How Moncton’s VidCruiter is Turfing the Skype Interview
Sean Fahey was working at an insurance company in 2009 when he was assigned a daunting task.
He needed to hire 200 people – right away.
“Someone asked me to hire 200 people as fast as possible. So I realized no tools existed to help with accelerating the hiring process that much,” says Fahey. “Try hiring 200 people by yourself in 30 days, basically.”
One could imagine how such a process would go. Sifting through resumes, reaching out to 200 people for phone interviews, playing phone tag to actually conduct said phone interviews with 200. It’s an HR nightmare.
It’s through this experience that Fahey founded VidCruiter.
VidCruiter is a video recruiting software company that offers various products that make hiring large numbers of people easy and customizable.
“Video was the first thing that made the most sense. The idea was to eliminate the need to talk to people and do phone interviews with them. So our main product, Video Interviewing, eliminates the phone interview.”
VidCruiter’s Video Interviewing product is almost like YouTube. Applicants are sent a link where they record their video interview at home, answering the questions that typically would be used for a phone interview. From there, the recruiter will log on and watch the videos afterwards.
“Think of it more like YouTube instead of Skype,” says Fahey. “You log into a system and all your interviews are done and you just watch videos all day long. It’s not like Skype when you’re talking to them, it’s more like YouTube where you log in and they’re done.”
But if a Skype-type product is what you’re looking for, VidCruiter has one of those too (Fahey says it makes up less than five per cent of their business). They also offer tools like interview scheduling, automated referencing, video onboarding and more.
VidCruiters clients span the globe and include the Government of Canada, General Motors, The City of Portland Oregon, Allegiant Airlines, U.K telecom company Lebara, just to name a few.
“Anyone that hires more than 15 to 20 people a year can benefit from using our products,” he says. “That’s anyone in the world really that has a medium to big-size business, basically.”
Fahey says most clients discover VidCruiter online or through recommendations.
“It’s most people just finding us on the Internet. We have a small sales team as well that were expanding,” he says. “Most clients came from word of mouth before. People come to our products and realize how good it is and they refer other people to come.”
Organic growth and a small sales team have worked well so far. Since 2012, Fahey says VidCruiter has tripled in revenue each year.
“More people are interested in video interviews,” he says. “We have clients in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, Europe and Latin America. U.S. and Canada. Ninety-five per cent of our business is outside of Canada.”
VidCruiter is one of many companies not just in New Brunswick, but globally that are shaking up how businesses big and small operate their human resources. In the future, Fahey says he sees technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality (AI) replacing more things that have been done by humans.
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“There are more and more tech startups coming in to disrupt processes. Our product is a process improvement tool, basically,” says Fahey. “So the next wave of that is artificial intelligence where the process becomes even smarter and starts making decisions without as many humans involved.
“I think that’s a little bit far for hiring. I don’t think we’re there yet, but the idea is that certain entry or smaller or easier decisions are made by computers instead of humans.”
Going into 2018, VidCruiter will be hiring up to six more people for its sales team and adding new product features.
“We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. We’re hiring a sales team now and ramping that up,” says Fahey. “We’re adding more and more cool features into our system. We have everything figured out for our product roadmap so that’s just executing on that and growing the business really.”
Though there are many realms for HR tech companies to play in, Fahey says VidCruiter will continue to work and innovate in video.
“Video interviewing is at six or seven per cent market penetration globally, maybe even less,” he says. “So that’s the market we play in the most. So we see a lot of potential there.”