Pulling Back the Curtain on Modern SMB Hiring

Hiring is harder than ever — more applications, more AI-generated resumes, leaner teams, and higher expectations from candidates. In this recording from Spark Hire Demo Day, our team walks through how modern hiring teams can move faster without losing the human element.

You’ll see how Spark Hire helps recruiters and hiring managers cut through the noise using one-way video interviews, AI-powered insights, predictive behavioral assessments, and an easy-to-use applicant tracking system — all designed to work together or independently.

Whether you’re hiring at scale, managing high-volume roles, or simply trying to make better, more confident hiring decisions, this session shows real-world examples of how teams are improving speed, quality, and candidate experience at the same time.

What you’ll learn in this demo:

• How one-way video interviews save time while preserving human connection
• How Spark Hire AI summarizes interviews and highlights key competencies
• When and how to use behavioral assessments in hiring and development
• How to involve hiring managers without overwhelming them
• How AI can provide context — not control — in your hiring process
• How Spark Hire Recruit acts as a command center for your entire hiring workflow

Let’s get going here. So, as I said, my name is Gary. I wanna, jump in here real quick and provide introduction to my my team here. Gary Shwaki, chief revenue officer at SparkHire. I’m joined by Mackenzie and Marley, who are both senior account executives here at SparkHire, and Mark and Sonia, who are our customer success team. And we’re going to be going through diving into an agenda here, obviously looking at some of the products, but thought it’d be helpful to kind of tee up, you know, why we’re here today and how we think about the solutions that are available, that we provide.

And it’s no secret that hiring has gotten harder, not easier as, as, the scales have tilted, we have candidates that are heavily equipped with AI. We have an ease of process. And so what we’re finding is a lot of volume and an even harder way to get signal. And so we think a lot about that as it relates to the solutions that we provide and how we’re helping our clients really navigate that process in an efficient manner. That’s all exacerbated by the fact that many have a very lean team. In many cases, talent acquisition isn’t the only part of your job, talent development, other HR responsibilities, maybe even operations.

And therefore to do that well, we also need to involve other members of our team or other stakeholders, hiring managers and others who aren’t necessarily hiring professionals, but yet it’s critically important as part of the process. And so that’s another part of the equation that we’re really thinking hard about. How do we simplify that so that we make it easy for those other extended members of your team to be able to not only participate, but amplify them and accelerate their ability to do that in a way that that makes a better, faster process for you as a hirer, but also for the candidate that we’re able to to, you know, make a match between the candidate themselves and what their expectations are and their desires and what the company needs.

So that’s kind of the theme that you’ll hear over and over again, as we really think about that. Also grounded in reality that many organizations don’t necessarily have the technology budget, or the size of team to be able to implement a very difficult solution. And so we have woven throughout everything we do is simplicity. So with that, I’m going to pass the baton over to Mackenzie and Mark.

We’re gonna start off with, our video interviewing solution. So, guys, take it away.

Thanks, Gary. And thanks again everyone for joining. My name is Mackenzie. I’m a senior AE here at SparkHire, but I’m also a previous recruiter of eight plus years. I’ll be walking you through SparkHire’s one way video interview today joined by Mark, one of our customer success managers. Our goal today is to show how SparkHire helps teams hire faster without losing that human experience and human connection.

Yeah. Thanks, McKenzie. And hey, everybody. So, again, my name is Mark, and I’ve been a customer success manager here at SparkHire for the past four years. So over that time, I’ve worked closely with a a wide range of customers, seeing very clear patterns in how teams kind of get value out of Spark Hire. So throughout today’s demo, my job is gonna be showing you those real world examples and just stories about how teams are really getting that value from these tools, as well as what’s really gonna be driving those real results.

There’s a lot of conversation in today’s recruiting world around AI interviews and kind of speeding up the process, but I think what’s important is we kinda look at how you don’t lose that context about the candidate.

Yeah. And that that reflects what we consistently hear a lot of times across a lot of our teams, both speed and quality. So everyone’s looking for efficiency, but not really at the expense of losing the human element within their hiring process.

So what customers often tell us is or tell me is that, you know, one way interview or one way video interviews definitely deliver, same time saving as AI interviewers, but without sacrificing that personalization or the actual human element.

And this is really where AI Spark SparkHire’s AI really helps.

Over here, can see that as you are evaluating a a one way video interview, you can see that the playlist is broken up into five different clips.

You can also see that there’s an AI summary. This AI summary is gonna get pulled directly from that transcript. I like to think of this as less time spent watching and a little bit more time deciding. I still review the video. I just know where to start and where to focus based on that AI summary.

Yeah. And, Mackenzie, that’s a really great call out. A lot of our customers tend to see the biggest impacts with this whenever they use it for high volume, evergreen, or even those people facing roles. And what teams quickly realize is that the AI summary really helps them triage the candidates more effectively and understand whether a candidate’s really answered the question accurately or not or even if the candidate might have gone off topic. And as you can see here on the screen, it even notates within the summary that it calls out if they went off topic or not whenever they were responding to a specific question. And this is really gonna allow your team to prioritize where to spend time during their review and also evaluation process.

As I go into the SparkHire AI tab, I like to kind of take a look here and show you that here, again, you can see that AI summary, but you also also see that there is the AI video review. A big call out here is that this AI video review isn’t going to compare a candidate versus another candidate. It’s simply looking at these four competencies and these two personal qualities based on what the Spike Hire AI is looking for. You can click into each one, take a little look, and then for each question, it’ll also give them a ranking strong, moderate, or weak for an overall strong, moderate, or weak as well. I think that this is really just used as a second set of eyes, especially for competencies or traits like communication or motivation that might be harder to evaluate on a resume or even in traditional phone screen. It’s just a great way to way to prioritize where you start when you start looking at your candidates.

Yeah. And I love that. And, you know, one customer story that comes to mind is one of our clients, Arrive AI. And, you know, what was happening is they were falling behind on interviewing or getting some scheduled interviews, and they were risking on not meeting a critical deadline for making a hire, and they really need to pick up the pace.

What they shared with us is that they were able to do this by reviewing those one way interviews. I believe they mentioned over the weekend, you know, on a Sunday watching some football from the comfort of their home, you know, and what what really happened with this is they used the Spark High AI AI tool to actually quickly identify those strong candidates to be able to move forward with either a live or in person interview right away. So that way, by Monday morning, they were ready to be back on schedule with their, you know, deadlines and everything was kinda moving back in a a good flow again.

And what what they really realized is that the AI summary helped them narrow the candidate pool down really quickly, but the AI video review really gave them that extra context as well as reassurance that they needed to be able to make those confident decisions with moving those candidates forward.

And speed like this really makes a big difference both in your recruiting workflow as well as the candidate experience. And speaking of candidate experience, many of our most successful customers actually use a mix of platform videos to elevate the experience and get that candidate excited from the start. The first example of that is going to be our intro and outro videos. As you can see here, you can use your intro video as a great way to talk to your brand. You can introduce yourself. And the outro is gonna be a great way to thank them for their time or even set expectations on what they can expect next in the process.

Yeah. And that’s exactly right. Recently, I was working with a large college university, so it’s really diverse with with these platform videos where, you know, they they they use that as a way to kind of set up next steps to avoid confusion and candidate drop off really early in their in their process by by putting these videos in place. And often what we see is a lot of our most successful customers really use both intro and outro videos paired with the recorded video questions as well, which is another great way to really brand and enhance your overall candidate experience. And that’s gonna lead us into the next topic that we wanna talk to you about today is how you can actually ask those interview questions to your candidates during a one way interview.

Yeah. So when you’re setting up your one way video interview questions, you can either do it via text, as you said, or via video. In our system, under suggested, there are actually over a 100 prerecorded videos with a live human, with our suggested questions that you can use.

But you can also do my personal favorite, record yourself or record someone on your team asking those questions and use those here.

Yeah. So, like, a unique way that we actually see customers such as Chick fil A use this is they actually use their current employees to record questions being asked to a candidate. So think of maybe like team leads or even shift managers kind of recording those questions. What this is gonna do is really add a personal touch to the overall experience and put a real face on the screen for your candidates.

It really helps them feel way more connected from the very start. So with this, it’s a small operational change that you can make within your process, but it has a meaningful impact for your candidate experience. Candidates definitely feel like they’re meeting team members rather than just talking to a blank computer screen whenever they’re answering your interview questions. As a result of this, customers definitely see a more consistent and stronger engagement from their candidates as well as a higher completion rate whenever they were talking one way interviews.

All of these videos paired together, whether it’s gonna be video questions or even if it’s a intro or outro video, tend to work best whenever they feel really authentic rather than overproduced. So instead of having huge backgrounds, marketing teams, our productions, our theatrics, something very simple in these types of situations go a long way with your candidates. Some of the most effective videos that I’ve actually seen from customers are simply recorded on a cell phone or even in the comfort of their home in a home office directly on their laptop computer.

And then that same idea of clarity and authenticity applies to how we really close out the interview as well. The way that you wrap it up with the candidate can leave them feeling informed, respected, and heard. A great way to do this is adding a final question within the question set that kinda leaves it open ended and allows them to tell you a little bit about their self. When I was a recruiter, two of the questions that I like to use for this situation were, is there anything about you that we haven’t asked but should know, or is there a skill or strength that you bring that didn’t actually come up in today’s interview? When I use these, it a lot of times brought out a context or an insight that we wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Yeah. And that’s a great point, Mackenzie. And and recently, I was working with an attorney general’s office, and they were struggling with having low interview completion rates. So what we did is review their entire process.

And by making some changes, we actually looked at some of their questions as they were asking. And what we’ve done was we added some additional open ended prompts like the ones you mentioned, and we definitely saw a more meaningful increase in completed interviews. And in follow-up conversations that they had with their candidates, the candidates often shared that those open ended questions really gave them the space to be able to add additional context, or they really felt genuinely heard from their candidates because they were allowed to actually highlight additional information that was valuable that might not have been excuse me, that might not have been otherwise uncovered within the interview because it could have been missed if they weren’t asked those open ended questions.

When using AI in one way video interviews added with that personal content, it’s really kind of the balance that I needed and and wanted as a recruiter. And so with this, I I’ll kind of recap our our Spark Hire one way video You can use AI to help teams move faster and add meaningful checkpoints. You keep people at the center of your hiring decisions, and you can use personalized platform videos to create a connection and consistency throughout the entire candidate experience.

Awesome. That was a wonderful review. And one thing that I forgot to mention since all of you were, able to join us here live, you were all entered into an opportunity to win a prize for a solo stove, which of course is very on brand for a company named Spark Hire. So very excited that we’ll we’ll be selecting that afterwards and we’ll let you know afterwards, but wanted to bring that to your attention.

Also wanted you to know that, there’s a lot of ground to cover here, and we just scratched the surface and we’ll scratch the surface on a lot of these things, trying to highlight some of the core things, that that can be helpful. But if you want a personalized tour of this, just go to go.sparkhire.com, demo dash cap excuse me, demo day recap. Now we’ll be sending that out afterwards.

You can take a look at that, and you can also follow-up directly, with your account executive who’ll be reaching out, but wanted to let you know that. And then just before, we move on now to the predictive behavioral assessment, just wanna reiterate the point about AI, which I think, Mackenzie, you’ve lived firsthand as a as a former recruiter, is it’s really there to help augment and supercharge your decision making ability. It is not making decisions for you. And I think that’s that is a core aspect of how we view AI is that it should help you find the signal out of a lot of noise and all primarily primarily to help you prioritize where to spend your time so that you can really lean into those candidates And also give those that may be on the may have been on the bubble from a resume perspective, actually give them the opportunity to bubble up to the surface.

So, I think that’s a a really important point. So turn it back over to Mackenzie and Mark as we dive into the predictive behavioral assessment.

Awesome. Well, next, we’ll go ahead and jump into the predictive behavior assessment and show you how customers can use it not just to hire, but also to coach and develop their talent. When used intentionally, this can be one of the most powerful tools within the hiring process.

At a high level, this assessment measures job related competencies, things like communication style, adaptability, and decision making. As a recruiter, what I really appreciated is that this is not a passfail test. It’s simply directional.

Yeah. And that distinction is gonna be really critical whenever you’re thinking about it. Customers most of our customers, tend to see strongest outcomes are the ones who actually position this as a decision support and development tool in their process rather than just a personality type test.

This is because or or this should this should actually become another piece of your puzzle whenever we’re thinking larger hiring. So in combination with one way interviews or reference checks, this helps make a more informed hiring decision and not just to be treated as a pass or fail stage within your process.

So what this really is going give hiring teams is going to be context, not just more data, but better data whenever we’re thinking about it. So it’s actually going to be where they can help it can help you understand a candidate’s likelihood of better success within a role based on those specific competencies and the results that come from this assessment.

When recruiting, this is helpful because I’m no longer guessing what good looks like within the candidate. I’m evaluating candidates against a profile that was built specifically for that role, and that’s exactly how I actually previously used it in a previous role.

When we rolled this out, we tested the assessment against 15 to 20 internal candidate or internal employees who ranged in experience, tenure, performance, but were all sitting in the same role. What stood out was patterns, shared strengths, and and consistent areas of development. And that’s when it clicked for us. We weren’t looking to clone employees, but rather it was more so about understanding what success looked like within that particular role.

Yeah. And that’s a really key realization, you know, that we see across, a lot of customers. It’s another great benefit of the assessment is going to be that in addition to the behavioral profile fit score that it provides you, the assessment will also uncover a candidate’s individual top 10 behavioral competencies, which offer some additional valuable insight beyond just that one defined job profile.

These top 10 competencies are exactly what I used when I was creating our custom behavioral profile. I was able to look at consistencies across all of those internal employees and really focus in on six to eight ones that happen to show up more often and weigh them based on the experience and tenure of those employees. And from there, I really just built that custom behavioral profile to be able to use within our recruiting experience and our recruiting workflows.

Yeah. And and, you know, when I’m talking to my clients, that’s how a lot of my my customers actually utilize it. They look for trends and not perfect matches. And that shift, you know, in that mindset is what’s really gonna turn the assessment into a strategic hiring tool rather than just another step within your hiring process. And we often see this used even outside of a traditional type role. So for example, I was working with a manufacturing company who, you know, they were hiring for a plant supervisor, and they use a predictive behavioral assessment to better understand their leadership style and also communication before that hire was even made.

And what the customer shared with me was that it really helped them not only select the right candidate, but it also allowed them to adjust their onboarding and also coaching approach from day one whenever they completed this assessment.

And kind of on that of, like, being able to use this moving forward in a lot of different places, not only are the results really easy to see within the Spark Hire platform, but they’re also really easy to download and share with others folders or other people within the process. There’s a hiring report, a coaching report, and an individual report. We’ll go ahead and jump into the hiring report. This is gonna be one that is going to be really beneficial for your actual hiring team as it gives a fit score and overall score, but it also digs into the different percentages and where they may need areas for development, things of that nature.

So this one has a lot more of the insights and and numbers and analytics and things. Whereas if you jump into the coaching report, this is gonna be great to provide to maybe a a future manager or someone who will be over them and help to kind of develop their talent. This is really gonna focus more so on the different areas. So it doesn’t give a fit score for the role, but more so just gives you insights to each particular competency, where they can kinda go coach them and just really gives them insights on what these might actually mean.

The last report is gonna be the individual report. This is actually created to give to your candidate. So whether that is actually shared or you go over it with them, the support isn’t gonna have a FIT score on it, and it’s more so going to kind of focus on the motivations and the habits that that candidate has so that they are able to dig deep and really kind of develop themselves, whether that’s internally in your company or externally in the future.

Yeah. And, you know, when you think about it, it’s really amazing all of the data that this one assessment can provide your hiring teams. And all are gonna be beneficial whenever they’re used correctly throughout your actual interview process. One of the best times that I’ve personally seen customers use this assessment is gonna be right before that final interview stage. And by doing that, what it’s gonna allow is those hiring teams to come into that conversation with your candidate with deeper insights into their strengths and also their areas of development.

In our areas of development, this is where it really showed as a value to me as a recruiter. I could go in, take a look at maybe what areas they needed to develop, and it allowed me to better prepare questions based on those lower competencies or even mid rate competencies. That way I could gauge for myself whether this was something that could be developed or may actually be a disqualifier. Disqualifier.

Yeah. And that’s a really great point, Mackenzie. And, you know, another story that comes to mind is recently I was working with a medical office that was hiring physicians and they actually used the hiring report to initially or intentionally design their final interview. What they done was they took the hiring report in combination with ChatGPT, and it actually helped them generate follow-up questions to be able to dig deeper in the final interview round. And this allowed the team to be or feel more prepared to be able to have more meaningful questions to ask the candidate.

And in reality, what this showcased is that to the candidate, it showed them that the organization was taking the time to invest not only in the candidate’s future with training and development, but also the future development of the organization overall.

And I kind of took this a step further with some of my other clients and kind of suggested it as a tip to like staffing and recruitment agencies I work with, as well as government offices. So think about maybe police departments and fire departments who really love this idea to be able to gain deeper insights into a candidate before that final round interview to be able to put the right candidate or right person within that position that they were hiring for.

Yeah. And I think candidates really respond well to this when it’s positioned as development. They they feel that you have taken that extra step to kind of give your insights or give your input. And when it’s presented, whether that is in an interview question or the actual report itself, and you kind of frame it as we reviewed this and we wanna learn more about that and approach in these different areas, a candidate feels a lot more seen and not so much tested. This shows that you’re not only invested in their growth, but you’re you’re not just evaluating them.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, really, whenever used the right way, again, really improves the overall candidate experience and it really provides you as a recruiter with meaningful data to be able to use throughout your process. So our predictive behavioral assessment, it really gives the hiring teams that deeper visibility into what’s going to drive success within a role. That clarity really leads to having better hires, stronger teams, and also a long term impact.

So as we wrap up with behavioral assessment today and kind of recap here with a predictive behavioral assessment, just think about it as not a pass or fail type tool. This is definitely designed to enable, to make more confident data driven decisions within your hiring. And then also real value really is gonna show up with how your team applies the insights that you do gain from this in this assessment. Whether it’s gonna be refining interview questions or identifying long term development and those opportunities later down the line. And then also, lastly, because this is has flexibility to it, it’s a natural fit across the entire candidate journey. From early screening to final interviews to onboarding, you know, this is really gonna be a really great assessment to input into your actual experience.

Mackenzie, Mark, thank you. Excellent overview of the predictive behavioral assessment. I wanna do point out something as well is that what I think is really exciting about this is that for a very, very long time, most assessments have been on a per assessment basis and SparkHire has really flipped the script. We acquired a company that had fifty years in the making. So there’s a lot of science, behavioral science behind this assessment over decades, honestly. And, we flipped the script a little bit and actually made it available on a subscription basis so that it’s unlimited. You can use it in many different situations and I’m sure McKenzie in your situation it’s like when you when you take the per unit cost off of it and that’s you start to really think about how you can change your hiring process that way.

Definitely. Definitely. Yes.

Awesome. Okay. Well, that was a great wrap up on video interview and predictive behavioral assessment. As I said, if you want to, go deeper on either one of those, just go to go.sparkhire.com

demo day recap. And, again, we will send an email out with the recording with, highlights as well as that link. So don’t feel like you have to do it right now. But just wanted to make you aware that you, have the opportunity to really go deep with, with one of our advisers.

So now let’s bring in Marley and Sonia who are gonna walk through our applicant tracking system, called.

Take it away.

Alright. Thanks, Gary. Pull this up here.

Perfect. Thanks again everyone for hopping on. Just quick reintro. I’m Marley. I’m a senior account executive here at SparkHire for about three and a half years now and here with, Sonia who’s a rockstar customer success manager for, SparkHire recruit. I don’t say a rockstar lightly. So, we’re That’s too much.

We’re gonna run through, SparkHire’s applicant tracking system today, and we’re gonna do so in a really focused way, which is going to be in a couple areas, which is, solving for hiring manager buy in, and then also how to use AI, more for context versus over complete control of your hiring process. So, with that, we will dive in. I personally always like to think of SparkHire recruit as your true command center. So you can see all of your open positions sorted in essentially any way, you would like, and then get more context into open roles and all of your candidates in progress. Again, being able to sort them however you would like.

We always say the key to the platform is that it’s not built for recruiters alone. It’s also built for, you know, your hiring managers who need, really easy and efficient way to navigate a platform.

Let’s start with that friction point, getting hiring managers to actually use the system.

First thing is going to be that it’s all task based. They’re not dumped into a giant database of information.

It’s really easy to go in, and they will only see candidates or maybe positions that they have a say in. The more they need to find out about a candidate, it simply waterfalls out to the right.

In fact, Marley, this is really, really important because our customers often mention how important this is. Basically, possibility to group their tasks and to filter their tasks based on different criteria, like the current step, the priority, the time added, the source. So this is really, really a key. And also this is customizable on a user level. So everyone can decide what works best based on their own working style.

Good call out. Yeah. The customization you’ll see throughout all the different, areas of the platform we run through today will, definitely be a benefit. So another way that we’re able to really ensure hiring managers know where they have a say or an action step is actually going to be in the creation of your job workflow, and super simple at that. Being able to easily add a step in your process, drag and drop, change the type of step it is, or even change who is responsible or even multiple people responsible for conducting a step in your hiring process.

A hiring manager really only sees a candidate whenever it’s time for their involvement. So really the the drag and drop nature, the customization of this, and even as you can see the seamless integration with some of the tools that we went through already today, make it really easy for hiring managers to understand where they’re needed and be able to complete those tasks quickly.

I wanted to reinforce over here, one more thing that, in fact, it’s very, very easy to adjust the workflows based on each hiring manager needs. For example, maybe for some positions, might need some specific steps, but not for another one. Right? So it’s very, very easy to decide which steps will will be included in each hiring process. But not just that, we can also customize workflows on a candidate level, which means even more flexibility for our customers. So just wanted to reinforce how easy and how important this is for our customers.

Absolutely. Yeah. And we’ll run through a couple of parts where the candidate is actually in the hiring process. So can quickly show you how you can customize steps on that candidate level that won’t change anything on your job level as well. The the last way I think is a great way to get hiring managers collaborating in the system is the ability to comment on candidate profiles, send reminders, which we’ll touch on again when we bring a candidate through the process. As we transition into that, I do want to call out part one of having context over control, which is going to be our AI resume review. So What’s really great about this is candidates can easily once they enter the platform or apply, those resumes are going to easily and automatically, most importantly, be, reviewed by our AI resume review.

Now they will get one of four fit scores, so strong fit, good fit, partial fit, or low fit. Now our philosophy on this is we’re not using AI to completely replace what a recruiter or someone in talent acquisition is doing. We’re really only trying to make it easier for them to be more efficient. With that, teams can still have a review step, after that AI ranking is complete, and then they’re able to easily sort their candidates potentially by priority so then they can go through their strong fits, their good fits, their partial fits, etcetera.

And we’ll show you what that looks like in real time. Do just wanna call out. It will rank a candidate’s resume against your public requirements for the job, so whatever’s on that job posting, as well as any internal requirements that might be beneficial to your team in the position, but that you don’t want public.

This reminds me of a meeting I had earlier today. So this customer was mentioning how important the internal requirement field was to help them identify candidates who have been promoted within a previous position. So of course, this is not something that you would publish externally on draw boards or on the careers page, but might be a very important criteria for the hiring team. So of course, adding these type of internal requirements can be a great, great help to identify of course these specific candidates based on those requirements.

Awesome, yeah, really good call out. So let’s see what actually, or I should say what it looks like in practice. So one great thing about the platform is that every candidate, once you click on one, will then be moved to the side. So you can easily run through all of your candidates here down the list.

But when we look at this, we’re going to see two areas.

Number one, of course, is going to be your AI resume review. It will have your position, requirements and then with that candidate ranking.

If you want to have a little bit more insight, you can click the drop down and it will give a little bit more detail.

Now you can see this candidate is a really strong fit for the role, but I still have that review step just to make sure I like what I see and, it’s it’s accurate to me. If I wanna see a little, higher level overview, we have the high level, points here with that AI evaluation, and I’ll still be able to see that resume below.

So that’s really it for the AI resume review.

One other area where we’re really finding that hiring teams have more context throughout the process is going to be with our new candidate, AI summary.

This is actually, an area that continues to get updated as your candidates move throughout the process. What’s really great tying it back to that hiring manager adoption is going to be that they don’t need to read an entire resume or maybe previous phone screen or interview notes, to piece together how that interview went. The AI really gives a quick executive summary of what the candidate brings, what stands out, and potentially what to consider next. You can even click into the arrow and then see a little bit more, again, similar to the AI resume review detail there. Again, this is, updated as candidates move through every step of the hiring process.

This reminds me of, of a customer, this IT company that really had a very specific need. They had to build their their HR department from the ground up, starting from scratch. And this HR leader leader really benefit from all of our eight AI features in order to get started very, very fast. For example, using the AI features, included both in Recruit and in Meet, they were able to have their first hire just in three weeks. So really impressive and it’s a great way or a great example of how much AI features can help the hiring team and the process itself.

Absolutely. Yeah. With volume like that, it’s definitely important to be able to sort candidates by priority and, easily get through them in that way. So that’s a really good call out for sure.

Overall, we’re not going to go too deep into moving the candidate through the rest of the process, but I think the major call outs are going to be that you have that context, really making it easy for not only recruiters, but hiring managers to run through everything as well. To go back to the top and recap here, contextual dashboard, command center, everything lives in one view, really makes it easy to see a three sixty view of not only your job, but your candidate, and again, making it really easy to sort your candidates by filters that are important for the organization, any way to make it, as efficient as possible for hiring teams.

That is a quick overview. But, yeah, Sonia can take it.

May I add one more comment? I believe it’s very, very important to emphasize how how important it is for our customers, for the ATS to become the single source of truth.

So it’s very, very easy to have everyone on board, to help everyone keeping up with the hiring process itself. So we have a great internal communication tool within each candidate profile. So it’s very helpful to tag teammates for them to have a look at the at a resume, for example, or for them to be asked to collaborate or to perform a task. So this feature can be really, really helpful as well exactly by tagging someone.

For example, the hiring manager can receive a notification. They can respond directly from the inbox, and absolutely everything gets saved right here. So no more additional emails, no more chat messages, everything can remain in sync right here. And these notifications can be sent via email and via Slack as well. So this provides even more flexibility to our customers.

Yes. Great call out and a good reminder to go through this as well because I knew I said I would do that. I felt like I was missing something. So, yes, I think this is a huge call bringing everything together, being able to efficiently collaborate on a candidate. One thing we hear a lot is, you know, paper trails and feedback in one place, feedback in another place. So makes it really easy to have everything here on the candidate profile, and these comments, reminders, emails flow directly through systems you already use, whether that’s Outlook, Gmail, Slack, etcetera.

Makes it very easy for organizations to adopt as it’s baked right into tools that you are already using today. So that is all we got overall. Really great tool, we say, for improving that hiring manager collaboration and using AI to have, more context and control in your process.

Excellent, Marley. Sonya, thank you. Matthew did have one question I just want to go ahead and throw up on the screen is, which is probably common is, outside recruiting firm or as we think about, you know, organizations that are all kinds of manners with candidates get in here. But, you know, Sona, I guess from your experience, I mean, how do you see people managing third party relationships as it relates to candidates?

So we have a lot of, customers sharing, for example, the one way video interviews, recordings with external agencies, with external recruiters. So it’s a great way for them to have this context as well.

Yep. Got it. And, Matthew, we can follow-up with some more, more context on your specific situation. We’ll have your customer success manager connect with you.

Okay. So I think also we didn’t really cover largely, due to time, but what’s important is that SparkHire, we’ve gone through three different products, and we’ve designed them in such a way to be very modular. So you’ve noticed throughout the process as Marley and Sonia were sharing that there were steps in there for one way video interview as an example and the ability to include a predictive behavioral assessment. So each one of these can be used individually, but also powerfully included inside of the applicant tracking system as well.

And I think that’s very unique in that go back to the AI evaluation summary. Our vision for that over time is that as we get more and more information, instead of just having a yes, no completed, didn’t complete or summary of information, we can actually begin to compound the information asset that we have about this particular candidate and really get more and more clarity about what their strengths are. And really importantly, what we still need to explore. And I think that’ll help, you know, accelerate the process and really provide a lot more, visibility to the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses to hiring managers and the hiring team and other stakeholders much more quickly.

Okay.

We can, let’s bring our gang back on stage here.

And, we do, if they do have any questions, anything specifically you’d like us to dive into, definitely can do that. If you want to just put them in the chat, we can do that.

But, but I think as we, as we wait for those, I think, you know, as as you as we think about each one of these areas, maybe Marley, Mark, Sonia, McKenzie, you know, some and and maybe we start with McKenzie, given that you’ve transitioned from, from recruiter to spark hire. You know, just from your experience, what are some of the things people are thinking about maybe starting with video interview or behavioral assessment? They haven’t done that in the past. Like, are some of the things that you ran up against or some questions that you had now that you’ve been through it? You’re like, you know, I wish I would’ve known this then, or here’s what I was concerned about. And here’s what I learned along the way.

Yeah. So funny enough, I actually used spark hire starting seven years ago. So it’s been quite the journey with my experience with SparkHire and seeing it change over the years. And I think when I first used it, there was a lot of pushback because it was new. It was something that had never been seen before or wasn’t widely used within recruiting.

And so at that time, I had a lot of hiring managers who had hesitancies or weren’t sure kind of where they played that part. And I think as one way video interviews as a whole have evolved and hiring managers and candidates are a lot more aware of it and used to it. I think being able to see the benefits of how more efficient it is, how collective it can be, I think you can actually get a lot more insight from one way video interviews that you often can’t from a phone screen.

I I I think that for me, the biggest thing was the time savings when it came to scheduling and being able to use it for people to do their interviews on outside hours. So instead of me as a recruiter having to stretch my calendar to take calls at seven, 8PM because that was when they put their kids down or something like that, I think really being able to flip your mind to see the real world implications of it and the real world changes that it’ll make for you, just in your eight to five or nine to five, but also just from the candidate side and the candidate perspective, what that difference makes.

From the predictive behavioral assessment, I think being able to get your hiring team on board to use it for diving into key insights, really using it within that final stage interview. I think that was always kind of the sweet spot for me of being able to apply what you learn from that into your final interview and really being able to dig deep. I think a lot of times, hiring managers, especially ones who don’t do interviews often, go into an interview maybe with questions that they don’t even know they’re gonna ask or or or not super planned out.

So using it really maybe have three or four questions that you ask specifically for different, you know, efficiencies or or, areas that need development, I think being able to prepare that going in is a better experience for your hiring managers, giving them kind of that context, but also for your candidate as a whole.

Long winded question or long winded answer.

I hope that that’s something That’s fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, you’ve we’ve been fortunate enough to get your experience here and I know that people would benefit from that. So thank you for sharing.

Of course.

And and I guess from an applicant tracking perspective, I mean, Marley, Sonia, and you obviously spend a lot of time with with prospects and customers there, and we have some that are coming from other systems and some that are implementing, an applicant tracking system for the first time. And And I would suspect that given that it’s such a big and powerful system that, it probably one of the biggest questions is just, you know, either how much work is it in implementation or how much work is it going to be from to go from one system to another?

Maybe talk a little bit about that as a as a stumbling block for many times people like we put up with a lot because we’re fearful of how much work the change is going to be. And obviously, we’ve we’ve worked hard as a company to make that easier. So, you know, I guess, Marley, starting with you, when you’re, know, what are some of the common questions that you’re hearing or obstacles that people are thinking about as they think about implementing a piece of technology like this?

It’s a good question. So, you know, I think change management is probably the biggest area that is important but nerve racking.

And so with that, it’s what will we have to change and how do we even manage that? So, with that, it will be a very popular one is, you know, I’ve been using another system. I have candidates in there. Maybe they’re in progress. How do I move them over? That that is a big one. How do I make sure that they’re going through the same process that they were previously?

I believe that the flexibility we have with giving you a really strong base, but the ability to customize is directly how we solve for that. So that would be number one. And and number two, I sound like a broken record at this point, but how will I get my non HR, nontalent acquisition people to use the platform?

So I think that’s exactly what we went through, just making it super simple, baking the tool into tools that they already use and are comfortable with today. I think it resonates a lot that it’s hard to get nontalent people to log in to a system that they don’t need to use every day. Yeah. So those are probably the two largest questions.

Such a good point. And so Sonia, like, so Marley goes through that conversation and then they become a customer and now we actually have to make that happen. And then obviously we’re very transparent about how we set expectations, but you know, what, what if, what, what’s the word to the wise as we think about that, how have we helped customers do that from an implementation perspective, which is a big part of that. And then Marley’s fantastic point, which is a system is only as good as the people that are using it. So we need to get them to use it and, you know, maybe talk through an example of how we’ve helped customers do that.

Of course. So in fact, as part of the onboarding process, we train not only the recruiters, but as well the hiring managers to make sure everything’s comfort everyone is comfortable using SparkHire. And I would love to include one really great success story, I would say. So we have this customer, this credit union that has branches all over The US and they have been in the market for more than seventy years. So they are very, very experienced in regards to recruiting.

So they have been using Spark Hire Meet and they decided to transition to Spark Hire Recruit.

Shortly after the onboarding, one of their hiring managers used internal recognition tool to say how helpful Spark Hire was. They had big, big challenges, big issues in terms of finding the right candidate for a specific branch, and they were able to find the best candidates after the implementation. So I believe that hiring managers, congratulating the HR team and providing this type of feedback through, this type of internal tools, these recognition tools is a great example of how much we can help our customers, during the onboarding to make sure they are successful, of course.

Yeah. Such a good point. I think, we work hard at simplicity. Simplicity is hard, right, to really make it easy for the the honestly, the occasional user, right, the hiring manager who’s not in it every day to make it an easy platform.

And then as Marty pointed out, we meet them where they are. They can respond in email. They can do it in Slack. They you know, wherever the case may be.

But it’s important that we aggregate all of that information in one place so that you can get a a full view of the candidate.

Outstanding observations.

Okay. Well, as I said, first of all, for joining us today, you are now entered to win the solo stove. So be on the lookout on your email. We’ll be reaching out to the winner here shortly.

We’ll announce that. Very excited for that. I’m envious, especially the the tabletop size. A lot more useful in trying to love the big one that I have run around.

And then next steps also, as I mentioned, if you wanna dive deep on any one of these things, any one of these products, I think this is the best way to do it. So go to go.sparklecard.com demo day recap. We’ll also be reaching out to you directly, as I said, with, with a recap, with a full recording, so you can share it with your team, and you feel free to respond to them as well.

So if that’s easier for you, but in any case, that’s a good way to get going. And there’s also some additional information there, about the various products as well. So if, you, and also if you have any questions, you know, certainly reach out to any of us directly when we’re, when we send out the recap. So with that in mind, we, really appreciate all of you spending time with us today.

Thank you for demo day at Spark Hire. Hope we found it helpful and, some inspirational aspirational things that you can implement into your hiring process to improve efficiency and get more signal out of the noise. So on behalf of the team, thank you all for joining us.

Have a wonderful day.

Thank you.