What is BrightHire?

BrightHire is our interview recording tool. It is an interview intelligence platform built on Zoom to help run structured, high-quality interviews that can be replayed, shared and analyzed.

BrightHire rides along in Zoom interviews with an interactive notepad. All you need is the Chrome extension and Zoom and you’re all set. It records and transcribes the interview, making it easy to give thorough feedback in Greenhouse. The platform supports our equal opportunity hiring efforts by ensuring we evaluate each candidate on their own words with consistent interview criteria.

Here is a 1 minute BrightHire tour to help you familiarize yourself with key features of the platform.

Why do we record our interviews?

We believe that candidates should be assessed based on merit, not our memory (did you know that one hour after an interview, memory recall of the conversation declines to 44%?). BrightHire allows us to revisit key details, revise initial impressions, and replace implicit bias with explicit evidence. It brings structure and consistency to each interview and ensures that every candidate gets the opportunity they deserve.

BrightHire also helps our interviewers feel confident that they are providing an excellent candidate experience by running a fair and effective interview process. After every interview, full highlights from the conversation provide evidence that is essential for strong decision making and reducing bias. Along with training, this will help us check and mitigate the unconscious biases that we bring into interviews and hiring decisions.

Specifically, BrightHire helps with:

• Equitable Hiring: BrightHire helps us reduce bias in every interview and hiring decision by facilitating structured, consistent and evidence-based hiring for a fundamentally more equitable process.
• Quality & Consistency: BrightHire takes the gut-feelings and guesswork out of our decision making process, helping Sourcegraph uncover the best talent and raise the quality of every single interview, assessment and hiring decision our team makes.
• Speed & Efficiency: BrightHire helps us make great hires in record time by shortening feedback loops, removing unnecessary steps, and eliminating misalignment across our hiring teams.

How to setup BrightHire

You must be on Google Chrome in order to use BrightHire.

• Step 1: You'll automatically receive an email invite to BrightHire when you're scheduled for your first interview (if the invite does not come through, or you require access prior to your first interview, please Slack #Hiring and a member of the Talent team will manually invite you). Use the invite to set up your account, log in with Google using your Sourcegraph email, and sync your Google calendar.
• Step 2: Familiarize yourself with BrightHire by watching this video. Note: you must be a registered BrightHire user to view this video.
• Step 3: Download the BrightHire Chrome extension.

How to interview and take notes with BrightHire

Step 1 (join your interview via BrightHire)

• Via zoom: In Chrome, open Google Calendar and click the "Interview with BrightHire" button in your calendar invite when joining an interview. (This is instead of clicking "Join Zoom Meeting").

• In-person: If you’re interviewing someone in-person, please be sure to bring your computer to the conference room. When the interview begins, open your Google Calendar invite in Chrome and click the arrow next to “Interview with Brighthire” and select “Start as in-person interview” (screenshot below).

  While in-person, you can tell the candidate, “this interview will be recorded so that we can focus on you, not taking notes. If you prefer not to be recorded, please let me know - the structure of the interview and decision-making process will remain the same and your preference will have no weight on your candidacy.”