Recently, Justyna McCaig and Ravin Shah, to talk about the origin of the company, what exactly are speed interviews, and how they can help you.
You can check out the video below, or read on about everything they discussed.
Hellohire’s Origin Story
Justyna: If you don’t know us already, we are known for making recruiting teams really happy. But that’s not how we started, is it Ravin?
Ravin: The original company was called Showfloor. The vision was always the same: create new, meaningful connections. It just so happens that those connections we’re creating now are between employers and job seekers. Whereas the original idea was a virtual trade show platform to connect buyers and sellers. We are very much focused on recruiting now.
Justyna: So it really started when the company started to focus a little bit more on the employer and new role relationship.
Ravin: Right. We ended up doing a lot of job fairs and career fairs. We found a niche where our product was loved. Individual employers would say “Hey I love the platform, but I don’t want to compete with 20-30 other employers. I’d like to host my own virtual job fair/virtual hiring event and brand it for my company, and make it about our hiring needs.”
In one of these hiring events in particular, we had a recruiter doing these back-to-back short video conversations with candidates. One after another they were doing these back-to-back video interviews, and that’s when the lightbulb went off. What if we could create this concept of back-to-back video interviews with interested candidates without having to do any work, coordination, and things like that. That was the birth of the idea of what are now speed interviews and what we built our entire product around.
The Issue with Current Hiring Practices
Justyna: I’m sure there’s people out there who say “We do speed interviews. We book 15 minute screen calls, and we hack together Zoom or Microsoft teams.” But there’s a ton of missed calls, bouncing emails, and let’s be honest, tons of ghosting going on. So people are trying to hack together this idea but it’s not quite working. All those different tools might be fine but they’re not quite it.
Ravin: People are used to what they know in the real world. We as a society always try to take the real world and then throw it into the digital sphere. People are hacking tools together to make these real world concepts work. One concept is a group interview; let’s invite a lot of people and do a presentation. Then let’s go through the room one at a time and have people answer questions.
The problem is that there’s still a lot of coordination, and you are wasting the candidates time. If you’re in a room with 25 other people and your person number 25, you’re spending an hour or two to have 2–5 minutes of talking time. These concepts have come from the real world but they don’t make sense virtually. Why do I need to spend 2 hours in front of a screen looking at 25 other tiles when I’m only going to have 5 minutes of talking time? So that’s one of the things we solve.
The Magic of Speed Interviews
Justyna: Currently, there is nothing on the market that is purpose-built for recruiters and hiring teams to give them the same level of control over the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, while also making sure that the right candidates are coming to the forefront. It’s purpose-built, easy to use, quick to jump in. This is built for the process recruiters use and rely on, and making that a reality.
Ravin: There are different categories of products that claim to do something similar, but this is a product built specifically for recruiting/hiring that brings candidates to you without having to do any work—it’s honestly like magic. Until you actually experience it, it will sound like magic. Imagine you’re hiring—you’re a call centre or retail or hospitality company—your hiring a ton of people. Imagine you just open up your computer and boom there’s someone, a candidate, that wants to work for you.
Justyna: And not just a candidate, there’s candidates—a queue of ready candidates.
Hellohire’s Speed Interview Experience
Ravin: Imagine a virtual queue, and people are coming in waves to come for that interview. As a recruiter, you open up your computer and boom there’s a candidate and you interview. As soon as that interview is done the next one shows up, and the next one, and the next one. This is the reality of customers using Hellohire speed interviews. It eliminates all the work that you do in reviewing resumes, chasing candidates to do a phone screen, and in no shows. There’s no other way to protect yourself against no-shows other than our fancy algorithm that is optimized for the recruiters time. Our algorithm sets it up so that recruiters are never ever waiting and candidates will wait from 0 to a maximum of 10 minutes for their interview. On average, it’s often 0.
Get Started on Your Own Speed Interviews
Justyna: There might be a bit of shame from recruiters for their no-show rates. This isn’t a unique problem. The more we talk to really good hiring teams the numbers start at 50%, and we hear 50% would be a great no-show rate. Sometimes it’s as low as 20%. And these are high quality brands, great paying jobs, but somewhere in the process people aren’t connecting—there’s some friction there—and it’s essentially what we’re trying to do, just get you to meet more candidates faster.
We want to help you explore speed interviews and get a taste for it. Go to our website or YouTube channel for resources to get an idea on how this is done, and how you can get started. We do also offer a free trial, so give it a shot, nothing to lose! It could be a game changer for you.
Not sure where to to start? We’re also launching an Applicant Friction Test – get your application scorecard to better understand where your challenges are. We could help you figure out what’s behind all your no shows.
Thank you Ravin for the quick convo, hopefully we see you soon!