Q&A with Danielle Weinblatt

The HR space is incredibly archaic. CEOs of firms always say talent is the most important aspect of building their businesses, but have historically under invested in this area. It’s one of the last sectors in which innovation has happened last and I saw a tremendous opportunity because of it.

We have three solutions. The first one enables organizations to screen candidates more efficiently and record responses that allow companies to share and collaborate among themselves. Our Live product gives companies an opportunity to record remote video, phone or VoIP interviews and includes the appropriate questions to ask. You can also annotate this interview and make that interview searchable across a company. For example, if you wanted to pull up every single developer that you’ve interviewed for a specific position, you would be able to do it. It becomes a digital database of talent.

The third product solves the black hole problem when applicants apply for a job and they don’t hear back from an organization. This enables companies to market to candidates. They can employ marketing tactics and be able to nurture and cultivate an applicant the way they would a consumer.

We’re continuing to grow and launch new products and solutions. My focus is solving problems for our clients. In the next few years, I would also like to return capital to our existing investors.

Take the Interview, Inc. (“TTI”) solves problems associated with the lengthy interview process and helps organizations hire better talent faster. We do it by streamlining issues within organizations such as eliminating the need for scheduling interviews and improving the overall assessment and screening process. Candidates are also more engaged using our platform, enabling companies to hire higher quality candidates over time. Sometimes you are interviewing someone and you have a gut feeling that a candidate is not the right fit for a position within the first few minutes. Typically, you still need to conduct that interview for a half an hour to 60 minutes. We eliminate that problem with one of our solutions by enabling you to review the responses of candidates to your most important questions at your convenience prior to bringing them in for an in-person interview. We also reduce the number of steps to identify the right person for a position. Currently, we have three software solutions for recruiters and managers that enable better coordination, collaboration and help you reduce your likelihood of making a bad hire. Finally, our solutions produce analytics around manager feedback for candidates and help organizations understand why they make decisions to hire certain candidates and not others.

I came up with the concept for TTI based on my own experiences interviewing candidates and being actively involved in the recruitment function at Citigroup. I started TTI when I was a student at Harvard Business School after I met a software engineer in Harvard Square and we decided to partner on a business together. When I would interview candidates in finance and I would ask them the same few questions: “Why do you want to join Citigroup vs. JPMorgan?” “How do you value a company?” And, “where does depreciation fit on the three financial statements?” If they couldn’t answer those questions I wouldn’t let them move to the next round of interviews. I didn’t understand the screening process and how certain candidates were able to get in front of managers. It was very frustrating for me, as it added more to my workload. I knew there had to be a better way and with more and more companies moving from on-premise software to the cloud and companies trying to do more with fewer resources, I knew a SaaS product that streamlined the interview process would be something organizations would want.

My background is based on building and scaling high-growth venture-backed businesses. I do three things as CEO, set the vision, make sure my team has sufficient resources to invest in high-growth areas and opportunities and hire people smarter than me to lead their respective areas. I am not a developer, but I have a great product and software development team. It’s all about the people you hire which is why our business focuses on that mission. As CEO, I set up the infrastructure of our organization and define our culture. I also am the one who always leads the capital raise and approves all major investments to achieve the best ROI. These are all the areas that I’ve had experience with before starting the company.