Pillar Expert Review, Pricing, Alternatives - 2023

Pillar brings a modern design and forward-thinking approach to the interview management and intelligence space. A stand-out feature is real-time guidance to interviewers, through metrics like talk-time insights and question suggestions.

Pillar’s product centers around speeding up the hiring process and saving money in the process. You save money by hiring the right people, cutting the failure rate of each hire, and also finding the right people faster. Their platform does this through transcribed interviews, records, and presenting recaps and highlights of the interview that you can share with each recruiting stakeholder.

That being said, the platform doesn’t stop there. As the top interview intelligence tools have done so in the recent past, Pillar have also added a coaching module into their product. This part of their software takes insights from all the interviews you eventually pile into it, and uses them to produce question recommendations, give out interviewer scores, and present guidelines for improvement.

A notable distinction with Pillar’s approach to interviewer training is that their tool can provide coaching on-the-spot. Meaning, while the interview is being performed. Interviewers can get a prompt with a question to recommend, or see a talk-ratio and tailor their interaction accordingly.

In essence, this reduces the risk of bad interviews, but also lets you find the right hire through less interviews. An interesting stat we learned from Pillar is that filling up a new position takes around 18 hours, but their tool can help HR and recruiters half this time. This is made possible thanks to the simplicity with which you can share a candidate’s profile long with their transcribed interviews and recordings. Hence, other stakeholders can look them over without needing to schedule an interview themselves.

Another thing we and other users seem to like about Pillar is simply the design. The tool has a sleek and modern look and UX is a part of the product  that is constantly being improved. The same goes for integrations with other HR tech. As a relatively new product, the list of native products you can connect to Pillar is ever-growing.

As with most interview intelligence companies, Pillar’s product isn’t quite ready to tackle the hiring challenges faced by deskless industries. Although focused on white-collar workers, they are also lacking features that cater specifically for hiring programmers or software engineers.

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• Comparisons: Stuck between two candidates? Bring their profiles side by side to compare their skills, interview highlights, and interviewer feedback. ‍
• Automated video highlights: Pillar puts together video highlights that you can share with stakeholders. These can be generated automatically but you can also tweak them, adding the interview moments you consider most important. This is aimed at replacing manual note-taking, which then entails creating candidate write ups to send to stakeholders. For that reason, research from Pillar suggests that this feature can save up to 5-10 hours per week.

Pillar integrates with several tools to make hiring easier: 

• SSO: Okta SSO
• ATS: Lever, Greenhouse, Breezy, Jobvite, iCIMS
• Scheduling: Calendly, Microsoft Office, Google Calendar
• Video Call: Zoom, Google Meets, Teams

Pillar’s pricing information is undisclosed. The way to get a quote would be to reach out for a demo and explain your project requirements.

Pillar is aimed at recruiting firms and internal talent acquisition teams that prioritize video call and phone interviews. Within the latter group, most of their clients are in white collar industries of varying sizes.

As such a young product (founded in 2019), Pillar goes into new places fairly fast. Recent developments include their training module, within which you find one of their standout features, real-time coaching during the interview.

Pillar was founded by current CEO Mark Simpson. This is his third startup, having founded Acoustic (an independent marketing cloud) and served as CEO until 2020. Before that, he was the president of Maxymyser, a customer experience tool that was acquired by Oracle in 2015. After the acquisition, Simpson served as the Group Vice President of Oracle’s Marketing Cloud for a year, after which he moved to IBM to work on Watson Marketing.

Through these ventures and experiences at big tech companies, Simpson identified one of the challenges he wished to tackle through a new venture; change the way people go about recruiting talent. Hence, Pillar was developed with a clear vision of the challenge, and a solid understanding of the tools needed to overcome it; AI for job interviews, delivered through a SaaS platform at the service of both candidates and recruiters.