Purpose

This article provides an introduction to Eightfold's AI Interview Companion agent, and explains how it works.

Overview

Interviewers often face the challenge of trying to engage with candidates while simultaneously taking detailed notes, which can lead to delayed or inconsistent feedback.

The AI Interview Companion is a passive, AI-powered assistant designed to solve this problem. It 'silently' joins scheduled video interviews, records the conversation, generates a real-time transcript, and automatically pre-fills the interviewer's feedback form.

This AI companion is strictly a note-taker. It doesn't speak, turn on video, evaluate the candidate, or ask questions.

Note: Enabling AI Interview Companion requires an additional license cost. For further details and assistance, contact your dedicated Account Executive or Customer Success Manager.

Key features

• Automated note-taking and summaries: Generates concise, bulleted summaries of the interview and maps the conversation to your specific feedback template.
• Multi-platform support: Integrates seamlessly with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
• Multiple interviewer and interview slot support: You can add multiple interviewers to a panel and schedule multiple slots. Each mandatory interviewer will receive their own personalized, pre-filled feedback form.
• Multilingual capabilities: Capable of transcribing and filling out feedback forms in several supported languages, matching the language of your scheduling template.
• Candidate compliance: Candidates receive an email notification that an AI companion will be present and they can opt out before the interview. If they opt out, the bot is automatically removed from the meeting.
• Scheduling link support: As well as the scheduling wizard, you can attach the companion to a scheduling link — the shareable link a candidate uses to pick their own slot.
• Edit feedback with your own notes: After the interview, add your interview notes and have the companion redraft only the answers those notes speak to, reviewing each proposal before it lands.
• Role-based transcript visibility: Your administrator decides by role who can read the verbatim interview transcript. Interview summaries, answers, and ratings aren't affected.

How to use?

Schedule an interview (For recruiters)

Scheduling an interview with the companion is integrated directly into the standard workflow.

1. Go to the position pipeline and Schedule a Meeting for the relevant candidate(s).
2. From the Scheduling modal, select the scheduling template.
3. Enter the meeting title, select the meeting duration, add your interviewers, and select the Window of Availability.
4. Turn on the Interview Companion Agent toggle switch.
5. Select a supported platform (Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams).
6. Click Add room, location, resources for the interviewer, and select a feedback form. The AI companion uses this feedback form to map the conversation and auto-fill the appropriate answers.
7. Complete the scheduling. The candidate will automatically receive a communication template notifying them about the AI companion.

Schedule with a scheduling link (for recruiters)

A scheduling link is the shareable link you send so a candidate can pick their own slot. You can attach the companion to a link so interviews booked through it get the same note-taking and pre-filled feedback.

The setting is per link, so you can attach the companion to one link and leave another without it. A link whose setting you've never touched follows your organization's default.

1. Go to your Account page and open the My Calendar tab.
2. Find the Scheduling Link section, and the card for the link you want to change.
3. Turn on the companion setting on that card. Depending on your organization's setup it's labelled either AI Companion or Interview Companion Agent.
4. If the setting is unavailable, hover it to see why. The link's scheduling template either has no video conferencing tool (Add a video conferencing tool to this template to use the AI Companion), uses one the companion can't join (The AI Companion cannot join this template's conferencing tool), or is no longer available (This scheduling template is no longer available, so the AI Companion cannot join).
5. Select Copy Link and share the new copy. You'll see Link copied to clipboard.

Important: Turning the setting on changes the link. Every link that exists today produces the same URL as before, and a copy you shared earlier keeps its original behavior — so always copy and share the link again after turning the setting on.

There's no save button in this section. The setting saves as soon as you change it.

What the candidate sees

A candidate booking from a companion-enabled link can decline the companion before they book:

1. On the slot picker, they open the AI Companion actions menu and select Opt out.
2. They confirm the Opt out of AI Companion? prompt.
3. The picker then shows the AI Companion will not join this interview. They can select Add AI Companion back to reverse it before confirming the booking.

Opting out never blocks or changes the booking itself — only the companion is affected. A candidate can decline the companion, but can never add it to a link where you didn't enable it. Once booked with the companion attached, the candidate's meeting view shows either Interview companion agent added or AI Companion added.

During the interview

• Depending on your platform setup, the bot will either automatically bypass the waiting room (Zoom) or require the interviewer to admit it into the room (Google Meet/Teams).
• Once in the meeting, it'll appear in the participant list as Interview Companion.
• The bot remains completely 'silent' and 'passive' throughout the call.

Review and submit feedback (for interviewers)

Once the meeting ends, the AI companion goes to work.

1. The bot takes about five minutes to generate the transcript and map the answers to the feedback form.
2. Interviewers receive an "Action Required: Submit Feedback" email once the AI has finished pre-filling the form.
3. Log in to the Interview Feedback Center. You'll see an AI-generated interview summary and auto-filled answers for the questions discussed.
4. You have full control to edit, delete, or rewrite any AI-generated text.
   Note: If you start manually typing in the feedback form before the AI finishes its generation, the AI will stop saving to prevent overwriting your manual notes.
5. Click Submit feedback. (If there were multiple interviewers, each person must review and submit their own separate copy of the feedback form).

Redraft answers from your own notes (for interviewers)

Instead of editing the pre-filled answers by hand, you can hand the companion your interview notes and have it redraft the answers those notes speak to. Answers your notes don't speak to are left exactly as they are.

1. Open the feedback form for an interview the companion attended.
2. Select the floating Edit feedback with AI button on the form.
3. In the panel headed Edit with AI Companion, type or paste your notes into the Interview notes box, which prompts you to Add your notes to generate feedback.
4. Select Generate feedback. While the companion works, the panel shows Generating response...
5. Review the proposals. The review bar shows how many answers are left for review out of the total, and each proposal shows Current answer above Proposed answer.
6. Select Accept or Ignore on an individual answer, or use Accept all or Ignore all to decide on every proposal at once.
7. To work through one question's proposals, open Review AI suggestions on it — a pending count shows how many remain — and move between them with Move to previous suggestion and Move to next suggestion. Each proposal lists the points it drew based on your interview notes.
8. To adjust your notes and try again, expand them with Show your interview notes, edit them, then select Generate new feedback.
9. Select Submit feedback to submit the completed form as you normally would.

Nothing the companion proposes enters the form until you accept it. If Generate feedback can't be selected, your notes are either too short or too long — add a little more detail, or shorten them.

Who can see the interview transcript

The transcript is the verbatim record of what was said in the interview. Whether you can read it depends on a permission your administrator sets by role, separately from your ability to open the interview feedback.

• If your role has it, the transcript panel shows the transcript as usual, alongside the recording.
• If it doesn't, the same panel shows Transcript locked, with the message You don't have access to this transcript. Visibility is set by your administrator.
• You always keep transcripts of interviews you conducted, whatever your role. That covers co-panelists scheduled for the same interview.
• Access is decided per interview, so you may find one transcript readable and another locked.
• Access is checked each time you open a transcript, so a change your administrator makes applies immediately — including to interviews that already happened.

Interview summaries, auto-filled answers, and ratings aren't affected. Only the verbatim transcript is. Where transcript download is available, it follows the same permission.

Two other panel states mean something different from being locked:

• Transcript unavailable — the transcript was removed under your organization's data retention policy.
• Not yet available — the transcript is still being processed after the interview.

This permission covers AI Companion transcripts. AI Interviewer transcripts keep their existing behavior.

Where your feedback reminder arrives

The reminder asking you to complete your feedback reaches you by email. Where your organization has connected a chat tool, it also arrives as a chat message in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

• Chat doesn't replace email. Chat delivery is additional, so the email reminder continues.
• You don't choose the channel. It's resolved automatically from what your organization has connected, not a personal setting.
• The chat version carries a short summary. It includes a condensed version of the interview summary plus the candidate's details, with a link through to the full record where you complete the form.
• Candidate details follow the same masking as the email, so the chat message shows no more than the email would.

The pre-interview prep message works the same way. For more info, read Interview prep by AI Companion.

What the companion assesses

The companion works out which areas to assess from the questions on your own feedback form, then answers each question from the evidence it has for that question. Two consequences worth knowing:

• The quality of the answers follows the quality of your form. A question that bundles several ideas gets one bundled answer.
• Where the evidence is thin, the companion leaves an answer blank rather than filling it. Recommendation and decision questions are always left blank for you to complete.