Storytelling about myInterview with Benjy Gillman

Welcome to the Use Case Podcast, episode 94. This week we have storytelling about myInterview with Benjy Gillman. During this episode, Benjy and I talk about how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing myInterview.

Benjy is an expert in all things video and candidate experience. His passion to build a product that is candidate first really comes through during the podcast.

Give the show a listen and please let me know what you think.

Thanks, William

Show length: 27 minutes

 

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William 0:26
Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you’re listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Benjy on from myInterview. Don’t worry, we will be learning all about his firm and how to buy myInterview. So I’m excited, and Benji, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and also introduce myInterview?

Benjy 0:46
Absolutely. William, thank you so much for having me on today. I really appreciate it. I started myInterview when graduating from university with my business partner on the back of starting to look for jobs ourselves. Very much coming from a candidate’s point of view. We looked at our resumes in there, and they looked very similar. And we thought that you know, we want to be able to speak to every employer and tell them who we are. Show them the full story. But this obviously isn’t, isn’t scalable.

And when you’re applying for graduate jobs, it’s almost impossible to have a face-to-face interview with everybody who applies. So we started to look for solutions and landed on video as being the richest form of communication in a scalable way. So with that, we founded myInterview. Fast forward quite a few years, we’ve created a platform which really brings employer and candidates together in an incredibly easy to use interface.

I think one of the key things that we’ve really stood on from the very beginning, is building a product that is candidate first. So building it from a candidate perspective, ensuring that those candidates are having a positive experience. They’re able to communicate who they are, and really show their soft skills to employers, and give all the tools and functionalities for employers to be able to get to the real key point on what makes a candidate unique and special. And enough information for them to bring them through the shortlist and hopefully, have a really, really good hire from there.

William 2:41
So some of the basic stuff. The types of candidates or the industries where you’ve seen it kind of flourish? In looking at the data, is there anything that kind of comes out that, you know, for software engineers or for knowledge workers, or for the hospitality industry? Is there anything that kind of shakes out in the data?

Benjy 3:03
Yes, industry-wise, incredibly, incredibly diverse. We have government clients, we have hospitality clients, we have banks and high-tech companies using it. The commonalities of the job types that they’re using our product for, are typically positions that receive a high volume of applications. We typically see that from quite junior, early careers, up to junior early middle management positions. But completely industry agnostic is where we sit.

Another key differentiator in our customer base is that we really target everybody. So we have small-medium businesses using a product as a real core of our customer base. And then, and then a very nice set of enterprise customers. But one of the key things that we did in building myInterview is creating a platform that could really be used by anyone.

We don’t have onboarding processes. Anyone can sign up for free and start using it. So it’s, it’s appealed to, to a lot of SMBs SMEs who haven’t traditionally had access to this type of technology

William 4:32
I love that. Well, you talk a little bit about being candidate first? Let’s go peel, let’s peel that onion a little bit. What are some of the features that stand out when you first started? Obviously, you started with a figure, a thesis, an idea, and some of that is based on your own experience, but some of it was also based on others. What are some of the features, if I’m a candidate that I can expect out of myInterview?

Benjy 5:01
So the number one feature for candidates is the ease of use. Okay, so, I’ll break that down, probably a little bit further. We’ve developed it really, by deeply looking at our user data. So we’ve done a couple of million interviews through the product. And we have been dissecting the conversion rates of candidates receiving an invite to completing them.

As a result, we’ve worked backward to say, okay. We can increase or we can improve these usability functions to increase candidate conversion. Which we then say, also is obviously better for the candidate, because they’re having a good experience. Because they’re going from A to Z. The key things that we’ve seen that increase candidate conversion in completing these interviews is speed.

So the candidates are applying for a ton of jobs. When you’re job searching you’re looking for a range of different companies. And you’re often quite time-poor. You’ve got to find time in your day to be investing in the application process. So we created a product, which number one can be used on mobile without downloading apps, and all frictionless in that sense.

But we’ve also built it from a client side, so when they build any interviews, on average, the time from clicking a link for the candidate to walking away in the process is, is around 10 to 15 minutes. So very, very short in the way that we’ve structured the actual process.

William 6:53
And real quickly, when we structure the interviews on the recruiting and hiring manager side, they’re obviously putting the questions that they care about. I’m sure the candidates put questions in front of them that they care about as well. Is that text-based? Is it email? Is it a video? What’s, probably could be a lot of those things, right? But what’s the interview rendered in right now?

Benjy 7:19
It’s just, it’s a video interview. The candidate that’s presented in, in text, the questions are presented in text, or in video from the employer side.

William 7:31
So the do the does a candidate get to choose which one they’d like to respond to? Or do they need to respond to it with video?

Benjy 7:41
Candidates can respond in video as the primary source of communication. And we come at that approach, because it allows the candidate to properly express themselves. In a way, a lot of our clients use it without the video. So just audio responses.

But we found that the speed of completion will be on and also the authenticity of the response is a lot greater when using either video or audio. In the submissions compared to a written response, which can sometimes be rehearsed or very thought out, which sometimes miss the true essence of what the candidate has to give and offer.

William 8:31
So for the geeks out there that have studied this stuff for a while, there’s synchronous versus asynchronous, right? And this is whereas I understand that your recruiters would then put a list of questions together, maybe even put a video together, and then send it out to candidates.

And then candidates would then respond to those questions, you know, and with their own videos. So that then the hiring managers and recruiters could then vet them and see if there’s somebody they want to take forward in the process. Right?

Benjy 9:02
Exactly. And from and also to touch on the the the ease of use is a lot of our clients are SMBs and SMEs. Often don’t have any I think this is true for everybody. We don’t always know what the best questions are to be asking our candidates so that we can get the required information or the best information to be making a hiring decision or shortlisting decision.

So we also have a framework for question suggestions. So we have companies complete a survey outlining the characteristics that they’re looking for in a particular candidate. And then we will surface questions that can best expose those qualities for candidates when answering them. And obviously, our clients have the choice to edit questions and, and provide the questions that they feel are right. But we find that the recommendation engine on the questioning front is incredibly helpful.

William 10:12
Oh, I love that. So tied into the workflow for recruiters and hiring managers or just people that are hiring? Let’s keep it simple. Where does myInterview kind of tie into, or integrate with other tools that they use?

Benjy 10:29
So we integrate with a ton of tools, Greenhouse, Workables, JobAdders, or Zappier is connected to everyone everything. PageUp people have a ton more now, in our pipeline. What we have seen in our data is the majority of our clients use the screening and shortlisting functionality that we provide in our dashboard over their integrated platform.

So what they’ll typically do is, use our user dashboard, do the video process, bring everyone through to comment, rate, because we have a ton of collaboration features, and really build a platform that is geared to collaboration and bringing in different decision-makers and providing a really user-friendly layout for them. And then what they’ll do is they’ll then push that candidate back into their ATSs that they’re using. For the rest of the process.

William 11:32
Right. Well, I like that, I think that’s, again, that’s useful for them because they’ve got to use the ATS is some type of compliance. In a lot of cases, they use it for compliance. And so they can use myInterview, outside of that, get to things, you know, get all the interviews out, figure out stack rank, who they want to pull forward, and then pull that data in.

So let’s go back to candidates for just a second. What’s been the feedback and how’s it informed the product when you get feedback from candidates on their experience?

Benjy 12:11
Yeah, so incredibly important. We have anonymous surveys that are completed post-interview. We’ve had around 64,000 of those voluntary surveys completed, and 94% of candidates say that they had a positive or highly positive experience through the product. And that they had a favorable view of the company for putting them through the process.

Obviously, that’s quite, that type of statistic doesn’t necessarily inform how we develop. It shows that we’re doing a good job. But we have a range of other questions which help us to tweak the experience. One of the key features, which might sound quite small, but we allow candidates to rerecord.

William 13:12
Is that unlimited? Or is that by the client? Can a client say, okay, you get three shots? Or is it something that in the system, it’s unlimited or, again, is it client by client? Can they set the parameters of how many times something can be recorded? Or re-recorded? Or is that something that the candidate drives?

Benjy 13:35
No, definitely, definitely client by client, question by question. They can decide which number of re-records.

William 13:42
What do you find with that? Because you study, you’re sitting on all this data? Do you find that people just let them, they give them a number? Or I say three, that’s just random. Or do they let them just re-record until they’re comfortable? Like what’s what, what does it look like in the data for you?

Benjy 14:02
So, the data is, is actually you’re spot on the nose, is from two to four records is the average which people give. We actually find that three is the magic number for candidates when they use the retake options. So it’s a really strong tool for candidates and one of the big usability differentiators.

And from what I’ve seen, I think we’re the only tool in the market that allows candidates to actually click and select the retake that they want to have. It’s not just the latest one they’ve recorded. If you want you can move back to the first one and submit that one, and often, it’s the case where your first shot is your best. And that’s what candidates end up settling on.

William 14:58
Do you find? Two things. We’ll deal with the prep. Do you find yourself in the business of giving candidates kind of a lot of either content or otherwise on how to have successful video interviews?

Benjy 15:17
Yes, but we take them to where they need to be very quickly. So we give them all the information that they should want, should they want to look into it? But they ultimately click right into starting the interview immediately. Oh, that’s a so so it’s a usability frame of mind, right? You want to take someone to the end as quickly as possible.

So they can go click into articles, they can do practice questions to their heart’s content or they can go right in, jump right in right into it and explore for themselves. And we’ve tried to build the function to be that self explore exploration. More than creating a cookie-cutter type of interview, which we expect will perform best for candidates.

William 16:06
Right. The other part, and I noticed what has come up anyhow. So we probably need to get there. Mobile-first or at least mobile, extremely mobile friendly?

Benjy 16:18
Yes. Extremely. No, no app download. Mobile responsive, incredibly easy to use on mobile. We’ve really developed that with mobile-first.

William 16:36
Benjy, if you look at the data right now, what and I know people are curious about this. What percentage of people are doing their video interviews via mobile? Or let’s just say tablet, laptop, desktop? Yeah, all the other stuff? What is it kind of break down? What does it look like?

Benjy 16:54
65% mobile

William 16:56
65% Oh, my God. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, and again, some of that’s the industries and some of that might be the stage into one’s career. It could be a lot of different factors, right?

Benjy 17:08
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s also ease of, ease of use. It’s a lot easier to get out your mobile phone. Anytime, functionalities, it’s there. It’s a lot more comfortable to use.

William 17:21
Yeah. Well, and I think people’s comfort level. You know some of this is also…we’re gonna skip all the generational stuff. But I think people are just comfortable shooting video. I mean, my mother in her 80s is comfortable shooting video. So you know, everyone’s comfort level has just gotten so much higher, which is great.

Benjy 17:43
To mimic the incredibly comfortable experiences that you have on platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat, and all these other things, and bring that type of interface to the candidate experience that a lot of people used to.

William 18:05
So let’s talk a little bit about the buying side. And so the recruiters and heads of TA and HR. All the folks that you sell myInterview to. First things first, let’s talk a little bit about the demo. Maybe this is their first time buying something that’s video interviewing. Maybe they’ve got something or they’ve used something in the past. What do they love about myInterview?

Benjy 18:31
So we have an incredibly rich feature set that is accessible from day one. So our platform is completely free to use. You can go you can sign up, and you can start interviewing your candidates paying nothing. The product speaks for itself. And we don’t want you to pay anything. If you’re not happy with it, you’re not seeing value in it, and you’re not succeeding in using it. So clients really love that.

And when they’ve tried our products, they can immediately see the benefits that we have been able to deliver by investing so heavily in our user experience, monitoring how people are using our platform, and then giving them the tools to get from A to Z.

We’ve seen that clients get a lot of interviews coming through from the candidates that they’re inviting. Which is fantastic, but also means that we have to give features to assist them in the shortlisting process. We’ve got a team of data scientists, machine learning engineers, who’ve developed natural language processing algorithm.

It’s proprietary technology we’ve developed. Which essentially acts as an incredibly powerful search engine. So you can go into the job and you can type in some phrases, keywords, experiences, skills, and it will pull up the interviews candidates have spoken on those topics. We transcribe all of our interviews. So you have a textual accompaniment with your video.

And all of these features are, number one, incredibly, incredibly helpful as they are now. But we also have a very ambitious roadmap, which we playing very heavily on this text engine, to really assist in that shortlisting. So this is a feature that’s much beloved by our clients. We also have an easy-to-use Kanban, drag and drop through a funnel.

You can create as many funnels in that Kanban as you want, drag and drop which video, you can share a Kanban board with some decision-makers. You can give thumbs up thumbs down feedback immediately coming through the platform. You can anonymize all your candidates, you can view them without names, without images, without whatever you want, choose the criteria. Incredibly, incredibly, incredibly simple.

And obviously, the last one, there are a few more. But the last one for today is branding. It’s a white-label experience, you can upload and create your brand as you want. When the candidate comes to the landing page, it will mimic the experience that they’ve had throughout interacting with your brand and your product.

And, again, is just incredibly sleek and helps with the candidate conversion, it helps with their experience, it means that we’re putting them first. And we see the results in the high conversion rates.

William 21:45
I love that. A couple of questions from that is with all the, you know, basically when people who receive the videos back, and you, you’re giving them kind of a shortlist. Out of the 100 candidates that that, you know, replied, here are the five that really really excelled. I could see that being super useful. Is some of that based on the job description of the job ad and some of the language that’s used in there?

Benjy 22:19
So what we do is when a client, when a client creates a job, we have a priority list. So we have a range of different attributes that could be beneficial for a particular job based on the job title, right? That the company selects. Say, okay, for this particular role, I want them to be outgoing, I want to have X experience dah, dah, dah, dah.

And then we trail through the videos and, we don’t give them a top five. We do like Google does, where they, where you just it’s just ordered. So you can go through and if you don’t find, you know, on the first, just keep going down until you find someone that matches or meets your requirement. And they can also reorder that search at any time. So they can reorder it.

We’re not in the business of saying this person is the best person. You have to hire them. We’re in the business of helping you search.

William 23:16
Right. Right. Right. Are people using it to search from a D&I perspective? Or is that something down the road that you think it’s gonna be important to them?

Benjy 23:28
Definitely, definitely something, something important down the road, we have a number of features to support that. Especially in our natural language processing. We are working very hard to ensure that the language which we are taking into account is appropriate for a diverse range of spoken language.

William 24:01
So, oh go ahead, go ahead, Benji.

Benjy 24:04
No, I think, I think that that that covers it. Because it’s, you can different ways, different phrases, different terms, for expressing themselves. So it’s very important that we take all of that into account.

William 24:17
Okay. So on the freemium model, you know, letting people try before you buy. I love that because it also lowers the barrier. It’s like, hey, just check it out. If it’s not for you, it’s not for your candidates, then there’s no need to get into a long and arduous kind of sales process, etc.

I forgot, I might have missed where they convert. So is it, is it that they have to use it for a month, or so many candidates? Like what’s the moment in which you’d really need to kind of convert them over to a, say a paying client? A client that’s outside of the trial or outside of the “try me before you buy me” phase.

Benjy 25:00
So we have limits on the number of candidates that you can interview within a certain period of time. Yeah, so if we have time, and also some feature requirements. But again, upgrade is self-serve, so you can upgrade yourself to a plan. You don’t have to ever speak to one of our salespeople, right?

And you can upgrade up and down, you’re not locked into contracts or anything. You can go month by month. And then you can come back to the free later. It’s really, we’re not trying to lock anyone into anything.

William 25:36
Well, I like that, because it’s also, for a lot of people that are hiring that fits them too, right. So they hire 100 people in one quarter, and then the next quarter, they might not be. They might not have that many hires. So that also fits. I like that pricing model. And again, not down into the dollars and cents part, but just what’s your philosophy on pricing?

Benjy 26:04
So accessibility, our goal is to have as many people who are hiring using the product and not thinking about price. Our first plan starts at $29 a month. And, and that includes I believe, 200 or so candidates plus. Which is a lot and should be plenty for most hiring.

William 26:36
Right. Well, brother, this has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on to the Use Case Podcast. I love what you’re doing. I love the way you’re doing it as well. And I’m just glad you came on. And let’s reconnect in a couple of months to see how things are going.

Benjy 26:53
That’d be amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

William 26:56
Absolutely. And thanks to everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast. Until next time.

The Use Case Podcast

Authors
William Tincup

William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.


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