Spark Hire’s Origin Story: A Video Interview Solution

What problem did you see in the world that led you to found Spark Hire?

Josh Tolan, Founder and CEO of Spark Hire: When I came up with the idea for Spark Hire, I was still in college. I was working for a family business that was a pretty small company at the time. When I started working there, there were only five of us, and I was handling a lot of the digital marketing, with a strong focus on SEO.

The company started to grow, and the big area of growth for the company was when they started building out a Call Center. So, they started hiring a handful of customer service people. From there, hiring grew, and the company was 50, 60, 70, or so people after some time. And, the challenge was that we didn’t have an internal HR or recruiting function. 

The business owners were responsible for all hiring, from start to finish, until they eventually brought in managers. However, even with managers, without HR, they still faced many of the same problems.

They would post the job, and would get a ton of people applying for these customer service positions. Most of the resumes didn’t paint a picture of who the candidate was, so they couldn’t tell the candidates apart. Then, they were doing phone screens, where they were spending 30 minutes on the call with candidates. Then they would bring the people in from the phone screens to do an in-person interview, and they would spend another 60 to 90 minutes with them. 

All this to say, the hiring process was the number one complaint I would hear them talk about. They kept feeling like they were spending so much time on in-person interviews, and they just felt like they needed a better way to screen people before they invested their time. Because, remember, they’re the owners of the company. Their time was very precious. 

So that’s what got me on the idea of using video in the process. If we could have people answer a few structured questions to add more context to their resumes before we decided to interview them, maybe that would help. And so that’s what got it started. 

On the flip side of this, just being on the verge of graduating from college, I would hear a lot of people who were entering the job market say, “How am I supposed to get a job? My resume looks like everybody else,” or, “If I could just talk to the hiring manager and tell them about my experience with X, Y and Z, they would see how I’m a good fit.” So that’s where I also saw the power in allowing more candidates to tell their story; it might change the way they’re perceived by the hiring team. 

Those two things were really the whole catalyst for building some type of video-powered hiring solution.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in the early days of Spark Hire?

Josh: In the early days, the challenge was actually that we were trying to be something different than what we are today, which was to be a sort of marketplace. Spark Hire started as something similar to a job board or LinkedIn, where we wanted job seekers and companies to sign up, and we were hoping companies would post their jobs and job seekers would come and apply and use video and all that.

We quickly pivoted from that when we realized the massive challenges of starting a marketplace, which was that you need to have users on both sides of the platform, and without raising a ton of money to grow both sides of the marketplace, it just wouldn’t work.

So I pivoted the product to be just a video interview solution because we actually had a lot of companies signing up that were interested in asking candidates to answer questions on video. 

Once we were a video interview solution, the early challenges were that it was just so early on. It was 2012 – 2013, so there wasn’t a lot of adoption of video interviewing yet. When we would say video interviewing, people would think of basically what Zoom is today, but back in the day, people would say, “So, it’s like Skype?” And we’d have to explain the differences between a one-way video interview and a video tool like that. 

Essentially, there were a lot of challenges related to building the category that we were in and being recognized as a category and a solution so that customers understood the difference between what we were doing vs. something like Skype at the time. That was probably the biggest hurdle in the early days: brand building and category building.

What is one piece of advice you would give today to the version of you who founded Spark Hire in 2012?

Josh: I would tell myself to narrow my focus and get even closer to a focused group of customers. In the early days, we didn’t yet know who we were building for. We were trying to sign up anybody. We would get excited when we received a demo request from these big brand companies, or we’d meet them at a conference, but that really wasn’t our market.

So, we didn’t know exactly who we were building for, and therefore, it didn’t allow us to get as focused with product development and narrow in on our ideal customer profile to determine what we needed to build and the challenges we needed to focus on for them.

I think it still worked out, but if I were doing it all over again, I would try and focus on that earlier.

Spark Hire’s Identity: From Past to Present Day

How would you describe Spark Hire’s mission and purpose today?

Josh: I don’t think our mission or purpose has changed much since 2012. We’ve fine-tuned a lot related to the “sparking connections” verbiage. Now vs. then, we just give our customers a lot more ways to do that.

That’s the cool thing about our brand and the company name, with Spark being in the name of the company and being our purpose: We want to spark connections between talented individuals and organizations. That’s what we set out to do from the beginning, and today, we’re just giving customers more ways to achieve that. 

I think that every relationship starts with a spark. And the same can be said for the employer and candidate dynamic; all it takes is for the candidate to have the opportunity to get in front of the hiring team and for the hiring team to assess them against what they need for the role and creating that spark allows them to continue to cultivate and nurture that relationship throughout the rest of the hiring process, ultimately turning into a successful employee. 

So I think for us, that’s the cool story here. We’ve just continued to expand ways to do that, allowing more ways for that spark to be ignited, and then to be cultivated through the screening process. 

As a company, it’s exciting to be at the forefront of that. People’s livelihoods and their jobs are obviously a huge part of their lives, not only the time that it takes up, but also in how it contributes to their quality of life. So, for us, it’s meaningful to play a role in that for literally millions of people across the entire world.

How has Spark Hire’s identity and company culture been shaped by its customers?

Josh: I think one of the main reasons I love our ideal customer profile of small and medium-sized employers is that there’s a lot of accountability. The cool thing about working with small and medium-sized employers is two-fold. 

One, the impact that we have on these organizations, because every hire matters so much more when the company is smaller. Two, in the way it shapes our culture and how we have to think about the products and customer experience, there’s a lot more accountability. 

It’s easier for a small or medium-sized employer to switch vendors or just stop using a solution like ours altogether. So I think that creates a higher level of accountability for us to really have to deliver. That was definitely something we realized early on. 

When we were only a video interviewing solution and we had month-to-month pricing plans, we knew that if a customer wasn’t happy, they would leave in one month, and we would never see them again. So, the types of customers that we work with really create an immense amount of accountability for us as a vendor. And I think this translates to the company culture in terms of the effort and emphasis we put into making sure the customer experience is right, making sure we’re building what our customers need, not counting on the fact that it’s just a big company and they won’t be able to switch for five years even if we did mess up.

That’s really embedded in our culture and everything we do.

In an increasingly crowded hiring tech market, what makes Spark Hire unique as a business?

Josh: There are a few things. Being in the video interview space for a while, I’ve seen a lot of companies come and go. I’ve seen companies raise money, and I’ve seen companies go out of business. 

Number one, we’ve always had a very methodical approach to how we run the business, and we did that out of necessity. We didn’t raise venture funding when we started the company, so we’ve always had to be methodical about how we build and grow the business, doing so responsibly. That’s just always been part of our DNA. 

Even as we’ve grown, secured a private equity firm investment, and completed acquisitions, that remains in our blood, in our DNA, in terms of how we run Spark Hire from a fiscal responsibility standpoint. 

The other side of it, while I can’t speak for other vendors, I think what we’ve seen particularly as it relates to the AI narrative of other vendors is, and even with non-AI solutions, is everybody likes to talk about the buzzwords around their features and the things that they’re building to check boxes and to say, “Hey, look at all this stuff that we have.”

That’s not the case at Spark Hire. Because of our methodical roots or DNA, those same principles have been applied to what we do from a product standpoint. And, I go back to what I would tell myself in the earlier days, “We have to be really focused. We have to know who we’re building for. We have to get to know our customer really well, and then we have to focus on solving their core challenges vs. trying to be everything to everyone and checking a lot of boxes.” 

So for Spark Hire, even as we’ve grown as a company, we’ve actually narrowed our focus and our messaging so we focus on what matters most for the customers that we work with.

The Journey & Evolution of Spark Hire’s Hiring Solutions

Who is Spark Hire, and who are Spark Hire’s solutions built for?

Josh: When people ask me what I do or what my company does, the high-level answer is we provide hiring software. More specifically, Spark Hire offers hiring software for a specific type of customer that we’ve defined as small and medium-sized employers, typically in the 50 to 500 employees range, whose people power their organizations, which means their people are essentially their service or their product or their team’s expertise is their service and product. 

We focus on this for several reasons.

Number one, for small and medium-sized employers, the impact of each hire is magnified vs. a larger employer, so you have to get hiring right.

Second, when you are a people-powered organization, where your people’s expertise is your product or service, your business depends on hiring the right people even more. This gives us meaning in what we do, the types of hiring tools that we build, and what we’re actually trying to help those customers solve.

How does Spark Hire help SMBs overcome their unique hiring challenges?

Josh: We’re hyper-focused on the things that we believe ultimately lead to great hiring outcomes for organizations with 50 to 500 employees. That’s being great at screening and selection, really narrowing in on who and what you’re looking for, and having the ability to figure that out during the hiring process, and then also doing that together as a team.

At a small or medium sized employer, especially in a people-powered organization where collaboration in the workplace is super important, you’re going to need multiple people involved and you need to know how the people you’re hiring are going to collaborate with people when they join your team, both internally and then also externally, as in your clients. 

That’s why we’re focused on those two core themes: screening and selection and collaborative hiring.

The way that we help our customers do better than any other hiring tech provider on the market is through our solutions: Meet and Recruit.

Meet is our talent assessment solution, which is focused on screening and selection just by the nature of it being a talent assessment solution, but also, because our assessment solutions are asynchronous, meaning candidates do them on their own time, they’re highly shareable, and they provide invaluable candidate insights, they enable the whole hiring team, and therefore enable better hiring collaboration as well.

Then, Recruit is our applicant tracking system, which we believe is better than any ATS on the market for fostering collaborative hiring because of features like our highly customizable and flexible workflows, the way that you can design a unique process, create accountability by assigning people to specific steps within that process and then empower them with all the tools and training that they need to run that hiring process as a team.

That’s how we pull it all together, with our talent assessment solution and comprehensive applicant tracking system, which can be used together or independently.

What was the major turning point in Spark Hire’s history?

Josh: About two years ago, as we looked at the entire hiring tech market, where we wanted to be as a company, and the impact that we wanted to have on our customers as a video interview solution, we recognized that we had made our mark at really one point in the hiring process. 

So, as we looked ahead at where we wanted to be as a business and the impact we wanted to make on our customers moving forward, we knew that it was time to expand and help make an impact on more areas of the SMB hiring process. Being a company that was serving the small to medium-sized employer market, we had a lot of customers that either didn’t have an ATS, were using their HRIS as an ATS, but were outgrowing it, or had frustrations with it, or were using an ATS that wasn’t the right fit for them. We could see at scale that a lot of our customers were in one of these situations.

So we saw an opportunity to acquire an applicant tracking system, as well as other assessment solutions, that could help us fill this gap for our customers, people-powered organizations with 50 to 500 employees, and help make a bigger impact on their broader hiring process.

Why did Spark Hire acquire Chally and Comeet?

Josh: We wanted and needed an ATS that aligned with what we felt were the core challenges our customers need to solve, which again are screening and selection, and hiring collaboration. So, when I discovered Comeet, the collaboration piece was really what got me excited because it seemed like an ATS that enabled recruiters to empower their hiring managers and create the accountability that recruiters are always complaining about with hiring managers. It felt like a really good strategic fit to bring that solution on.

But even when we did acquire Comeet, we knew we weren’t going to just consolidate the solutions and offer an ATS for the video interviews. We understand that adding an ATS is a much larger decision than an assessment solution. Strategically, we knew we needed to keep the solutions separate from a go-to-market standpoint, where you could start with the assessment solution and always add on the ATS, but also if you start with the ATS integration, you gain access to the assessment solutions.

It was really important to maintain the flexibility that we know small and medium-sized employers need. We always want to meet them where they are.

Now, in terms of the acquisition of Chally, we knew from a screening and selection standpoint that one-way video interviews were solving for certain use cases with our customer base, and we saw an opportunity to again expand how we can make an impact on the screening and selection stage of the hiring process if we offered additional assessment types. 

So first, we decided to build automated reference checks. Then, we decided to acquire Chally, a behavioral assessment company. The primary reason we went the acquisition route over building a behavioral assessment ourselves is that we were able to acquire a company that had years and years of research and validation studies, and the resulting successful customer base. This allowed us to feel really good about the insights that we would be able to deliver to customers, rather than starting from scratch. And so, that was another piece of rounding out our assessment offering to give small and medium-sized employers the flexibility they need to evaluate candidates.

Today, Spark Hire customers can utilize one assessment solution vs. another based on their specific use cases or job roles, but the options are all available in one platform.

What are some of the feature updates or solution additions that you’re most proud of since merging Spark Hire with Comeet and Chally?

Josh: I’m probably most proud of how we’ve unified everything under the Spark Hire brand this past year. Getting to a point where we have clear names, Meet and Recruit, has been really key for positioning the products on the market. So that’s a huge accomplishment for us internally, but I think externally, the thing I’m most excited about is the alignment regarding what we’ve built and what we’re building across our product roadmap with our core themes of screening, selection, and hiring collaboration. 

Today, across both our talent assessment solution and applicant tracking system, we’re aligned on giving customers flexible ways to solve these hiring challenges, depending on where they are, which also allows Meet and Recruit to work better together. When the roadmaps for both offerings are aligned on the same core themes, it allows them to compound.

On a similar note, I’m extremely proud of Spark Hire AI and the way that we’re thinking about our AI narrative and strategy as being problem-first rather than feature-first. Again, everything we’re building in terms of Spark Hire AI is aligned across Meet and Recruit to ensure they complement each other. So when you’re using Meet and Recruit together, you get more value out of the AI features we build as well as the non-AI features.

All that to say, our team alignment around the challenges our customers need to solve and the way that we’ve been thinking about building to solve those core hiring challenges across the two solutions has been tremendous.

Josh’s Vision for Spark Hire’s Future

As you look ahead, what are you most excited about for Spark Hire? 

Josh: What’s right in front of us; we’ve done a great job of repositioning the company as one brand with two core solutions: Meet and Recruit. 

It’s funny, these acquisitions and all the brand work we’ve done in the past year or so remind me of when we were back at the start of the company. There’s not as much category building, but there’s brand building in the sense of getting the market to see Spark Hire as more than what we’ve been for the past decade plus, a video interview solution, while at the same time avoiding being viewed as an all-in-one hiring software conglomerate where customers think they need to buy everything. 

I think this is both the challenge and opportunity we have, building the brand and building a clear narrative around what Spark Hire offers to the market now, while also being very clear about the customers that we serve. 

As a byproduct, we must ensure existing and new customers understand the flexibility that we will continue to deliver, in that they can still use Meet, our talent assessment solution, without having to use Recruit, our applicant tracking system, but our ATS is there when they’re ready.