Verint Gets into Intelligent Interviewing via HireIQ Buy

Verint, a publicly traded provider of customer engagement software solutions, recently expanded its workforce management (WFM) software offering by adding intelligent interviewing capabilities. The new tool came via the vendor’s acquisition of intellectual property from HireIQ, a provider of hiring automation solutions especially for the contact center staffing industry. The acquired technology automates the candidate evaluation process and leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze answers to interview questions.
 
HireIQ sold its technology to Verint and has since shut down its website. Thus, Verint Intelligent Interviewing (formerly HireIQ) is already available today as part of Verint WFM and through the Verint Cloud Platform.
 
HireIQ was a small private company that focused on being a contact center hiring platform. Its patent pending Audiolytics advanced voice analysis can mine recorded, natural language interviews to glean emotional and other relevant traits (e.g., empathy, patience, nurturing attitude, etc.) from the candidate. This subtle intelligence provides insights to help hiring managers make more informed decisions.    

Why Automate the Hiring Process?

Verint believes that the accelerating shift to remote and digital customer experience (CX) and the Work from Anywhere (WFA)/Work from Home (WFH) business culture and lifestyle will drive an increase in the number of customer services roles—both in the back office and contact centers. As a result, traditional interviewing and candidate selection practices need to be reimagined. This drives the need to digitize and automate elements of the hiring process to allow both the candidates and hiring managers to engage from the time and place of their choice.
 

Figure 1. Typical benefits of Verint Intelligent Interviewing (formerly HireIQ)
   
Verint Intelligent Interviewing is expected to allow service organizations to extend the reach of their hiring efforts beyond the limited range of their physical office locations. This is expected to dramatically increase the number of applicants, which is where Verint Intelligent Interviewing should help by pre-assessing candidates to minimize hiring managers’ efforts.
 
Verint believes that the pre-hiring experience is critical to building longstanding and effective relationships with employees, in turn driving improved CX due to selecting candidates who are seemingly the best fit for the organization—both technically and culturally. Figure 1 shows the Intelligent Interviewing customers’ typical benefits of AI-driven screening of candidates and the reduced risk of bad hires for both the organization and candidate.
 
As a matter of interest, a number of HireIQ’s competitors have also recently been acquired. For example, Harver and FurstPerson were recently nabbed by Outmatch, while Aspiring Minds was scooped up by SHL Recruit. All of these players would also occasionally compete with Montage, iCIMS, Jobvite, Workable, Spark Hire, and HireVue, to name a few.
 
It’s also interesting that, while Verint and HireIQ were not partners, they did have several joint customers. On the other hand, HireIQ was a partner of Verint’s CX software archrivals NICE and Genesys, so it will be interesting to watch what happens to the joint customers HireIQ shared with NICE and Genesys.    

Verint WFM’s Strategic Roadmap

The Verint WFM suite provides strategic planning capabilities that enable organizations to determine their workforce needs. The suite can also help businesses handle seasonal demand fluctuations using sophisticated regression analyses to account for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual trends. The WFM suite provides recommendations about the optimal time to hire, according to the specific skills and required number of staff members.
 

Figure 2. Verint’s current portfolio of WFM software
 
Now, with Intelligent Interviewing, Verint WFM can also handle the process of hiring resources and extend strategic staff planning from concept to execution (see Figure 2). Linking strategic forecasting and planning to candidate requisitions and candidates’ success will create meaningful insights for the WFM managers. The strategic roadmap for Verint Intelligent Interviewing also extends to the following:
 

• Leveraging the proliferation of data within the Verint Customer Engagement Cloud Platform to enhance the understanding of employee characteristics and behaviors throughout their lifecycle
• Intelligent analysis, determination, and mitigation of risk factors that might indicate employee retention and customer engagement risks

 
Verint Intelligent Interviewing appears to harmonize with some other solutions from Verint’s portfolio. For example, Verint Performance Management should be able to enrich hiring by measuring and coaching the best talent. Moreover, Verint Speech & Text Analytics (a.k.a., Verint Interaction Analytics) should extend the understanding and processing of languages. Verint’s global coverage will likely also add to the number of languages covered, something that the tiny HireIQ could not afford.
   

Staying Focused Will Matter

At this stage, Verint does not anticipate that this acquisition will necessarily take the company into the general talent acquisition and talent management markets. The vendor’s intent is that intelligent hiring will only address the areas of business that Verint already focuses on with its cloud platform: contact center, back office, and branch offices.
 
Still, once you have the hiring capabilities, the customers might start asking for compensation, benefits, learning, and other human capital management (HCM) software tools. Will Verint be telling its customers to look elsewhere for these? And, if so, for how long before the vendor adds them?
 
What is more certain is that Verint will now work on developing video interviewing capabilities. That capability did not come with HireIQ but is becoming increasingly popular in today’s remote and digital talent acquisition software market. (See, for example, iCIMS’ recent acquisition of EASYCRUE as well as a range of other available solutions on the market).
 
 
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