This week's podcast is brought to you by Paperfly, brilliantly simple employer brand software that allows HR professionals to take control of their employer brand marketing. Paperfly delivers over 70% savings on global production spend whilst ensuring it is delivered authentically and consistently in every market and in any language. To find out why Paperfly are the trusted partner of companies such as BP, Ferrero, Rolls Royce, PNG and Unilever, please visit www.marketingmadebyu.com. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind at all the ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 35 of the Recreating Future Podcast. A little while ago I wrote a market report on video interviewing and it's been a space that I've been tracking closely ever since. This year I've noticed that video interviewing is getting some significant traction in a number of recruitment markets and I was keen to get an update from the front line. My guest this week is Ian Wills from PowerMeter, an emerging provider of video interviewing products. In the interview, Ian gives us his thoughts on how the market is developing as well as his more general thoughts on the role of video in recruitment. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recreating Future Podcast interview. My guest this week is Ian Wills from PowerMeter. Hi Ian, how are you doing? Hi Matt, very well, thank you. Good stuff. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do? Yes, so I'm the managing director of PowerMeter. It's a video interviewing platform. Previously, I've worked for a number of years in the recruitment advertising worlds, starting off in prints, a lovely which dates it back a while, and then moving across into job boards during the early part of the 2000s and work personnel today in jobs go public and read.co.uk. I've worked on that side of the fence and now looking to supply a different kind of service to the recruitment market. Now, we were actually both together yesterday at an event in recruitment event in Glasgow and you did a really interesting presentation on the role of video in general in recruitment and how it's changed and how important it is. Tell us a bit about that. What's your sort of your view on video in recruitment in general? Yeah, so I think that over the last five to 10 years, video has just become such an important medium. I think in the consumer world, people are so used to using video to convey their message, to convey their story around their brands and around the values and to really project an image to the consumer, to make an emotional connection with brands. I think in recruitment, we're still a long way behind that, but I think there are there are huge opportunities for brands to put together some relatively cheap and relatively simple messages that can reach candidates and be consistent and really explain what it is that each brand is looking to offer to a potential African. Have you seen any sort of particularly good examples of people doing that recently? Yeah, I mean, there's one that I quite often show when I'm talking about, which is by R.B., who are a record bank, so they used to be called, sort of a household products company, and it's amusing. It's obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek, and they take a walk through their brands and explain what it is that they offer, but they also answer some of what I imagine are the common objections they get from candidates around kind of ethics and environmental issues, and you can see that they're seeking to almost kind of grab the sting from what someone's thinking in terms of why would I maybe not want to work there, and they kind of turn it on its head very cleverly in a sort of three or four minute video, as well as obviously flagging up some of their positives and awards that they've won, and they do it all in a very kind of, as I said, a musing way that would be engaging, and I can see how people would then think, "I want to take my application further if that's the kind of environment I'm going to be working in." Yeah, I've seen that video. I think I judged it as part of an award ceremony actually. It's very, very funny, but it is very, very professionally produced, so imagine it had a reasonably hefty budget behind it. Do you think it's budget that sort of holds employers back from joining the kind of the new wave of the video revolution? I think that's definitely one consideration. I think that maybe people kind of overestimates the budget that you need to be able to put something that's coherent out there. Clearly, that video has got, as you say, high production values. Clearly, they spent some money on it, but I think it's entirely possible to get brand champions, people within an organization who would do a great job of explaining what it is that they see as the benefits of working there, why they joined, what it's like to work there, what are the challenges. Even what some of the downsides are, let's be honest, most candidates now are going to research a company. They're going to find out the good, the bad, and the indifference. I think having people who are going to tell it like it is in an engaging way, I think that's possible with an iPhone and a room with decent lighting. I think understanding that the technology is there now, it's a lot simpler and a lot cheaper than maybe people would imagine. It's just a question of finding the time and probably the right people within the organization to just tell that story about what it's like to work there and why somebody applying to come and work there, what might be the benefits and what might they get from working in that environment. I think that's a very valid point and what I was talking about at the conference yesterday was just how strong video indexes in social media and what a great content format it is for getting an audience on Twitter, Facebook, and of course, the power of YouTube if you use it properly. Just sort of moving on to video interviewing. This has always been an area of particular interest for me. I did a report into a market report into video interviewing a couple of years back. Could you, for people who might not be familiar with the concept, could you just talk us through how it works and how a company likes a power meter deploys its technology? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's broadly two types of video interviewing. The first one and the one that probably everybody is more than familiar with would be Skype where you are conducting a real-time conversation with an individual and that can run on for an hour. I've done interviews, I'm sure most people have where you're effectively conducting what I would think of as being the second interview or the face-to-face interview, but you're doing it via Skype because of timing or logistical or geographical reasons. That's the one type and probably the one that most people are familiar with. Then the other type and what we do, and there's a number of other providers in the market, but it's a recorded on-demand service. The recruiter will set maybe three or four questions, which are then sent out to all the candidates who have applied. Those candidates are able to answer in their own time at their own convenience. There's usually a deadline set, but they're given a few days to come back and give their answer. Then that is sent back over in a recorded format so that the recruiter can review the videos, maybe review them sort of side-by-side all in one go so that they get a good comparison. Then because it's recorded, they're then able to share that either with other stakeholders within the business or perhaps external recruit, just depending on what the arrangement is. That's a ability to get a relatively short piece of video from people answering a succession of similar questions and then be able to share that. That's the key difference between the open format Skype and what we do. What are the main objections I've heard to video interviewing? In fairness, it tends to come from people who aren't using it. I suppose getting understanding of where it fits into the recruitment process, because I hear a lot of people saying, "Well, we don't want to replace face-to-face interviewing with videos." Does this feel automated and impersonal? Where does it fit in the recruitment process in general? What's been your experience? A good question, as you say, quite a popular topic that most people come up with early on. I think there's usually two ways of using it. The first is as a screening tool, it's obviously going to fit in towards the front end of the process. I would say that 90% of our customers use it effectively to replace what would have been the telephone interview in the not too distant past. The applications will come in. They will sift out from the CB, the people who they think have the requisite skills or not, and then they will speak to the people in the yes pile. We'll say the next stage we'd like to go to is to put you through a video interview and effectively that acts as the screening process. I think what people get from that particular action at that stage is they are obviously able to see a little bit more of the candidates, see how they communicate themselves, see how they explain their answers, get a feel for how they present themselves and project themselves. I think that is the key thing that they're able to get. The other big advantage for the recruiter is around scheduling and being able to say, "I'd like you to do this video," but you've got three, four, five days depending on the deadline that we set. You can then go away and do that as an eye as a recruiter. I don't have to find time in my diary to fit that five or 10-minute conversation in. It's over to you as a candidate to do it at your convenience. What's been the candidate feedback to it? Do all candidates are all candidates happy to do it? Is there kind of pushback on it? What's the sort of view? Yeah, I think, as with any new technology or new projects, people at first are a little bit resistant to it because it's something that they haven't done before and I think they worry that because they're not used to it, they may be not going to do a good job of coming across well and we survey all of our candidates or give all of our candidates the opportunity to conduct a survey at the end of their interview and over 90% say that this is the first time they've been asked to do a video interview. I think we're still very much at the tip of the iceberg. However, the feedback that candidates tend to give, it's always quite positive language. I think they see it as challenging. I think they see it as something that they still novel for them, but actually a lot of people appreciate their being given a chance to showcase themselves. They've been given the opportunity to do things at their own convenience in an environment that they choose and really kind of project themselves as candidates, which I think there has been, you know, definitely the case over the last six, seven, eight years when the times were tougher, that actually candidates were largely treated pretty badly on the whole and not invited in to kind of showcase themselves. I think a lot of people do see this now as at least a chance for them to show a little bit of what they can do, which can only put them in a better light. One of the things that's come across very strongly when I've been talking to you and some of the other providers in the market, and I'm guessing it kind of makes logical sense, is that a high degree of these video interviews are done by candidates on their mobile, which, as I say, makes perfect sense. It's in everyone's pocket. It's how people communicate. Mobile recruitment has kind of been problematic in terms of how people sort of adapt their traditional recruitment application and interview processes to work on mobile. I know it's something that companies are struggling with because everything has always been, you know, CV and document-based. Do you think video interviewing offers employers the opportunity to make their application process more mobile? And if so, how might that work? Yeah, no, I absolutely think it does. We've got over 60% of our interviewees conducting their interviews now on some form of mobile device. We've had a tablet or a smartphone. So we know that the demand is there. We know that that's a channel that people want to use. I think certainly the way that our platform works is that we host a video. So if somebody had an account with us, they would get a dashboard that they kind of go into, and that's where they can see the videos. That's effectively where the candidates leave their videos. So none of this is built into the recruiters' system. And I think because it does live slightly separately, and that does give us an opportunity to provide the recruiter with the chance to offer a mobile alternative that perhaps they wouldn't be able to sort of force into their own system because of all the issues you've spelled out, because it's a process that lives alongside and connects in with the recruiters' current systems. It does give that opportunity just to project the candidates, at least the functionality of having a very good mobile interface, even though the recruiter behind the scenes hasn't really changed their own process at all. I think most of the case studies that I've seen for video interviewing, across the board from everyone I've spoken to, there's kind of an overwhelmingly sort of positive reaction to it, and that's what I found when I was producing the report. A lot of the case studies seem to be for graduate recruitment or volume recruitment. Is that the natural home of video interviewing, or do you think that it's got to potentially broader appeal than that? I think both. I think, yes, it is the kind of the natural home. I think anywhere that, as you say, you've got the volume, you've got people in roles where their ability to project themselves and maybe interact with customers or other members of the team, perhaps in sort of management roles, but anywhere where that interpersonal set of skills is important, there's a natural home for video interviewing because you can just tell a little bit more about how somebody conducts themselves by being able to see how they answer questions rather than just hear them or see a cover letter. I think that was the natural home for it to start with, and I guess any new technology needs the foothills to start the journey. We've already started to see customers then branching out and using us for other roles. We've got one customer who only uses us for their management roles. They don't use us for their kind of starter roles, and their reasoning behind that is they know that the kind of people they get in at sort of grassroots level, and when they have to bring in management level people to coordinate those teams, they want to see what the personality of those people is and how well they think that's going to blend with the people they're already growing themselves. It's already starting to move up the pyramid. We've got legal businesses, we've got charities, construction companies, so yes, it started, as you said, in perhaps kind of retail hospitality in the graduate level, but I think we've already seen that move out at least one wave, and I can only see that becoming more so as people become just familiar and comfortable with the technology. Interestingly, as you mentioned, there are other players in the market. I was talking to one of our competitors the other day, and we were both saying it's noticeable that neither of us have a single customer that we could name who has started to use this type of technology in any meaningful way and has then walked away from it and said, "You know what, I'd rather go back to our old processes," and I think that's quite a revealing trend. It does take people a little while to kind of warm up to this, and there's always elements within a business that need to be rethought through in order to get something like this up and running, but once people have done it and once people have seen the benefits, I think it's very hard to kind of go back to the old slightly more laborious methods, because you do sort of start to realize how useful this is and how much more, how many more candidates, how many more people you can see and bring into your process. I think that's interesting, and I'd sort of completely endorse that as well, because when we were producing our report, which was completely independent of any kind of vendor, we were just looking into how the space was evolving, we actually really struggled to find to find users of video interviewing who had anything bad to say about it, which was kind of made it quite difficult to write the report, because we wanted to appear as balanced as possible, but it did seem that the reaction amongst people using it was very, very positive, which is fantastic. So in the time you've been working in this sort of emerging space, what's the most unexpected thing you've learned about video interviewing and how it all works? I suppose the most unexpected thing has been that the usefulness that it can start to have across an entire organization. So as you said a couple of minutes ago, there's an obvious home for this to start, but we've been the kind of the volume and the graduate end, but we have worked with organizations looking to recruit reservoir engineers, who the benefit for them is that you can still do a screening job, even though someone is currently working in Eastern Europe, and their next role is likely to be in South America, but the benefit for them is they can continue to do their screening interview in their own time, in their own way, they get the same chance to object themselves, even though it's 4 o'clock in the morning where they're going to be working, and it's 7 o'clock in the afternoon where they are now. So that kind of multiple usefulness I suppose has been a bit of a revelation. I think the other one is the extent to which some of the benefits have more ramifications than you might think, and the one that strikes me as being the best example is we work closely with a hotel chain who have now been using us for 18 months or so, and as part of their integration with us and getting us on board in the summer of 2014, they made a number of changes. We certainly weren't the only thing they did. They had a significant overhaul of their recruitment process, but one of the things they've now noticed with a year's worth of usage is that their retention has increased by over 20 percent, and one of the reasons that they earmarked for this is that by being able to better match the personality and the attitude and approach of candidates much earlier in the process, it means that they are dealing with a more condensed group of people all the way through who are much more closely aligned to that brand's values, and it just means that by the time they get them on, these people already sort of well imbued with how the business wants to work, they represent their happy being there, and a year down the line, they've seen their retention rate increase significantly. So I think for something that probably most of us think of being, it's a good way of saving some time, saving some money early on in the recruitment process, that's where this all starts. Actually, it can have a knock on effect much beyond the recruitment process through on boarding and into the actual running of a business. Final question, what's next? Where's the interview going in the future? What's next? Yes, good question. I think we're on the verge of it becoming a lot more mainstream. I've been to a couple of events in the last few weeks, and compared to the kinds of questions we were getting last year, which were very starter questions, "Well, what is video interviewing? How could it possibly work?" We're now being asked much more detailed questions around how could it actually fit into the process? What kind of outcomes could we expect? How quickly could we get going? These kinds of questions, which indicate that the industry, the recruitment industry has moved forward in its understanding, which I think means it probably is on the verge of starting to become a lot more commonplace. I think the other area that I'll be interested to keep an eye on for is just around the flexible working economy. The gig economy, people who are looking to work on different projects have almost replaced their working life together a little bit like freelancers. It's that kind of world where there is not only the need to be able to be recruited on a project-by-project basis, but a need to be able to market and promote yourself as a candidate and have something that is meaningful, relevant, engaging to attract the attention of your next potential employer or your next potential group of workmates, depending on how the process works. I think looking at how flexible this can be, both from a recruiter's point of view, who could pick up a video interviewing platform just for one role or just for one project and then decide, actually, I don't need it for the next role, and from the candidate's point of view, that kind of more flexible working approach. I think there are two areas that are going to be very interesting to watch over the next 12 to 18 months as this starts to become more accepted and more commonplace. Ian, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks a lot. My thanks to Ian Wills. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes, subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me at www.rfpodcast.com. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next week and I hope you'll join me. [Music]
Matt Alder talks to Iain Wills from Powermeeter
Back in 2013 I researched and wrote a market report on video interviewing and I’ve been tracking the space every since. This year I’ve noticed video interviewing get some significant traction in a number of recruitment markets and I was keen to get an update from the front line.My guest this week is Iain Wills the MD of Powermeeter, an emerging provider of video interviewing products.In the interview we discuss: • Where video interviewing is currently fitting into the recruitment process • How the candidates are reacting • The market fit for video interviewing • Video interview as a potential solution to the technology problems in mobile recruitment • Video in recruitment at a more general levelIain also tells us about the most unexpected thing he has learned about video interviewing since joining Powermeeter and gives us his thoughts on the future of the spaceSubscribe to this podcast in iTunes
