Kyle & Co Releases New Benchmark Research Report on the State of Interview Intelligence

Study of 431 employers and job seekers finds 85% of companies already use interview intelligence tools, while candidate experience scores haven’t budged.

BOSTON, MA, UNITED STATES, October 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Kyle & Co, the research and advisory firm serving HR and talent technology leaders, today released “The State of Interview Intelligence,” a study finding that employers have largely solved the technical problem of recording and transcribing job interviews, and have made almost no progress on anything that happens after.

The report, sponsored by Lavalier, the interview intelligence platform from Textio, draws on mirrored surveys of 257 employers and 174 job seekers fielded in August 2026, along with structured interviews with talent acquisition and HR leaders.

The headline finding is a trust gap that would embarrass most other categories. Asked whether they’d recommend their own interview process, employers returned a net promoter score of +48. Candidates, asked the same question about the process they’d actually just been through, returned +3. That’s not a rounding error. It’s two groups describing what look like different events.

A few other numbers explain why. Eighty-five percent of employers already run some kind of interview intelligence tool, and 97 percent are at least piloting one, so by any normal measure, adoption is finished. But Kyle & Co’s maturity model, which sorts respondents by what they actually do rather than what they bought, puts just 14 percent at a level where anyone is analyzing that data or checking it against how people go on to perform.

Employers rate their interviews an 8.3 out of 10 for predicting job performance. The best available research on structured interviewing, even done well, tops out closer to .42 on a 1.0 scale. Sixty-eight percent of employers admit they’ve left a candidate hanging without a final answer in the past year, and 57 percent of candidates say the same thing happened to them.

“We’ve spent fifteen years teaching recruiting to measure everything except the one conversation that actually decides who gets hired,” said Matt Charney, Principal Analyst at Kyle & Co and author of the report. “Employers can tell you the exact hour an offer went out. Ask what happened in the room that got someone there, and most of them are guessing, confidently.”

The report frames this less as a talent acquisition problem than a business intelligence one sitting in the wrong department. Interview transcripts, it argues, are a live read on role clarity, manager alignment, competitor pay movement and why people are actually leaving their current jobs, all of it generated for free and thrown away within about 90 minutes of the conversation ending.

Sales figured out the equivalent move with conversation intelligence years ago. Recruiting hasn’t gotten there yet, according to the findings.

“This is the report we wished somebody else had written first,” said Kyle Lagunas, Partner at Kyle & Co. “Every category hits a point where buying the tool stops being the hard part. Interview intelligence hit that point a while back, and most vendors, and most buyers, still haven’t noticed.”

The report also carries a foreword from Colleen Gallagher, CEO of Textio, whose Lavalier product sponsored the work but had no role in its design or findings.

“Eighty-five percent of employers already have this technology, and the numbers candidates actually feel haven’t moved,” said Gallagher. “That’s on the vendors as much as anyone, including us. We funded this study because we wanted the real picture instead of another category deck, and the real picture is that capturing an interview and learning something from it are two different jobs. Most of this industry, us included, still owes people the second one.”

The report closes with ten recommendations ranked roughly by cost, the first four of which are free: explain evaluation criteria out loud at the start of an interview, assign a named owner for every handoff in the process, put someone in charge of interview quality specifically (not just the software), and publish an actual policy on candidate AI use instead of leaving it to whichever recruiter is in the room.

Kyle & Co’s research also found that organizations meeting its top maturity tier are five times less likely to ghost a candidate than those at the bottom, and give consistent post-interview feedback nearly universally, without using notably more software than anyone else.

“The State of Interview Intelligence” is available now by clicking here: download the full report now.

About Kyle & Co

Kyle & Co is a modern research and advisory firm helping HR and talent technology leaders make smarter decisions, faster. By blending practitioner insight, rigorous research and strategic advisory, the firm uncovers the signals that matter most, then translates them into action. Kyle & Co’s work spans custom research, workforce strategy and market analysis, supporting solution providers and HR leaders alike.

The firm is the team behind the Human-Centric AI Council, the Transformation Realness podcast, and prior research on quality of hire, workforce planning and responsible AI, and works with clients including Workday, ADP, GoodTime, Findem and SmartRecruiters.

Learn more at kyleandco.com.

About Textio and Lavalier

Textio builds tools that help high-growth companies recruit and give feedback to high-performing teams. Its latest product, Lavalier, is an interview intelligence platform that helps recruiting teams raise their hiring bar with structured interviews that gather real hiring evidence. Founded in 2014, Textio is used by people leaders at companies including Bloomberg, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung and Spotify, and has been named to Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies list, TIME’s Top WorkTech Companies, the Fortune Impact 20, the Forbes AI 50 and the CNBC Disruptor 50.

Evan White
Evan White PR
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