Verint Adds AI-Powered Interviewing to WFMVerint Adds AI-Powered Interviewing to WFM

Verint announced today that it has expanded its workforce management (WFM) offering with “intelligent interviewing” capabilities via the acquisition of privately held HireIQ, a pioneer in hiring automation founded in 2009. Verint did not disclose financial details of the transaction, but said it intends to bring on the HireIQ workforce in full.

What Is Intelligent Interviewing?

HireIQ’s solution, now Verint Intelligent Interviewing, automates the candidate evaluation process and leverages AI to analyze answers to interview questions, providing insights to help hiring managers make more informed decisions. Wanting to understand more, I gleaned additional context from a HireIQ whitepaper, “Audiolytics Emotional Assessment and Predictive Analytics.”

In the paper, HireIQ posits that an employee’s or job applicant’s emotional affect is not easily measured using traditional cognitive, behavioral, or personality assessments, nor is it easily faked. However, it can be easily detected by analyzing the person’s voice for key emotional factors.

When hiring contact center agents, a telephone interview is a common step in the recruitment process. Analytics can be applied to discover the candidate’s emotional make-up and affect, and a determination made as to that applicant’s potential for performance, tenure, and leadership. HireIQ’s patents-pending Audiolytics advanced voice analysis software application does this by mining recorded, natural-language candidate interviews for these emotional characteristics and then using them, in addition to other features of the recorded audio, to predict a job applicant’s potential to be a high-performing, long-tenured employee.

As noted in the whitepaper, clients using HireIQ assessment as part of their talent acquisition process report significant improvements in key performance metrics, including:

Why Is Verint Adding Intelligent Interviewing Now?

Since its founding 12 years ago, HireIQ has analyzed more than two million interviews and supported the hiring of more than 40,000 agents, the company reports on its website. HireIQ is also in the alliance partner programs of NICE and Genesys. So why has Verint acquired the technology now?

To date, HireIQ has had particular success with business process outsourcers, which are in the business of hiring thousands of agents across the globe. While they and many other companies already have been using intelligent interviewing techniques, thousands more become prospects in the post-pandemic world. As discussed in my post last week, “Future of Work: What It Means for the Contact Center,” one element of attracting and retaining contact center talent will increasingly include options for hybrid work. That means techniques for remote hiring become more important.

As seen in the graphic, Verint sees Intelligent Interviewing providing synergies across their portfolio, extending the strategic planning components of workforce management to using the technology not just for hiring but for coaching as well. What Verint brings to HireIQ is global reach. “Today, HireIQ language models are limited to English, Spanish, and Portuguese. With our extensive language model support and interaction insights, we believe that we not only can extend the quality but also extend the coverage of Intelligent Interviewing,” Nick Mortimer, vice president, global product strategy, Verint, said during a pre-briefing.

Verint’s move to acquire HireIQ was driven by business model changes resulting from the pandemic and its influence on the future of work. In that way, it is similar to Cisco’s December 2020 acquisition of Slido. In both cases, companies were acquired that had technologies that were interesting to a limited number of companies before the pandemic but become compelling to a much broader addressable market post-pandemic.

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