr. Account Executive, put it, “rather than truly understanding a candidate, you’d rely on paper notes, a room full of people, little context, and hours of interviews condensed into three sentences.”

However, since most of the interview process is happening digitally, this is also an opportunity. For example, BrightHire records and transcribes the entire interview and presents it to other interviewers as answers per question and points of interest.

Points of interest are key conversation topics that BrightHire’s Natural Language Processing capabilities can identify. For example, to mark the part of a conversation where topics like salaries, relocation, or past job experience were discussed. A recent development of BrightHire is that these points of interest are customizable. You can determine which words are essential for you within an interview, and BrightHire’s customer success (CS) team can coordinate training the tech to identify them.

Interviewers joining the process are able to glance through the interview questions or points of interest, click to get to the exact moment of the conversation they want to zero in on and read the notes from former interviewers. All this is accessible as a widget within the ATS or within the BrightHire platform.

If on an ATS, all video interview intelligence tied to the candidate’s profile stays that way. Once reviewed, the candidate could be shortlisted, rejected, or simply sent to another round of interviews, with all this information readily accessible to the next interviewer or hiring manager. In fact, all interview questions can be created in the ATS. They sync from the interview scorecard or job profile to the BrightHire interview assistant.

Of course, this intelligence can also be used to train recruiters and interviewers. This was shown to us at the time of our demo of BrightHire, along with integrations with tools like Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, as well as ATS platforms like Smartrecruiters, Lever, and Greenhouse.

What’s this like for the candidates? 24 hours before the interview, they get an email to accept being recorded and transcribed. If they prefer it, they can opt out from recording (according to the company, less than 1% of them opt-out). Also, a recent analysis on Glassdoor shows people don’t even mention recording in their reviews about interviewing with their client companies, which is an indication that it isn’t negatively impacting their candidate experience negatively.

Naturally, BrightHire wouldn’t be of use to companies that only do in-person interviews, although they do offer features that support phone interviews and onsite interviews. Also, they only support interviews conducted in English.

BrightHire is used to make better hires at companies like Canva, Rippling, Salesloft, Attentive, BetterUp, Noom, and many others.

• Interview Assistant: The crown jewel of the tool is the widget you can use within your ATS for easy note-taking, interview review, sharing and feedback, interview training, and analytics.
• Interview timestamping: Go to the exact second of the interview you’re interested in based on the topic discussed or question asked/answered.
• Analytics: Metrics like Total Interviews, Talk Ratio, from the aggregate data of all interviews. The BrightHire team can also create custom metrics for you to track. Even further, you can see analytics per topic. For instance, look at interviews that mention a specific topic like work location or salary,
• ‍Interview Training: This module makes training materials from the best interviews performed by your team. It lets other interviewers take a look at specific moments from past interviews and get training around, for example, what a good candidate looks like, how to ask better questions, how to pitch the company, etc.

As of late 2022, BrightHire integrates with Greenhouse, Lever, Smartrecruiters, Zoom, Google Meet, Bullhorn, Google Chrome, Google Calendar, Outlook, and GoodTime. New integrations are a constant project for the company.

BrightHire’s pricing is based on company size and hiring volume. To give an example, a small company would typically start at about 10k annually. As of late 2022, they do offer free trials.

BrightHire is mostly used by tech companies with 500-10,000 employees and who conduct interviews via video. They support both corporate TA teams and RPOs/staffing.

Implementing BrightHire is handled by their customer success team. They take the lead on client onboarding and follow a 3-step methodology: establishing a game plan, connecting the tool (which includes running a test interview), and launching the tool by inviting team members to the platform. They partner with you to host workshops for your hiring teams. For this last step, they host a rollout workshop.

In addition to a customer success manager, BrightHire customers get access to a knowledge base, an in-product support chat, and a support email.

BrightHire’s founders saw that there was a serious gap in how important hiring is and the amount of time and energy and rigor that goes into the process. Their philosophy is that “every single company’s success comes down to one thing: people.” But sometimes hiring is broken and this brings a giant capital consequence. What if the company is continuously missing out on hiring great people because there’s something wrong with their process?

This is where their interview intelligence tech comes in. Although founded in 2019, the company has been making huge strides, evidenced by its client and partner list, as well as funding. They are likely the most-funded company in the interview intelligence space.

It comes as no surprise when you learn that the BrightHire team is advised by talented thought leaders like Laszlo Bock, Google's former SVP of People Operations, and Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant.