1519 – Hiring Start to Finish with Vidcruiter’s Sean Fahey

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0:58with us right now it's sean faye sean you are the ceo and founder of vid cruder you're found on the web at vid cruder.com sean this ain't your first rodeo vid cruder has been around for about 11 years congratulations on your longevity and uh you know to our friends who are listening to our podcast right now you can go to vid cruder.com just like it sounds and you can kind of follow along. But Sean, it's great to have you here. Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me. Yeah, talk a little bit about the platform and like who's using this platform and what big problems are you solving in the marketplace?

1:35Perfect. Well, yeah, so VidCruiter solves all sorts of different problems, but most of them are all geared around recruiting. So we have a recruiting solution that can help anyone who's hiring 100 people a year or more. That's sort of our target market. You need to be in that range. And they go up to some of the biggest companies in the world. And we solve different kinds of recruiting problems for different companies. So in some cases, we'll automate their interviewing or automate their scheduling or automate their reference checking or any of the above combined with adding skill testing or making their process more robust in terms of predictability of the hires that they're hiring.

2:16Faster hiring per hourly, So it's everything hiring from start to finish is what we sort of focus on. Our core products is video products, whether that's where the name VidCruiter comes from. But yeah, that's sort of in a nutshell what we do. And where does the video come in? And how is this different than let's say, okay, great. I've got 10 candidates. I'm just going to schedule them all now. And I'm going to book, you know, 15 or 20 minute Zoom calls with all of them. Just so we can have kind of those initial conversations and, and or, you know, maybe final conversations if, you know, we're hiring remotely.

2:52But how is VidCrueder different? And I know it's a lot more than just scheduling a time to chat on Zoom. Sure. So we have two video products. The first video product is more like Netflix than it is like Zoom. So the idea is that you send a link to the candidates and say, can you record yourself answering my five or 10 phone screen questions? They do that on their own time on a weekend or whenever it's convenient for them. And then from there, you would just log in on Monday morning, just like you log in on Netflix on Friday night and watch those interviews. And then at the time it takes you to do one phone screen, you could go through those 10 people, basically.

3:31Because you can watch them on fast forward. You can compare. You can ask kick out or knock out questions. And so you just dramatically speed up that process. And that's just with 10 people. If you're doing that with hundreds of thousands of people, it's dramatic, the cost savings that you have. Our second product is like Zoom, except it's purpose-built for recruiting. So first, like you mentioned, why don't I just schedule 10 people? Well, the act of scheduling is slow. And so our tool has an automated scheduling system that just goes out, gets your times, puts in the candidate of your times, and schedules those calls for you.

4:04Now, you could use a tool like Zoom or Teams to talk to them, or you could use our product that has built-in interview questions into the tool, that has built-in notifications into the tool. So, for example, as I'm talking to you, if I interrupt you, there's a prompt that says, hey, you shouldn't interrupt this person. You're interrupting. Oh, you're talking too much. You're talking not enough. And then it has your ratings built in, so you can put your scores in as you're talking directly in the interface. That's crazy. So that's feedback for the interviewer or the interviewee? The interviewer.

4:36Yeah. Oh, my gosh. You know, as a founder of an organization, like I want my interviewer to do a good job, you know, to attract people in. That's so cool. You're providing instant feedback about, you know, because, you know, and again, in the interviews that I've done too, like I'm doing the best that I can. I don't know that I'm the perfect, you know, job, you know, interviewer, you know, when I'm interviewing these candidates, I certainly don't want to screw up as you know, whether I'm an HR professional, or again, you know, I'm involved in that interview process. That's really cool. Just little nudges and coaching moments that we want to just say like, Hey, you know, maybe you shouldn't do this, maybe shouldn't do that and make you a better interviewer.

5:20We're also adding like, checking the questions that are being asked and maybe flagging out that question, you know, you shouldn't ask this question, or maybe you should ask this question, or, you know, coaching how to properly evaluate questions. The clients can choose how much of this stuff they want to add on, they may not want these extra features. But the goal is that it's your notes, just that part, you're scoring, you're done the interview, you walk away, all your notes are done, it's automated, you don't have to do anything. And you can even have automation built into that. So let's say we're in a video conference right now, I can have a button at the end it says move forward.

5:53So I don't have to do anything that moves them forward through all the different systems that I need to talk to, gets the candidate to schedule another video review or sends the offer letter or whatever the next step is, but that's done from inside the video conferencing platform. Yeah, and I would imagine VidCruiter has evolved quite a bit. Were there any big evolutions or needs that you needed to fulfill, particularly during the pandemic? Yeah. So pre-pandemic, we were focused on all in-person interview products. And then we switched and started doing a whole bunch of video products. And now we're focused on hybrid solutions.

6:32So because half the people are at home and the other half are in the office, in some cases, how do you interview in that scenario? Right? What do you do if the candidate's not coming in? Or if they are coming in and half your team is coming in and they're from home? And how do you make sure that that framework still works for all cases? So the pandemic really pushed video into another league. I mean, we went from 40 employees to 200 in about two years. So, yeah, that first week of the pandemic, we were like, the website's shut down. No one's talking to us. We're worried about our jobs like everyone was.

7:06And then we were some of the lucky people that all of a sudden the website just started getting flooded with pharmaceutical companies, food service companies, like everyone who still had to operate started to come to us to look at products that we could help. We actually helped hire, I think it was 1 ,500 nurses in a week that went from all across the U.S. all to New York City during that peak at COVID. That was the first city they got hit, and everyone had to go there to fly to help them. So we were part of crucially staffing up the New York City hospitals with our tool with one of our clients.

7:44It was actually kind of some cool stories that we were able to do to help make a little difference from just where we are, you know? Yeah. So VidCruiter is, you know, over 100 ,000 recruiters are using it, including the UN, UPS, Lionsgate, Samsung, US Foods, and many others. Is this primarily an enterprise-level solution, or does it make sense for SMBs to take a look at this? Yeah, as long as you're hiring over 100 people a year, we have some clients that'll do 50 a year, and they still see an ROI. But you have to be in that sort of range of hiring before it makes sense. Either that or before you hire a recruiter, then you could implement our product to sort of eliminate that person in that smaller business.

8:30We've seen some of those smaller cases. But most of our clients are sort of mid-sized, large enterprise governments. We do a lot of business with, we do business globally. So yeah, mostly sort of over a hundred hires a year, sort of the sweet spot. I noticed that, you know, for, in terms of like how VidCruiter can improve existing processes, You know, an employer who's really like they've got some DEI goals. How does VidCruiter help them ensure that they're hitting those goals to make sure that they've got the workforce that they really want to provide? We do that through multiple different ways and we've helped multiple different clients with those goals or those end goals.

9:20The first part that we look at is your interview design. So who's on your panel? Who's doing the interviewing? Is that a diverse panel? Is it a diverse panel who is part of this process? Maybe have different participants at different stages. So maybe you won't have a panel interview, but your screening will be done by certain genders or certain people from certain demographics. Whatever it is that you want, we could help associate and make sure that you're following just your panel formation goals and your interview goals. Then the second side of the coin is how do we make sure that you're being inclusive for everyone at every stage for every interview that they go through.

9:57The number one way to do that is to have a structured interview, which means everyone's treated identically from day one. So that's the first thing that you want to implement is called structured interviews, which all of our products do that. And you can stand behind that and say, every single person that goes through our process will be treated the same way, ask the same questions, evaluated the same way. That's another sort of standard of just proper interviewing, but it also helps with DEI initiatives. and you can rest your hat on that to say, like, we are doing these things to make sure that we follow proper interviewing.

10:29And then from there, you know, obviously the organization can make decisions on how they want to do hiring and what goals they have to achieve those. But the tool, since you, you know, one of the differences here is that you can have that pre-video, that first video, what we call pre-recorded. I can send that to a lot of managers, whereas before the phone screen might've just been done by a recruiter. So all of a sudden your profile and your interview is now being watched by maybe 10, 15, 20 people, whereas before one person would have only watched your interview. So we can track who's watching these, make sure that multiple people are watching that.

11:06You get more than one viewpoint on your profile, which also can help with these targets and goals in terms of making sure you have the right person in your organization. So that's just some examples of how we've helped organizations do that. and and sean are you what was the first version of a vid cruder and were you the developer or you're just the idea guy and like what what what was the uh you know the the garage in silicon valley story of like how this thing got off the ground so the very first version is i was knocking at doors uh to talk to recruiting firms to ask them like hey would you use a video tool And we got the recruiters to record themselves and the candidates to type their responses to the recruiter's video just to see, like, how would they interact with the video?

11:56Would they just type the response? That worked really well. We had some really personable recruiters that were presenting themselves. Then we added a recruiter, an applicant video. So the recruiter would record a video asking the question. The applicant would record a video answering that. And that worked really well, too. And so from there, we just ended up building on top of that framework, all sorts of other products. We have like eight different recruitment products now. And each one of those is purchased independently or, you know, bolted on depending. Or if you have another platform, we plug into that, you know, depending on what your needs are.

12:28But those are some of the ways that we got started. But it was really just like the results would get emailed. There was no login. It was the simplest possible platform. I had a developer friend of mine that put it together in like a day and a half, you know, it wasn't like a complicated thing, but we just went to the market, tested the market with a product that took a day and a half or two days to build. Um, and to validate the idea before we would start, you know, we didn't even incorporate at that time, which what was the point there, you know, if no one's going to buy this product, why would you even incur the legal costs to incorporate?

13:03And, you know, oftentimes people say, well, shouldn't you get an NDA and all this kind of stuff? It's like, yeah, no, it doesn't matter. It's more like, is anyone going to buy this should be your primary concern. And we got really good feedback. And then after that, eventually we incorporated the company and started. Man, I absolutely love that. And it's like, what a great path. And I hope someone that's kind of at those earlier stages, or they have, you know, something coming up and thinking about, you know, what that validation process is, you know, how much effort do we put into this before we, you know, start bringing something to market.

13:37And I think it sounds textbook to me, but you know, I've got my own biases on those ideas, having started a few companies. So today, Sean, what is, you know, how is business growth done today? Do you have a, I mean, obviously, you're a known commodity in this world. So you've got the authority, certainly have a huge book of business and people that you get to serve. But are you advertising? Do you have kind of a direct outreach approach? Or how do you acquire new customers today? Most of our client base is referrals or inbound marketing. We've heavily relied on inbound marketing since the beginning of our business.

14:23And 99 % of our clients come through those channels. So they find us online and we make sure that we're found with SEO and AdWords and other review sites and this kind of stuff. We also have strong alliances with key partners and have sort of rely on their sales teams to bring us clients through those channels. Yeah, tell me more about that. Who should be partnering with VidCruiter? So we partner with Oracle, Workday, SAP, Ceridian, ADP, you know, the biggest HR tech companies in the world. and we're integrated into those platforms. And so we lean into those relationships and see how can we leverage a lot of the teams that they have to sort of have them recommend our products.

15:11Now, it's not always that simple. You got to get to a certain stage and level to get to that kind of business growth, but that's where you really can not have to have all the cost structure associated with a huge sales team and have other sales teams sort of piggyback off their work to get those clients that way. one of the key things that we did was hire a partner manager early. So someone that just owns this idea and concept internally. And at first that sounded so weird to me to have someone do that when we didn't even have these relationships, but it's just like, figure it out. And eventually that person did, and it started to snowball.

15:48And now we have, you know, I don't know how many salespeople are recommending VidCritter, but more than I could ever hire right now. they may only do it 1 % a year, but it's still - You multiply that times a lot of partners and that's a nice stream. You got it. So that's another avenue to get deal flow in terms of client-based and it's a warm lead instead of a cold lead. So they tend to be better quality leads. For sure. For sure. Sean, someone's been listening to our conversation right now and they're in recruiting, they're in hiring. you know, they're people leaders. What is the, what's kind of the next best step if they're just kind of at just, you know, high level awareness right now, you know, where they can really get to know VidCruiter a little bit better?

16:41Sure. I mean, going to our website, checking out the resources, the customer case studies, the different products that we have, the different solutions that we sort of implement, you know, those range, depending on the level of automation and artificial intelligence that you're comfortable with, or if you're on the other side, it's more of a compliance standard and structure to your process and framework. We sort of tailor to both those kinds of clients. The one that want the cool tech, we're doing some cool stuff with chat GPT right now, versus the ones that want more of a structure and a framework and a compliance standard that they can feel comfortable that their process is compliant.

17:19So these are the kinds of things that we do. And our product just luckily was extremely flexible from day one. So we're able to tailor our solution to the client's exact needs. And again, the website is vidcruder.com. Sean Faye, again, founder, CEO, nearly 11 years, plus some, you know, behind the scenes stuff going on even before then. So congratulations on your global domination and, you know, really just making the world a better place and making sure that the right employers are connecting with the right candidates. And that process is, you know, just closer to that ideal, you know, connection that we hope that we really truly hope that we're making those right connections.

18:11And, you know, So it sounds like VidCruiter seems like a really great solution for just making the process more streamlined, but yet more authentic so that we could truly have that connection that we're looking for. You got it. All right, Sean, thank you so much again for joining us, founder, CEO of VidCruiter. Again, the website, VidCruiter.com. Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Josh.

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