Behind the Scenes: Building HireAce and Why We’re Partnering with Deepgram
For most of my career, I’ve helped engineering and tech companies hire exceptional people. I’ve seen how a single great hire can transform a business and how a single bad one can quietly undo months of progress.
The irony is that those outcomes rarely come down to the candidate, their CV or even the assessments. They come down to the interview - that short, messy, high-stakes conversation where so much depends on interviewer capability, memory, instinct and often bias.
After years of watching smart teams make avoidable mistakes, I started asking: "What if interviews were data-driven, not just opinion-driven?"
That question became HireAce.
From Observation to Action
I’ve lost count of the number of times a hiring panel told me, “We just had a good feeling about them.” Sometimes they were right. Often, they weren’t.
What I learned was simple: most hiring mistakes don’t happen from lack of effort, they happen from lack of insight in the moment.
Hiring managers often go into interviews without shared structure.
They take individual notes that never get reviewed or compared with their colleagues.
And even when they agree on a “great” candidate, it’s hard to articulate why, or defend that choice later.
So we built HireAce to change that.
HireAce is an AI interview co-pilot that supports hiring managers before, during, and after every interview:
- Before: it helps design structured, outcome-focused interviews.
- During: it delivers live candidate insights, fairness prompts and interviewer coaching in real time.
- After: it collects all related data, turning spoken dialogue into measurable, comparable data.
The goal isn’t to replace the interviewer, it’s to give them clarity, confidence and evidence.
Why Deepgram Was the Missing Piece
To do all that, we needed something powerful: real-time understanding of conversation.
That’s where Deepgram comes in.
Their speech-to-text engine gives us fast, accurate transcription for multi-speaker conversations, even when people talk over each other (which, let’s face it, happens in most interviews).
This is what allows HireAce to provide:
- Live interviewer coaching and candidate analysis
- Bias-awareness prompts as the conversation unfolds
- Post-interview comparisons that reflect real substance, not guesswork
Deepgram’s low-latency technology lets us capture the nuance of live conversation and feed it straight into our live analysis layer, turning every interview into a source of structured insight.
Why “Human-in-the-Loop” Matters
We could have built HireAce to automatically score or rank candidates. But that’s not the future we believe in.
Hiring decisions should be informed by AI, not made by it.
Our “human-in-the-loop” model keeps hiring teams firmly in control, with AI acting as a co-pilot with the objective of surfacing data, identifying bias and prompting reflection without taking over the judgment call.
That balance between human experience and AI evidence is where real progress happens.
Looking Ahead
Joining the Deepgram Startup Program is an important milestone for us. It gives us the speech intelligence infrastructure to scale what we’ve built and to keep refining the delicate balance between technology and human decision-making.
We’re now preparing for our closed beta launch and we’d love to bring more forward-thinking teams into the conversation.
👉 Join the waitlist
👉 Interested in joining the beta program? Contact us
At HireAce, we believe interviews can be more than gut instinct and guesswork. They can be intelligent, fair and data-informed, without losing the human connection that makes them meaningful.
That’s the future we’re building, one conversation at a time.
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