History
Equip was launched in Jan 2022. We launched it as a pure assessment platform, with excellent proctoring. In the past 3 years, we have launched several test types, added many skills, improved proctoring and onboarded hundreds of customers. Our customers have in turn evaluated hundreds of thousands of candidates!
A huge drawback of regular assessments is that you cannot test subjective questions at scale. You can either ask MCQ/Coding type questions that are auto-evaluated. Or, you can ask subjective questions of a few tens of candidates and evaluate them on your own. This means, you can't really use our assessments to automate Phone Screening or Human Interview processes at scale.
AI Tests
AI changes all of this! AI is much smarter than you and me put together :P And it can process multiple responses in parallel. So, it can very easily mimic many intelligent humans evaluating several candidates at once. We are launching this functionality today, and calling them AI tests.
At Equip, these AI Tests come in two flavors: Phone Screening and AI Interview. Both are very similar in the setup and candidate experience. You can ask any question and add some prompts to aid the AI in evaluation. The candidate can respond by typing, speaking or recording a video of the answer, depending on how you've configured the question. The AI grades it. And it does a damn good job at the grading. The video below explains how they work.
When to use AI Tests
If you are reading this, your are likely an existing customer who has already used our assessments. Confused about whether to use your existing assessments or these AI tests?
Broadly, think of these AI tests as doing what your recruiters or the initial interviewers are doing. When they phone call a candidate or get on a quick 15-min videoconference call with them, they aren't asking very pointed questions about a specific skill, or asking them to code a full solution to a coding problem. They are asking not-so-pointed questions in a conversational manner. You may continue to use our assessments for existing roles and consider AI tests for newer roles. The table below can help you choose which test to use for what purpose.
| Feature | Phone Screening | AI Interview | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration | ~10 mins | ~40 mins | ~60 mins |
| Purpose | Quick screening | Deep conversation | Skills testing |
| AI Graded Questions | 5 | 20 | 0 |
| Video Responses | No | Yes | Yes |
Dashboard Changes
Along with this, we've made a major change to the recruiter dashboard. You can see the Before and After images below.
Here's a list of changes:
- Your dashboard should feel much faster and snappier. We have made many improvements in the backend for this.
- Just like you could create Assessments, you can create Phone Screenings and AI Interviews. The creation, invitation and results flow is very similar to Assessments
- In the newer features, we have introduced Auto-save. So, don't worry if you don't see a Save button
- We have streamlined a lot of the search, sort and filter operations. Not just will they be faster, they are much more unified across the entire product
Roadmap
As an existing user, you must have seen our product roadmap already. These features mark the release of 2 stages in the roadmap. In a job application journey, Phone Screening and AI Interviews are stages that happen before Assessments. We want to now build AI features for stages before these! That would be, the publication of a job post, a candidate applying to a job role, resume screening, etc. All these should go live in the coming weeks, and will all be AI-enabled.
Equip has been only an assessment platform for the past 3 years. With today's launch, we have taken the first step to extending beyond assessments in the hiring stack. And in the coming months, we will regularly ship features that will make us a one-stop tool for all the hiring needs of a Company.