Reinventing the most important hour in hiring

So much of what goes wrong in hiring is set in motion before anyone has met a candidate—in a rushed, fuzzy intake conversation where the recruiter and the hiring manager quietly walk away picturing two different jobs. Everything downstream inherits that ambiguity. So the very first thing Lavalier does is the least glamorous and most important part of all: getting everyone aligned on the role. You talk it through with the AI, or hand it a description to react to, and it helps you pin down the competencies that actually matter—then drafts the job posting, all in a few minutes. Get the beginning right and everything after it gets dramatically easier.

The stretch between “we agree on the role” and “the panel is ready” is where hours quietly disappear. Someone has to design the loop, write the questions, decide who covers what, and keep two interviewers from unknowingly asking the same thing. It’s tedious, it’s easy to half-do, and a thin plan all but guarantees a thin interview. Plan Builder takes the alignment from intake and turns it straight into a structured guide: a loop with stages, questions tied to the competencies you chose, and every interviewer handed a clear assignment. All of it is editable—the goal was never to replace the team’s judgment, just to hand them a strong first draft instead of a blank page.

Here’s the slightly uncomfortable truth about interviewing: most of us aren’t very good at it, and we almost never get the kind of feedback that would help us improve. The same role gets a prepared, attentive interviewer one day and a distracted one running on pure instinct the next, and it’s the candidate who pays for the difference. Live Guidance rides along during the conversation and helps in the moment—offering the next prepared question, nudging toward a competency nobody has covered yet, and taking the notes so the interviewer can actually listen. I cared a great deal that it feel like a capable assistant sitting in the room, not a teleprompter barking orders. Whoever’s interviewing is always the one running the conversation.

Sit through enough debriefs and you start to notice they’re often settled by the wrong things—who spoke first, who outranks whom, who tells the most confident story about a candidate they spent forty-five minutes with. The real evidence is scattered across half-remembered notes. Candidate Compare pulls it back to the middle of the table: every candidate lined up against the same competencies you defined at the start, with the actual moments from each interview that back the call up. It won’t make the decision for you—Lavalier never does—but it makes that decision a fairer one, grounded in what was really said instead of who said it loudest.