In 2013, I wrote a report on the future of asynchronous video interviewing; while a few employers were experimenting with it, there was widespread scepticism about its usefulness and longevity. Fast forward ten years, and we are literally living in a different world. Post-pandemic video now sits at the centre of the working day for many of us, and asynchronous video interviewing is most certainly here to stay.
So how are candidate attitudes towards video evolving, what problems is video interviewing solving for employers, and how will things develop in the future?
My guests this week are the perfect people to answer these questions and give us a deep dive into the market. Phil Strazzulla is the Founder of Select Software Reviews, and Euan Cameron is the CEO at Willo. Keep listening for a mix of practical advice and informed insights about the future of video interviewing.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How video interview has developed since the pandemic
• Evolving attitudes to video
• Is a video interview now an expectation for candidates?
• Removing interview friction
• Point solution or platform?
• The case for asynchronous
• DE&I
• Improving hiring outcomes
• Will the resume ever die?
• How does AI fit into the future of video interviewing?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Willo (0s):
Support for this podcast is provided by Willo, a video interviewing platform for scaling businesses. As the talent market evolves, you are probably thinking about how to build a more inclusive candidate experience that doesn’t require long days on Zoom, Teams, or Skype. Willo is a virtual interviewing platform where candidates can record responses on their own time using video, audio, or text. And it’s used by some of the fastest-growing businesses like Coinbase, Hotjar, and HelloFresh. Willo’s flexible platform means candidates can truly be themselves and recruiters get a consistent transparent process.
Willo (44s):
It’s also excellent for the candidate experience. 35% of candidates interview with Willo between the hours of 6:00 PM and 6:00 AM. Willo also integrates seamlessly with over 5,000 business applications such as Workday, Workable, Lever, greenhouse, and Team Taylor. There’s a free trial to try everything and if you need more Willo’s tailored plans include features to help you expand your talent pool and streamline recruiting operations. All with 24/7 live support. Request a personalized demo today at willo.video, that’s W-I-L-L-O.video.
Matt Alder (Intro) (1m 51s):
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 504 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. In 2013, I wrote a report on the future of asynchronous video interviewing; while a few employers were experimenting with it, there was widespread skepticism about its usefulness and longevity. Fast forward ten years, and we are literally living in a different world. Post-pandemic video now sits at the centre of the working day for many of us, and asynchronous video interviewing is most certainly here to stay. So how are candidate attitudes towards video evolving, what problems is video interviewing solving for employers, and how will things develop in the future?
Matt Alder (Intro) (2m 36s):
My guests this week are the perfect people to answer these questions and give us a deep dive into the market. Phill Strazulla is the Founder of Select Software Reviews, and Euan Cameron is the CEO at Willo. Keep listening for a mix of practical advice and informed insights about the future of video interviewing.
Matt Alder (2m 57s):
Hi Ian. Hi Phil. Welcome back to the podcast both of you. Could we just start with you both introducing yourselves and telling us what you do? Maybe Euan, you can go first.
Euan Cameron (3m 9s):
Thanks for having us on again, Matt, it’s nice to speak. So I am the CEO and co-founder of Willo. And Willo is an asynchronous video interviewing platform. We founded in January, 2020. And over the past three years have successfully raised over 3 million followers. We just closed our most recent round there and today we have over 10,000 paying users in 140 countries.
Matt Alder (3m 36s):
Fantastic stuff. And Phil would, could you do the same?
Phill Strazulla (3m 38s):
Sure. Thanks for having me again. My name’s Phill Strazulla. I run a website called Select Software Reviews where HR and recruiting teams can research what tools to buy anything from applicant tracking systems through artificial intelligence.
Matt Alder (3m 54s):
Fantastic stuff. Now I’m going to start by my first question I’m going to ask to you, Phil, because I think the development video interviewing over the last few years has been really interesting and obviously, you know, quite phenomenal fueled by the pandemic. How do you feel the category has developed and what have you seen happen since the pandemic?
Phill Strazulla (4m 19s):
Yeah, it, it’s really cool actually, like 12 years ago I was a venture capital analyst. And I remember I spent like six months looking at video interview companies. And back then, like we were literal, companies were like sending webcams to the candidates, which was kind of hilarious. And then, you know, everybody had webcams and we got comfortable on video and all this stuff and now it’s like very much a part of most, I would say or many talent acquisition teams repertoires during the pandemic exploded because we had to do it remotely. And I think that a lot of TA teams kind of came around to, you know, the folks that maybe hadn’t thought about too much were forced to think about it and realized like, “Hey, this is actually a really good candidate experience.
Phill Strazulla (5m 5s):
It’s great for us because we’re servicing applicants that maybe would’ve passed on a resume. But they have a presence, they have an interesting story. The resume is extremely incomplete sort of artifact when we think about somebody’s professional past and capabilities. So, I think the big story around the pandemic was just a more pervasive utilization of this tool.
Matt Alder (5m 30s):
I completely forgotten about the company that used to mail webcams to people. Yeah, that’s such a interesting kind of snapshot how far things have come in a sort of a relatively short period of time, I suppose. Euan, tell us a little bit more about your kind of backstory, why you sort of founded a video interviewing company, and also perhaps how you’ve seen the reaction of people sort of change towards it over time, particularly over the last sort of two years.
Euan Cameron (6m 3s):
Absolutely. So, I remember the webcam mailing days as well. And if we cast back to 2014, that was when I had my moment to experience video interviewing for the first time. Back in 2014, I’m hiring candidates, salespeople, junior salespeople for a startup at the time. And I was getting all these CVs in or resumes in and I was struggling to find the people that had the passion, the energy, and the drive, and the willingness to learn from the CVs obviously. So I started asking people for videos. And it was way back in 2014, I’m asking people to record a video of themselves speaking now. We think about that now and we think, well that’s really easy. You just pick up your smartphone and you would just switch the camera on and you would hit record and that was really easy.
Euan Cameron (6m 47s):
But back in 2014, it was a whole different ball game. You know, you had to connect your webcam, you had to like download some recording software. You had to figure out how to actually transfer the file cause it was not my big file if you wanted to send it. So it was really clunky. I started asking people to send me in videos, and I said three minutes. So I said, can you send me a three-minute video introducing yourself and why you would be perfect for this job? And it was kind of that moment when I started receiving these videos in from people that I realized that there was something in this concept and it was over the course of that year, so I’m hiring, a number of salespeople over that year. It was over the course of that year that I’m receiving all these videos in.
Euan Cameron (7m 29s):
They’re coming in all shapes and formats as well. So you can imagine like tiny little thumbnail videos that have been recorded on the smartphones back in 2014. We had lots of sideways videos because they didn’t know how to use their webcams properly. We had lots of videos that just wouldn’t open because they were attached to word documents and things. It was like a real mess. But the videos that did come through that I could actually watch, it was really eye-opening. I could immediately see that drive, determination, passion, willingness to learn. That allowed me to really fast-track them straight into final stage or even straight into offers sometimes, depending on what they were saying and what the team thought as well, used to share the videos around the team.
Euan Cameron (8m 8s):
And then we used to take them in and get ’em trained up. So that was way back then. I then did that for a number of years, just asking them to send in videos through email, nothing sophisticated about it. And then we got to like 2017, 2018 and I decided to have a go making this video interview concept into a more robust system and a SaaS platform that people could actually use and candidates most importantly could use as well. Because it was creating a bit of a bottleneck, me asking for all these videos, as you would imagine. So yeah, decided to create this platform in 2017. Built it 2019, and then launched 2020.
Euan Cameron (8m 50s):
I guess the evolution I’ve seen over the past two years in particular is just the willingness to record yourself on video. If I cast back to 2019 when I’m doing candidate interviews, I’m doing a few hundred candidate interviews just randomly, you know, asking candidates all stages of the application process. “Hey, if you were to do this on video, what would it look like? How would you feel?” All that kind of stuff. The biggest kind of pushback at the time, 2019 pre-pandemic was, I don’t know where these videos are going to go. I don’t really like the idea of seeing myself on camera, let alone talking on camera. All the kind of all the objections that we obviously overcame over the past two years were coming up and again and again and again.
Euan Cameron (9m 37s):
And obviously, COVID came along and everyone switched to video calls literally overnight. And it wasn’t just a specific demographic or a specific age group either. It was the entire world switched to video calls and that was really quite mind-blowing for us as a very tiny startup video interviewing platform to see that radical shift where our end users, our candidates, our end users were suddenly comfortable, happy with the process. Didn’t have any questions anymore, didn’t have any objections anymore. Completely changed. Completely changed.
Matt Alder (10m 14s):
Do you think there’s an expectation now amongst candidates that they just expect to do video? And if they didn’t that would be strange if they had to do all their interviews face to face or just on the telephone. Do you think there’s an expectation now that it should be video?
Euan Cameron (10m 30s):
Depends on the person. So if you’ve been – we’ve done a few studies on this. We get really interesting insights from candidates if we ask them the survey at the end of the interview. We do get a lot of responses. So, it’s really interesting to see if candidates have been through the traditional interview process in the traditional hiring process pre-2019, a lot of them will still expect to have face-to-face meetings or telephone calls. But people that have come into the hiring process in the past three years. They don’t really know anything else. So yeah, they’re kind of expecting video and video is the norm. And I think the, what we’ll see over obviously over the next few years is that more and more people will just be accepting video as the way.
Euan Cameron (11m 16s):
I think that’s really important as well because as we speak about all the time in Willo here, the ability to actually cast a wider net is obviously there when you start using video rather than invite people into an office, you remove a lot of like transport, travel issues, geography issues, all that kind of stuff. Time zone issues are all gone. So I think it’s a good thing.
Matt Alder (11m 37s):
Phil, just coming back to you. I suppose two questions in one really. What are the kind of problems that you are seeing employers solve by using video interviewing? And also just in terms of I suppose the systems, is there a case to have standalone systems like Willo and integrated systems? Are they integrated systems that do other things as well? What’s the kind of view, what’s the sort of the split? What do you think?
Phill Strazulla (12m 2s):
Yeah, it’s a great question. Actually, as Euan started talking, I realize that this candidate experiencing is a really important trend. When I was in business school in 2013, Sequoia, which is the best venture capital firm in the world was recruiting on campus. And they had backed one of these video interview companies, one of the early ones, and they sent people a link as the first step in the process and it was like a scandal on campus. It was like, “Oh my, how dare they. Like, they don’t even wanna talk to me.” And I think, well, one, you know, if you’re, if you’re recruiting for like executives or whatever, you’re probably going to set up something more formal.
Phill Strazulla (12m 45s):
But two, it just like shows how far this has come where now it’s like just so standard. Anyway, sorry. To your question. I think the main pain points are one around time, so how do we effectively vet lots of candidates, and how do we do it in a way that makes sure we’re not missing people? And then two, how do we also enhance the resume? Because when you look at a resume there’s some stuff there, but like realistically, there’s been a lot of research that shows it’s not the best way to hire people, certainly based on what somebody chooses to write down as bullets and some people are great marketers, and some people aren’t.
Phill Strazulla (13m 31s):
And so I think those are the two main problems. And so when I think about the value propositions, it’s decreasing time and increasing quality of hire, which both of which are extremely important. There’s probably a time to fill ROI in there as well, depending on how you’re using video interviewing. But I think those are sort of like the big buckets. In terms of these tools. Yeah, I mean obviously there’s a lot of value in using a point solution that is really, really good. If a company goes deep on something, they’re going to have all these teeny tiny product issues ironed out that if it’s just a module and it’s product manager at some larger company running the video interview platform, they’re not going to be as focused on the details.
Phill Strazulla (14m 20s):
And they’re also, I guess like I’m a big believer in sort of the economic incentives of things. Like they’re just not economically incentivized to stress out over every little piece of the puzzle. And so something like Willo that’s sort of really focused on by an entrepreneur. It’s going to be just a better product. So I think there’s a huge need and my understanding as well and you can correct me is that, you know, there, it’s not like you’re buying this product and it sits on an island. It’s actually integrated with probably the systems that you’re already using like your Apple contracting system.
Matt Alder (14m 59s):
Absolutely. Euan coming back to you and I suppose again, that kind of problem question. You know, what problems are you seeing your customers solve, I suppose recruiting problems that they have solve with the system? And then I suppose to follow up from that, obviously, lots of organizations are using video interviewing by default because they’ve been doing it since the pandemic and they’ve not changed it. Many of them will be using things like Zoom and Teams and other generic platforms. What’s the case for using a specialist platform?
Euan Cameron (15m 33s):
Sure. I’ll answer the first question first, which is why customers come to us and what problems are they solving. And I think that’s a really interesting question. There’s a couple of key ones there. Phil mentioned the first one a minute ago, which is time. So a lot of the customers that we work with, they’re TA departments are typically under-resourced and time is super valuable to them. And if they’re spending a lot of time doing, for example, telephone screening calls or they’re scheduling in those telephone calls, or they’re scheduling in Zoom or Teams calls, and then they’re having to conduct those, it’s super time consuming. And just as you were talking at, just ran some quick numbers. Last month just to kind of put this into perspective in terms of the time element, we saved 37,000 hours of time for our users, which if we just equate that to hourly salaries, that’s like $900,000 of salary saved.
Euan Cameron (16m 27s):
And that’s a huge time save. Biggest reason for that is that obviously, you’re automating the scheduling because there is no scheduling. Candidates can do the interview whenever they like. And then the other part of the puzzle is that obviously doing it asynchronously, they’re in charge of when they do the interview. So they’re actually going through the steps and answering the questions in their own time. And that combined with the scheduling is a huge amount of time. If you think about traditional first-stage interview you spend 10, 15 minutes scheduling and then you spend half an hour actually on the call speaking to the candidate, and then you maybe have a 15-minute wrap-up, so you’re looking at an hour per candidate. Whereas if you jump into something like Willo, you’re looking at an average of 10 minutes per interview.
Euan Cameron (17m 9s):
If you look at the average number of questions and the amount of time that a candidate takes to answer. So 10 minutes versus an hour, it’s a significant amount of time saved. But on the flip side, it’s also a significant amount of time saved with a candidate because they’re also having to be part of that one-hour time. And it’s amazing to see the sort of, the employer realizes at first, but then after a few months of using Willo, they realize, “Hey, the get the candidate feedback is really good here because candidates are telling us that they can do this obviously in their evening, in their own time. It doesn’t take up a bunch of their time, they don’t have to take time off work, all that kind of stuff.” So, time is definitely the number one thing that we’re talking about here for both the employer and the candidate, which is great.
Euan Cameron (17m 52s):
But then we deeper kind of meaningful stuff that we speak about every day, which is diversity and inclusion as a perfect example. So diversity and inclusion, when using something like an asynchronous video interviewing platform allows you to really open up a wider net than you traditionally would be able to. If you’re asking, for example, for candidates to send in a CV and then come into your office for a a first stage interview, you’re immediately excluding a number of different groups of people, whether it’s minority groups or just types of workers. For example, if you’re a shift worker and you are invited to an interview in the middle of your shift, you might not be able to go to that interview and you just miss out on the opportunity because you need the money potentially from that shift.
Euan Cameron (18m 35s):
Or perhaps you live in the countryside, in the interviews in a city, again, you’re being discriminated against there because you might not be able to make it into the city. And then we go into like different types of minority groups, they may not have, for example, access to the same education, so then that comes up in their CV or the resume and they’re immediately screened out at that point. Whereas, using someone like video, that person can put themselves forward for who they really are and give you a more deep and meaningful conversation and understanding of who they are. So I think diversity inclusion and opening up that wider net and casting that wider net is important.
Euan Cameron (19m 16s):
You’re also a final point here for me before I talk for too long on this point, but I think neurodiversity is a really interesting piece as well. So let me look at the traditional interview. The traditional interview can be quite discriminating for people with disabilities or new neurodiversity and learning issues or challenges. So for example, I’m a dyslexic person and so is my co-founder. Being dyslexic means that it’s really quite challenging to write a CV or a cover letter and both of those documents are really structured and that’s even more difficult for a dyslexic person because structure in organization is not a strong point. So, asking somebody to do a CV when they’re dyslexic immediately puts them on the back foot and actually disadvantages them.
Euan Cameron (20m 1s):
Whereas using a tool like asynchronous video between platform, you get to hear from me and who I really am rather than what my writing skills are like, which is not essential to most jobs anyway. So that would probably be the kind of key benefits of time-saving productivity obviously increases better candidate experience, which is what everyone wants, and better diversity and inclusion just by casting a wider net and accepting people for who they really are rather than what they write on a piece of paper.
Phill Strazulla (20m 30s):
Euan, this is sort of a random question, but, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot here, but I’m sort of curious, like, it seems intuitive that an interview would be a much big better signal than a resume and therefore by utilizing that sort of technology you’d have a better hiring outcome. And I don’t know if like there’s ever been a study done that shows that that is true or false.
Euan Cameron (20m 57s):
Good question. So I can give an anonymous example. We have a client, which I haven’t got permission to share without asking them, but I can give you the example anyway. And it was quite a large employer in the UK and the employer, and this is just one example, there is a few, but this is a really strong one. I think they previously used an application and a resume as their first stage of screening. And what they found doing that was that they always ended up with the same people. They always ended up with the same applicants in the process and they always limited the number.
Euan Cameron (21m 39s):
So they always ended up with like, I don’t know a specific cohort of person between this age and this age, you know, white male potentially with a certain education background. And they only ended up with a certain number of those people. They actually switched to using a video at the very start of the process. So they said, “Let’s not ask for application forms to be filled in. Let’s not ask for resumes. Let’s ask all of these candidates just to complete three or four questions on video. We’ll take it from there and we’ll use that as the screening basis.” And I think three of them reviewed each of the videos and had their own scoring metrics behind the scenes. But they were using the videos as the sort of the collection method for data rather than a resume.
Euan Cameron (22m 23s):
And what they found was that they actually, first of all, got a more diverse pool of applicants, but they also for the first time ever reduced their time to hire and they reduced their time to hire by a third. So they, this was an organization, quite an old organization, been around for, you know, many, many, many years. And they did this every year. And they always had the same outcome and it was the same people every year and it took the same amount of time for time to hire. But they reduced their time to hire by a third immediately by using this process. But they also more importantly opened up their pool of applicants to a much more diverse audience, which is amazing.
Matt Alder (23m 6s):
That’s a really interesting outcome and I think it really speaks to what happens when you start to change the recruitment process, then you start to get these kind of different outcomes. Just to sort of return to the second half of my questionnaire about companies who are doing video interviewing but may still be using Teams or Zoom or those kind of things now. You know, obviously bar the obvious thing that the teams never works properly. What do you say to companies like that to persuade them to move off Zoom and some of the other platforms that are on there?
Euan Cameron (23m 44s):
Zoom never works for me either. I think the key thing for those kind of conversations is that recruiters will burn themselves out if they sit on Zoom all day. It’s a really tough job. If you’re switching from doing face-to-face interviews, pre-pandemic, you’ve then gone onto Zoom. If you continue doing Zoom for the rest of your career, you would burn yourself out. It’s a tough old gig staring at a screen for hours on end talking to candidates. We know, it’s a difficult job anyways, interviewing face to face, but put it on Zoom and it’s even more difficult because there’s a lot of monos of just sitting there in front of that screen in that same chair. So there’s a kind of burnout element which we can address quite easily because we take away the monotony of sitting for literally hours.
Euan Cameron (24m 30s):
You know, we have customers that come to us and they have their TA team will sit for seven, eight hours a day on Zoom speaking to candidates back to back. And that’s not going to be a successful future for that team. So, one of the key things that we do is we obviously enable them to get away from that by allowing the candidates to record all of these shorter videos and by doing shorter structured videos, so imagine you ask five questions, candidate answers, each of those questions, all of the questions are presented to the candidate in the same order. So you can easily compare as well. But more importantly, it’s much easier to consume that content because the questions have been presented to each candidate in the same way.
Euan Cameron (25m 14s):
So they tend to answer them in a more concise way as well. So, you can consume all that information much more quickly and easily. But what’s really cool about it as well is that you can actually do that in your run time. So for example, some of our customers will dedicate the morning, so they’ll maybe say from 9 till 12, we’ll just review our Willo video interviews, and then in the afternoon we’ll have follow-ups, and we’ll have offers, and we’ll do maybe face-to-face interviews or zoom interviews. And it just allows ’em to really get a huge chunk of their day back to do those other things which, traditionally get pushed out into the evenings or the fringes of the day because they’ve spent their entire day on Zoom.
Euan Cameron (25m 56s):
So I think time’s a massive thing there and the monotony of sitting on Zoom calls all day is removed, which is I think one of the biggest benefits.
Matt Alder (26m 7s):
Phil, what does the future look like? Right at the beginning we talked about mailing people webcams and how things have changed over the last decade or so. What do you think the future of this space holds for us?
Phill Strazulla (26m 19s):
It’s a really good question. And I guess like the topic of the day is artificial intelligence, right? What’s interesting about the AI applications in this space? I think maybe not obvious, but it’s clear that some sort of artificial intelligence can look at a transcript, hear differences in voices, can look at differences in facial expressions and could learn effectively this person could be a good salesperson because blah, blah blah, or this person’s answer to this question is not very good or really, really good. There’s a company in the video interview space that got in trouble for using AI.
Phill Strazulla (27m 0s):
A couple years ago. There’s new regulation actually coming out of New York state and I think California’s is close behind them in terms of not allowing automated systems to vet candidates. And I would imagine that there’ll be more and more of these sorts of regulations that said, especially at a first cut, it feels like that sort of technology is going to be good enough really, really soon to help recruiters figure it out. And there’ll be a sort of a cat-mouse, right? Where it’s just like if you Google for ATS, the first thing that comes up is, how to game ATSs with your resume? or something like that.
Phill Strazulla (27m 40s):
Like how to like keyword stuff your resume so that some resume-parsing software puts you at the top of the pile. They’ll probably be voice coaches or whatever the signals are for these platforms. But I think that something like that is probably a pretty good first cut. I think another area of interest for me is other types of assessments. So can you layer video combined with short answers, multiple choice, maybe technical assessments etc.
Phill Strazulla (28m 21s):
And then of course integrating that into the rest of your text stack. So integrating it with your sourcing, with your applicant tracking I think is pretty important as well. So that’s sort of what I think about when I think about the future. And I’m actually really curious to hear your guys take on this AI stuff and the future in general, but also how that sort of technology’s going to play a role.
Matt Alder (28m 40s):
I’m just wondering whether people will be submitting deep fake AI videos so far. Listen, what do you think the future holds for us in this space?
Euan Cameron (28m 48s):
So we actually just, we’re just working on an update at the moment, which will stop candidates from inputting chat GPT answers into Willo. Because we accept text answers, so we do text, audio, video, and text answers will soon. You won’t be able to paste in your chat GPT answers, which will be amazing. I’ll cover that in another call. It’s quite cool though. But yeah, we’re going to be able to stop that, which will be good. In terms of the AI piece that Phil mentioned there, because of our friends that were in a legal case made that conscious decision back in 2019 not to do any screening or any decision-making with AI around the candidate.
Euan Cameron (29m 32s):
And I think that is our stance still and it’ll be our stance in the future as well. What we’re trying to do here is connect good people with good people. And I think there’s a huge amount of time-saving already been done just with the processor-based synchronous that we don’t need to reduce the time even further. We just need to put candidates in front of recruiters and help them make decisions as quickly as possible. So there’s not a place for AI and Willo when it comes to candidate screening and decision-making, but there is a place for AI in the communication with candidates. So for example, one of the biggest challenges, and it’s been a challenge forever is candidates don’t get feedback when they interview.
Euan Cameron (30m 18s):
And that’s typically bug bear number one from candidates is I never heard back. One of the pieces we’re trying to solve in the next few months is how you can help recruiters get back to the candidates through AI. So we actually will construct a response for the recruiter, which they can obviously add their own personal feedback into and then it will automatically get sent out to the candidate. So that every candidate is getting feedback because that’s, you know, one of the biggest challenges that we hear from recruiters is, “Hey, I would love to get back to all these candidates, particularly the ones that didn’t pass this round, but they could in future by just not at the time.”
Euan Cameron (30m 58s):
So, you know, being able to give them some time back and actually building and composing responses to candidates on both the accept and the reject side is definitely somewhere which AI will play a part in Willo in the next few months, which will be really cool and we’ll build that out over a number of years. But the kind of first iteration is let’s start building out these suggested responses, which I think will really close a big gap, which has been around for too long, which is particularly in the rejection space when they’re not getting back feedback.
Matt Alder (31m 30s):
As a final question to both of you, one of the themes that’s kind of run through this whole conversation, and actually not just this whole conversation, loads of podcast interviews that I’ve done in the last few years, is just how inadequate resumes, CVs, depending on which part of the world you’re in really are. And I think we’d struggle to find anyone to come on and stand up for them as an absolutely brilliant way to do recruiting, but everyone still uses them. Do we think that we dare speak of the death of the resume now? Do you think that with video, with AI, with everything that’s going on, we are finally moving to a higher form of recruiting?
Matt Alder (32m 11s):
Phil, you can take this one first.
Phill Strazulla (32m 15s):
I think the momentum is too strong. I would love to make some big bold prediction about the future, but realistically it’s just like the way things have been done for so long. There probably will be some startup that figures out, you know, like LinkedIn is essentially your resume on the internet, right? But I think there’ll be some sort of like pie metrics, sort of crazy assessment thing that is like extremely easy for people to do, but super deep and insightful that becomes perhaps a new CV for you. And I mean, one of the ideas here is like a portable track record from other jobs where maybe, you know, you’re able to export your feedback and stuff from one of these OKR systems performance management.
Phill Strazulla (33m 4s):
I think there’s actually like a lot of ways you could attack this problem. And I’m sure there are dozens of startups trying to do it right now, but I think at the end of the day it’s just like, good enough and then it’s being augmented in really amazing ways by technologies like Willo. And so if you wanted to make a bet in like five years, you know, are we going to see the depth of the resume? I would definitely say no.
Matt Alder (33m 29s):
It’s a no from you, but obviously augmented and changed.
Phill Strazulla (33m 32s):
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.
Matt Alder (33m 33s):
Euan, what your view?
Euan Cameron (33m 34s):
It’s similar to Phil, so —
Matt Alder (33m 36s):
Ah, I wanted someone come out and declare it debt, but no carry.
Euan Cameron (33m 42s):
You know what I think the really difficult part is that it’s both the employer and the candidate expect to use the CV in the hiring process. And it’s a significant shift to get away from that. There’s just an expectation if you’re looking for a job, the first thing you do is you type up your CV, your resume, and then you go online and you find some jobs and you start sending that resume, and that PDF out and then the employers read it and then they get back to you with some more questions and it’s just the norm. It is expected on both sides of the fence. And even, you know, some of our best employers or best customers, they’re employers and they’ve switched to no resume, no CV, just video, but they still have candidates wanting to send them a CV or resume because that’s just the way it is.
Euan Cameron (34m 33s):
And yeah, you’re always going to have that. I think for at least the next 10 years you’re going to have at least one side of the party will be wanting a CV or a resume to exist in the process. And it’s only the most forward-thinking organizations that will actually be able to remove it completely from their process. I think a lot of startups are doing that. You know, for example, Willo, we don’t accept resumes when we’re hiring. We just go straight to click on the apply now button on LinkedIn and you’ll come through to a video interview. And I think that’s probably what we’re going to see first. There will be a slow evolution through the more forward-thinking businesses and you know, we’re working on that every day with our own customers to try and help them change the processes.
Euan Cameron (35m 14s):
But there’s still a large number of our customers who have the CV at the very start of the process. That’s the currency that they’re accepting and then they go into a Willo interview after that and then augment this, the resume of the CV with the videos and that’s kind of, yeah, to echo Phil’s point, how it will probably look for a number of years.
Matt Alder (35m 37s):
I’m going to call that disappointing, but probably realistic in terms of
Phill Strazulla (35m 47s):
Thank you.
Euan Cameron (35m 48s):
Thank you. That was fun.
Matt Alder (35m 54s):
My thanks to Phil and Euan. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcast the app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show.
Matt Alder (36m 52s):
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
