HireVue – The Latest Hiring Trends With Anthony Reynolds

Announcer: 00:00 This is RecruitingDaily’s recruiting live podcast where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week we take one overcomplicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host, William Tin Cup,

Tincup: 00:34 Ladies and gentlemen, this William Tincup and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Today we have Anthony on from HireVue, and our topic today is the latest hiring trends. So I can’t wait to jump into it with Anthony. Anthony, would you introduce yourself and HireVue?

Reynolds: 00:51 Perfect. Well thank you William for having me?

Tincup: 00:53 Sure.

Reynolds: 00:54 Its great to be here. And I’m Anthony Reynolds. I’m the CEO of HireVue. I started in here at HireVue in February of 2022. I’m based in Los Gatos, California is where I live. But the company is based in Salt Lake City and it’s been around for about 15 years and we’re really the inventor and leader in on demand video based interviewing and assessment. So all powered by AI. And I know what we wanted to get in and talk about today is some of the trends just in terms of where we’re at. We have now just passed the 30 million video interview mark and a lot of what we’re seeing in terms of the growth of video based interviewing, it’s growing roughly 50% year on year. And so that’s kind of where we’re at today in terms of HireVue and excited to talk to you more about it.

Tincup: 01:54 Absolutely. Y’all one of the industry pioneers, actually I think about in 2008, 2009, somewhere in there, there wasn’t that many players. So y’all actually I help create a category of software, which is fantastic. And here we are now. So what do you see in terms of, what are kind of the big trends that you’re starting to see from kind of the data that you sit on with all your clients?

Reynolds: 02:21 Well, I think it’s really an inflection point, right? If you think about the last couple of years and the way that people have worked because of what COVID brought on, this idea that people are working remotely and working from home and now we’re seemingly getting back to work. And I think it’s very much a hybrid type environment, but for us from a HireVue perspective, we’re seeing very strong demand in some of our key segments. One in the early career, new grads, if you think about it, a lot of companies and organizations haven’t been able to go on campus the last couple of years for obvious reasons. And so now there’s a big focus on that in the recruitment of new grads for different positions. And then as you see the economy get back to work in the what I would call hourly worker category, there is a tremendous amount of demand in different sectors of the economy. And we can talk more about that and unpack some of the numbers there that we’re seeing.

Tincup: 03:45 I’d love that. Let’s start there and we’ll work backwards because I’m really interested in the new grads and some of the things you’re seeing there. But let’s see what some of the numbers are you sitting on.

Reynolds: 03:54 Well, I think the thing that I mentioned is just this idea that the growth of video based interviewing, right? And if you think of the hourly worker that’s maybe considering a new job, there was some job reports data that came out of the U.S a couple of weeks ago. And just so we get an idea of kind of the magnitude of what we’re looking at, there is just under 12 million job openings, but there’s only five and a half million people that are technically unemployed in the U.S.

04:33 So if you think about that, for every person that’s out there looking for a job, there’s two open jobs. So you can imagine the challenge that organizations are having in trying to fill some of those jobs. And then when you think of different specialist skill sets, what that means. And so you see in the hospitality industry, from hotels to restaurants to even retail stores, there is a huge demand for people and talent and they’re not able to find that. Healthcare, I was talking to a leading healthcare provider just a couple of weeks ago in Chicago at our customer advisory board. They are planning to hire 38,000 people this year, 38,000.

Tincup: 05:27 So how many people do you have to find to then reach out to the then interview just to then make those placements? That’s crazy.

Reynolds: 05:36 Well, and here’s the other stat, William, that’s remarkable. They can only see their way right now to potentially filling 30,000 in those positions.

Tincup: 05:48 Yeah.

Reynolds: 05:48 So, they’re already anticipating they’re going to be 8,000 short.

Tincup: 05:52 Wow.

Reynolds: 05:54 And this trend continues, whether it’s the cruise lines looking to hire people, whether it’s the airlines I mentioned, the hotels, the retail stores. But look, the trend then from a Kennedy perspective is there’s a number of opportunities, but for most of these people, they already have a job, right?

Tincup: 06:18 Right.

Reynolds: 06:18 And so this idea that you’re going to schedule an interview Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00 and get people to show up, it’s just not a reality. You need to allow the candidate because the candidate now has the ‘power’ they have to have the ability to interview when they want to interview. And here’s a stat for you. Our recent data shows or suggest that 46% of the time people are actually doing an interview outside of normal business hours. So…

Tincup: 06:54 Are they doing it in, can you tell if they’re doing it before work or after work?

Reynolds: 07:01 They’re doing it before work, they’re doing it after work and they’re doing it on the weekends, right?

Tincup: 07:07 Probably some lunch breaks in there as well.

Reynolds: 07:10 Yeah. Sunday happens to be one of the most popular days that people like to do interviews. And so if you don’t have a mechanism to allow for people to do an on-demand video based interview and be able to schedule that, you are missing out on a lot of potential candidates.

Tincup: 07:33 And first of all, Sunday makes sense on a number of levels, but it’s also, I’m looking forward to the week. It’s that Monday morning, the Sunday night. Oh my gosh, this week is going to be this. And Sunday’s a great time to interview, a great time to look for jobs, great time to interview. And that tracks with Indeed’s data as well as when people are looking for job when they’re the most active is on Sunday as well, which is interesting. I wanted to ask you a question about where you’re seeing that activity. If is it desktop, is it mobile, is it tablet? Is it la…? Can you tell anything about where those interviews are being, that are taking place?

Reynolds: 08:14 The frame of the question I think is the right one in terms of from a candidate experience, how they want to engage.

Tincup: 08:23 Right.

Reynolds: 08:24 Now, I don’t know specifically whether they’re on an iPhone or a tablet of some sort, but I can tell you this, okay, when it comes to early new grads, and maybe we start to transition there a bit, but it still holds with the hourly workers, how the candidate wants to engage with their potential employer is totally different. Okay. So in the old world it was, hey, you applied for a job, you got an email back confirming that they were interested to follow up and you needed to follow up with someone to schedule an interview. And this was all done via email, okay.

Tincup: 09:15 Right?

Reynolds: 09:15 Early new grads, that demographic of people, they don’t engage over email. I had a customer a couple of weeks ago at this customer advisory board tell me, hey Anthony, those kids coming out of college, they only go into their email once or twice a week. And I say, actually that’s not even correct. The only reason they’re going into their email is because you’re forcing them to go there.

Tincup: 09:42 That’s right.

Reynolds: 09:43 They have to reset their password. How they want to engage with their potential employer is more in a text, chat based environment. And we’ve done a lot of AB testing with some of our customers on this, and the engagement rates of how you engage those early new grads. It is phenomenal. It’s in the order of, when we did some AB testing with customers, we got engagement rates that were below 5% with when you try to email correspondence with them versus when you engage them with text or chat, it’s over 60% engagement. It’s that different. So the entire candidate experience, and we call this our customer’s customer, we’ve had to rethink how we provide our HireVue platform so that candidates can better engage with their potential employers.

Tincup: 10:48 I love this. I love this. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you is, the loop because email, I totally got that. The loop with SMS. And what you’re seeing from your employers, from your employers, from your clients and from their clients’ clients. What’s the demand in terms of SMS?

Reynolds: 11:14 Well, it’s huge in those segments, right? And I think it’s only in increasing in terms of that early career new grad segment that is the defacto way they want to engage with a potential employer by far. And it, as well more and more for some of those hourly worker jobs that I talked to you about. Because look, many of these people are even, and I don’t have the specific statistics around it, they’re looking for jobs or responding to jobs even when they’re on their shift working their current job.

Tincup: 11:57 Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh Yeah. And it’s interesting because it’s something you’ve hit already twice, it’s on their terms, everything process wise, tech wise. And it’s interesting because I think pre- COVID, the perception of hourly workers was there was a faucet and you just turned on the faucet and hourly workers appeared. And when you didn’t want those, you just turned off the faucet. And okay, we’ve blown that up in the last three years. That’s all gone now. And I think now that’s this concept of meeting them where they are on their terms or how they would like things. And again, that’s tech, that’s timing, that’s a delivery of everything. It’s kind of really what we’ve done in a professional market. They’re a salaried market forever. We’re just now applying a lot of that logic to hourly employees, now at our candidates.

Reynolds: 12:53 Yeah. When you talk about the candidate and them having the power, and we want to make sure we’re focusing on that experience just to, I always use this kind of our worlds collide in terms of we play at work and we work at home. But as I talk to a number of colleagues that have made the decision to go to Europe for a summer vacation this year, right? And we know what’s going on in Europe right now, aside from the heat wave, it is the vacation of lineups? Whether you’re lining up at customs or border controls, whether you’re lining up at the airport, you’re lining up for the taxi queue, you’re lining up to check into your hotel, there’s not enough restaurants, so you’re lining up just to get meals, you’re lining up to get to the attraction. And the big reason of course is that they’re just simply not able to staff all of these different things from planes, trains, to hotels to restaurants. There’s not enough people to do the jobs that need to be done.

Tincup: 14:07 I had a conversation…

Reynolds: 14:08 So the results of that, there’s a huge demand.

Tincup: 14:10 I had a conversation earlier today, the woman I was speaking with was saying something similar and she goes, listen, this is a real problem. And I said, well it is of course, but out of the things we can’t control, if in this country not doing with anything else outside of this country, we can always change immigration policies and okay, I mean, we can get more workers. There’s a bunch of more people that want to come into the United States. That would take probably a lot of that work.

Reynolds: 14:45 Yeah, absolutely…

Tincup: 14:46 We could fix this.

Reynolds: 14:47 Well, that would help alleviate it, right?

Tincup: 14:49 Sure.

Reynolds: 14:49 There’s a fine tipping point in terms of, just think of the numbers, right? The 12 million just under 12 million jobs and five and a half million people looking for jobs. It only takes a few million people either way. And all of a sudden the system starts to balance itself out. And so anything we can do to alleviate that would be a good thing in my mind now. But this problem of not having enough people to do the jobs, it really from my perspective, cuts across industry verticals as well as it’s not just with early new career grads or the hourly workers, it’s also happening with professional workers, even though we’re seeing some pullback in the technology sector from a hiring perspective, there is still a number of large organizations, one, the world’s largest consultancy firm looking to hire a 100,000 people this year. There’s still a tremendous amount of demand for professional type people as well.

Tincup: 16:12 Let me ask you about that. I wanted to definitely hit on that while we were talking today. So hourly, we’ve covered and we’ll probably bounce back and forth, but what are you seeing? What are you seeing from your clients in terms of professional, what they’re doing to adapt and also what they’re doing to adapt to their clients or their candidates and how they’re changing?

Reynolds: 16:39 Well, there’s a couple of things. Number one is I think people still have choice, right? And so it’s number one, creating that environment where people want to show up and feel like they can do their best every day. Now, when it gets to the recruiting aspect, again, it goes a little bit back to what I was talking about with the engagement. And this is where more of the conversational AI starts to come play. Because as people are looking at opportunities and moving through the process, they start asking questions or they want to understand, hey, what are the benefits that this potential provider is, or this potential employer is going to have?

17:29 It shouldn’t take an email to the recruiter to figure out what that looks like, right? Forward thinking organizations have created a chat like experience where potential candidates can just have that natural conversations to ask, hey, what are the benefits and make those easily available? HireVue is one, if you want to come and look at a job for HireVue, we put our whole benefit summary right on our webpage so you can see it, right? Just make it easy for them.

Tincup: 18:05 Yeah. And again, that’s the transparency, but also they can shop. That’s one of the things I love about chat is that I don’t have to schedule a time with a recruiter. I don’t have to go through this process if I’m just shopping. If I’m shopping, there’s nothing personal. I can actually interact with a conversational bot and ask some questions like, do I have to relocate? What type of work environment, what type of training? I could ask the board a bunch of questions that I wouldn’t normally ask an individual until it’s further along in the process.

Reynolds: 18:42 Absolutely. And one of the things that I hear, again in just talking to customers and that’s one of the benefits that I get is the challenge today doesn’t stop just when they’re hired, you go, you make a hire and they’re not yet scheduled to start for the next four to six weeks, right? How do you keep them engaged during that process from when they’ve accepted their job offer to when they actually start to make sure that they’re actually going to show up on the first day? Because remember, going back to how we open the conversation, they’re being inundated because there are so many different opportunities and hey, better opportunity could come around in that next four to six weeks. So making sure you’re engaging with candidates even post the selection process, but before the higher date is becoming an increasingly important focus for employers.

Tincup: 19:48 I wanted to ask about that because one of the things I’ve learned about the hourly market is people will apply to, they’ll apply to Best Buy, McDonald’s, Aeropostale, every job at the mall, whatever, and then they’ll accept multiple jobs and then they’ll show up for that job. And if they don’t like that job, they won’t go back to the second day or the second shift or whatever it might be. And so it’s really intense to make sure that you’re staying on top of those folks to make sure they have a good experience, both in onboarding and their first day, week, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I hadn’t reconsidered the professional market in terms of once you’ve got an offer letter and in an onboarding and in pre-boarding, onboarding and in what you can do between that and the start date without any brands or names of clients or anything, what are you seeing that’s innovative there?

Reynolds: 20:48 So I’ll give you one thought in and it’s a very large firm that specializes in security. So you go to an event, a concert or a sporting event, and they provide different security. They do circa 25,000 interviews and assessments a week, 25,000 interviews and assessments a week. One of the things that they’ve started to do is create a persona or a personality for their different chat experiences. So the chat experience that you have and how you engage with them during the interview process has one persona. But as you move from, okay, now you’ve been selected for the job and you’re set to start and get scheduled and onboarded, and there’s a bunch of verification and validation for obvious reasons in terms of reference background checks, how you continue to engage from a chat experience takes on a different persona. So they’ve actually created these personas, if you will, of how you are engaging with the company based on where you are at in terms of entering other company.

Tincup: 22:08 Oh, I love that mean, first of all, that’s just genius on so many levels because it gets to kind of personalization or hyper personalization, right? So people don’t feel like it’s a cookie cutter even though they’re having a chat or talking over SMS or whatever. The bit is, it seems like it’s more personal to them and people like them.

Reynolds: 22:28 Yeah. And I can tell you in this particular case, because I’ve had an opportunity to talk to them, you’ve got some very forward thinking HR and people oriented leaders in that business as well as very closely teamed with a very talented technology team in terms of how they’re creating this experience. And I think it’s the combination of those things, but it goes back to the central theme that we’re talking about, right? It’s our customer’s customer and that’s the candidate. And right now, as a vendor providing a talent experience platform, we need to be doing more and more to ensure that we’re enabling that great candidate experience. It’s just so… it’s so important and something we hear every day from our customers.

Tincup: 23:25 So with the time we have left, I one to ask you what you’ve seen with kind of the ‘recession’ or pending slowdowns, whatever it is, and dovetailing off of that is, what do you think? What do you believe the next between here and the end of the year looks like?

Reynolds: 23:44 Yeah, yeah. No, great question. And obviously not a week goes by without me thinking about the impact that raising interest rates and inflation has on the macro economy, those headwinds and all organizations are seeing that. But for us in the business that we’re in the tailwinds coming out of COVID, Trump, those headwinds, if you will, we are still seeing stronger tailwinds because of all the demand that we’re seeing from the airlines, the hospitality in industry, retail. We’re seeing a huge demand in healthcare right now. Even financial services as well as the federal government, right? We’re one of only a handful of HR tech companies that are FedRAMP

24:46 certified to be eligible to sell to the federal government. And because of that, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in business out there. But Ray, now what I’m seeing is we still have these strong tailwinds, which would obviously be supported by two of the data points I mentioned.

25:09 Number one, video based interviewing is increasing 50% right now, year on year for all the reasons we talked about people wanting to interview when it’s convenient to them. And then the second data point that I’ve talked about is just the number of jobs far outweighs the number of people looking for jobs by almost two to one. And as a result of that, we’re still seeing healthy and strong demand. And I would expect to see that continue for the remainder of the year. I think stronger demand, definitely in the early career, new grads, stronger demand still in that hourly worker segment.

25:51 I think we will start to see stronger demand in large companies for, call it intercompany moves, promotions, transfers, as people start to give opportunities within the company. And yes, maybe there will be less demand in that professional segment for some of the reasons we talked about, but I still see a number, especially of the large consulting companies with aggressive hiring plans for this year, and they’re still focused on quantity, right? Let’s get the people in the right jobs at the right time. So I know there’s a lot to unpack there, William, and let me pause there. So I give you a chance to double click on any of that.

Tincup: 26:42 No, I love all of it and I think we should probably do this every six months and just see what you’re seeing because one of the things I love about HireVue is you’ll sit on so much interview data, so you kind of… it’s like ADP sitting on so much labor data, right? Payroll data that you can see things before everyone else can see them. And so I think first of all, thanks for carving out time, Anthony. I absolutely appreciate it. And we should probably do this as a series every six months or so. And just check in and go, okay, what are you seeing?

Reynolds: 27:14 Yeah, [inaudible 00:27:14]would love it. Love it.

Tincup: 27:17 Where are you at? What are you seeing? What has been changing? Because y’all just have a wonderful vantage point. I just appreciate you.

Reynolds: 27:23 No, let’s do that and let’s pick up on some of these data points and we’ll just track them as time goes on, as a natural part of our conversation, I really enjoyed the time. It was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Tincup: 27:35 Vice Versa, and thanks for everyone listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.

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