[Interview] Diddo van Zand, Founder, In2Dialog, Netherlands

In2Dialog is a Dutch-based startup which develops AI-augmented tools to streamline and improve recruitment drawing from industry experience spanning the fields of recruitment, psychology and data science.

The startup’s CEO Diddo van Zand explains further.

Introduce your company

In2Dialog delivers conversation analysis solutions that enable customers to analyse interviews and retrieve key information using artificial intelligence.

The result is a more efficient, more accurate and more objective approach to interviewing, delivering better matches with less fuss whilst fostering greater management oversight and continuous improvement for your business.

Tell us about the professional backgrounds of the founders?

After graduating with an M.A. in Clinical Psychology and Psychometrics, Diddo van Zand spent nearly thirty years developing his expertise in the field of HR and recruitment.

A serial entrepreneur with extensive expertise in recruitment technology and AI tools, Diddo's most recent success was the development of Ixly - a science-based and data-driven HR assessment platform - which was successfully sold in 2023. Since then, his efforts have been focused on developing In2Dialog, along with a team of specialists who - like him - share backgrounds in the field of consultancy, recruitment, HR, psychology, AI and data-science.

Who are the owners of the company?

The founder Diddo van Zand is the biggest shareholder and operates as CEO. Members of the team also maintain minority shares, and a recent round of investment has also granted a small ownership stake to angel investors.

How is your company financed?

Initial finance was provided by Diddo van Zand through the successful sale of his previous start-up: Ixly. Team members also provided initial smaller-stake investment, and most recently, a set of Angel investors with established expertise in both recruitment and technology fields have provided additional financing to support the next stage of growth.

What would you say are the dynamics that continue to shape the HR tech space?

As with many industries, the field of HR is increasingly characterised by a need to balance efficiency with effectiveness. Processes need to be streamlined, and where possible, automated. But with recruitment, there is an intrinsically 'human' dimension to the process that cannot be overlooked: effective candidate matching is about understanding the 'click' between candidate and organisation. But discovering this personal connection within interviews can be challenging, resource-intensive and time-consuming.

The multi-stakeholder nature of the process is also important to the dynamic: many different stakeholders - both internal and external - are involved in making recruitment decisions, and it is important to make sure that they are all 'working from the same page'. They need consistent, objective information about candidates that can be communicated up and down the chain-of-command. However, given the personal nature of the interview process, this can often be hard to achieve.

Two central technologies are thus key to this drive for streamlining and efficiency. The first is ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), which aims to gather information on candidates in a single location so that it can be distributed efficiently to those involved in decision making. And secondly, AI - particularly in the form of LLM (Large Language Models) - can help to streamline and harmonise the understanding gained from interviews.

Why did you start In2Dialog? What opportunities did you see?

Having worked with AI, machine learning, LLMs and psychometrics in the field of HR and recruitment for many years, the ready potential of these combined elements has been apparent for quite a while. The sophistication that these tools have now reached presented the ideal time to start the business: maximising what can be done with them, but doing so before many others have seen or leveraged the potential.

What was important - and becomes even more important in light of developing AI rhetoric - was the development of a tool that augments but does not replace the human-dimension - something which is central to the hiring process, especially at the corporate level. Real-time conversation and note taking were obvious first steps in replacing the 'grunt work' of the recruitment process, but to truly enhance the human component, we recognised that AI and psychometrics could be used to give more consistent, objective and communicable insight on candidates. From there, a clear extension was the use of these elements to also augment not just individual interviews, but the overarching management and development of the teams' interview processes more generally.

What problems does In2Dialog solve?

Our software allows recruiters to save time while adding quality and efficiency to the hiring process. Recruiters can therefore focus on the candidates whilst better matching can be delivered by real-time job interview recording, automated note taking, data analysis and quality reporting. This solves the problem of time (and attention) wasted taking notes and writing reports, as well as eliminating the problem of inconsistency and overly-subjective viewpoints when communicating candidate performance to others. It grants much deeper and more objective insight into candidates, rendering the interview process more efficient, effective and fairer: ultimately, delivering better matches.

There is then the issue of recruiter performance. At In2Dialog we often describe the interview process as a 'black box', in the sense that without actively listening in on an interview, recruitment managers don't always know how their team is gaining information from candidates and formulating their conclusions. There may be inaccuracies or inconsistencies within/across interviews, and managers cannot know this without spending time actively validating interviews - something unfeasible in terms of time and resources. In2Dialog solves this problem because it allows managers to measure and benchmark interviewer performance remotely - examining their skills and styles, as well as the matches they achieve - in order to facilitate learning, development and harmonisation of organisational interviewing processes as a whole.

The metrics and information generated by In2Dialog this give hiring decision-makers better insight into their candidates, whilst at the same time giving recruitment managers deeper insight into the performance of their interview team.

What gives In2Dialog the competitive edge?

Some other firms are experimenting with the use of AI to streamline recruitment. In many cases, this has missed the point, since their applications have sought to replace rather than augment the interview dimension, which - as addressed above - remains crucial to ensuring a truly good fit between candidate and organisation.

Where other firms have sought to integrate AI or LLM into the interview component specifically, their central focus has remained largely on automating note-taking and generating summaries using AI to extract key data points.

This is an important part of the In2Dialog solution - indeed, recruiters can save as much as half an hour per interview, eliminating the need to write post-interview reports, and ensuring that interviewers can focus directly on their candidate without being distracted by note keeping. But this is only the first of three main benefits provided by In2Dialog.

The second benefit achieved by In2Dialog - and unique in its field - is the level of insight it grants recruiters regarding their potential candidates. It doesn't just create generic summaries, but extracts motivators, competencies and candidate expectations, and can be customised to extract more specific information aligned with the needs of the recruiter or organisation. It also goes further, quantifying dimensions of personality - using validated psychometrics to better understand and communicate the real nature of the candidate.

Moreover, as a third benefit, this level of insight can be turned towards the recruitment team itself. Recruitment managers can use In2Dialog to gain insight into how their team undertakes interviews. It quantifies and compares interviewing style, generating metrics for elements such as duration of interview and rate of trait extraction, percentage of turn-taking and open questioning, subject focus breakdown and energy-match between candidate and recruiter. Managers can use these to assess and benchmark team performance, without the time-consuming process of individually overseeing and monitoring interviews in-person.

As a final additional benefit, the range of integrations that In2Dialog offers - with some of the biggest ATS platforms on the market, including Bullhorn and Byner - is, we believed, unmatched by any other 'HR AI assistant'.

Who are your customers?

At present we focus on European Corporate HR and Staffing Agencies.

What does your company need in order to grow?

Future growth will be dependent on fostering additional integrations with ATS systems and investing in marketing communications in order to expand into further geographical markets.

What is your growth strategy?

The Dutch market has our initial focus, and this will be soon combined with an international expansion.

Generating leads by participating in industry events, embracing speaking opportunities and communicating our USP(s) to industry peers and decision makers will all be key strategic elements - leveraging our knowledge background to position ourselves as thought leaders and recruitment experts. We also value collaborating with ATS providers, HR consultancy firms and resellers in order to 'borrow' their authority in the market and position ourselves as industry players of similar caliber.

In which markets are you looking to establish your presence?

Our immediate goal is to have our software integrated in the majority of existing ATS systems, while expanding in Europe generally. We aim to become the standard application for recording and analysing job interviews, chosen in large-part because we a) perform that basic function more effectively than competitors, and b) provide significant value-added in relation to both candidate insight and management oversight/team development USPs.

What are your plans for the coming 12 months?

Within the year we hope to have onboarded 3000 users. We are also engaged in a continuous process of product development, enhancing the quality and depth of our software analysis to improve reports and matching data, as well as pushing forward with ongoing ATS integrations. From a communications perspective, we aim to extend our visibility in international markets.

www.in2dialog.com

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