A Better Hiring Process: How I Cut Interview Time by 75% While Improving Candidate Experience

Traditional hiring is broken. We've all been there—endless rounds of interviews where candidates repeat the same answers to the same questions, scheduling nightmares trying to coordinate multiple interviewers, and team debriefs that devolve into "well, they answered differently when I asked them that."

"We saved candidates 3–4 hours of their time, saved our team the same amount, made faster decisions, reduced bias, and actually got better insights into our candidates."

So I decided to hack our entire process. The result? We saved candidates 3-4 hours of their time, saved our team the same amount, made faster decisions, reduced bias, and actually got better insights into our candidates. Here's how I did it using Carbon Voice and Claude with our MCP server.

The Problems with Traditional Hiring

Let's be honest about what typically happens:

The Pre-screening Dance: A hiring manager conducts an initial interview to establish rapport and cover the basics. Standard stuff, but it's just the beginning.

The Panel Parade: Next comes the gauntlet—4-5 team members each conducting separate interviews. Even with the best intentions and rubrics, there's massive redundancy. Everyone asks variations of the same "getting to know you" questions.

The Interpretation Game: Finally, everyone reconvenes to compare notes. Cue the inevitable: "That's not how they answered when I asked them," followed by debates about whether it was the question or the answer that differed.

The problems are clear:

• Redundant questioning exhausts candidates and wastes time

• Scheduling complexity slows everything down

• Energy drain means candidates perform differently across interviews

• Interpretation bias leads to inconsistent evaluation

• Massive time investment for everyone involved

The Solution: Asynchronous Voice Conversations

Instead of multiple separate interviews, I created a single, evolving conversation using Carbon Voice. Here's how it worked:

Phase 1: The Initial Interview

I added the candidate to a Carbon Voice conversation and asked all our standard screening questions. The asynchronous format was a game-changer—candidates could think before responding rather than giving quick, canned answers.

Yes, they could potentially look things up, but let's be real: we expect employees to look things up and good candidates prep extensively for live interviews anyway. We tested for consistency by asking similar questions in different ways throughout the conversation.

Phase 2: Team Vetting

Once I completed the initial screening, I added the entire team to the same conversation. This was the magic moment. Everyone was told to:

• Listen to the full conversation from the beginning (they could do this at 1.25 or 1.75x. They could also relisten)

• Ask targeted follow-up questions in their area of expertise or on any answer they wanted to drill deeper

This allowed them to get an authentic feel for the candidate's communication style with the same answers while avoiding the redundant baseline questions entirely.

No more scheduling conflicts. No more repeated questions. No more energy drain from multiple separate sessions.

Phase 3: AI Analysis

After making our hiring decision, I asked Claude, which can access my Carbon Voice conversations through our MCP server: "We are interviewing a candidate in <Conversation Name> in Carbon Voice.  You're a hiring manager. How would you rate this candidate for a QA role?"

Claude provided a detailed breakdown with scores and reasoning, giving us an unbiased perspective to compare against our human evaluation. In this situation, it closely aligned with our team's conclusions, but by using AI it provides another “expert” looking at it through the lens of what was said vs. how it was said.

We could have further used it to ask “what questions should we ask as follow-up?”

The Results Were Impressive

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 61 messages over 1 hour and 15 minutes of actual conversation

• 3-4 hours saved for both candidate and team

• Faster decision-making with better information

• Reduced bias through consistent question format and everyone getting a chance to hear the same responses

• Better candidate experience with more thoughtful, asynchronous responses

The bulk of the conversation played out over a few hours where I was asking questions between other work, while on a walk, or driving to pick up my kid.  The whole process played out over a few days (including weekend time), giving everyone flexibility while maintaining momentum.

I did also do a Zoom call to validate that the “live” discussion matched the asynchronous one, spot checking certain patterns and then invested a bit more time in reference interviews.

I was also running this same process with a few other people at the same time, so these benefits amplified.

Why This Works Better

For Candidates:

• No scheduling stress across multiple time slots

• Time to provide more thoughtful, authentic responses

• More natural conversation flow

• Significantly less time investment overall

For Hiring Team:

• Everyone gets the same baseline information

• More focused follow-up questions

• Reduced scheduling complexity

• Consistent evaluation framework

For Decision-Making:

• Complete conversation history for reference

• AI analysis for bias checking

• Ability to ask follow-up analytical questions

• Faster consensus building

The Bigger Picture

This approach fundamentally shifts hiring from a series of transactions to a single, evolving conversation. It's more human in many ways—allowing for natural follow-ups, giving candidates space to think, and letting team members jump in when they have relevant questions.

We could even ask Claude: "What questions should we have asked but didn't?" The possibilities for AI-assisted hiring optimization are endless.

What's Next?

This experiment showed me that with the right tools, we can make hiring more efficient, less biased, and more humane all at once. The key is rethinking the entire process rather than just optimizing individual steps.

If you're interested in learning more about how to set up a similar process for your team, reach out. I'd love to hear your thoughts and share more details about the technical implementation. Reach me at https://cv.chat/travis

The future of hiring isn't about conducting interviews faster—it's about conducting them better. And that future might just be one conversation away.