Speed Without Shortcuts: A Look at What’s New in Spark Hire

New updates in Spark Hire are designed to work together and this session shows you how. Join us for a live walkthrough of what’s new, organized around the hiring workflow your team already runs.

In this session, we’ll cover:

• Smarter screening: How to keep AI Resume Review ratings current when role requirements evolve, so your candidate rankings reflect what you actually need
• Less scheduling overhead: Auto-send self-scheduling invites and automated interview reminders that move candidates forward without manual coordination
• Clearer assessment review: Proctoring alerts for one-way video interviews and new turnaround time metrics that help your team see where reviews are moving and where they’re stalling

Hey, everyone. Welcome.

Thank you for joining me today. My name is my name is Jason Brown.

I focus mainly on support for Spark Hire Meet.

We’ve got my counterpart Yeah.

Hi everyone. I’m Duo also from the customer experience team alongside Jason.

I’ll be your expert for the recruit platform, both of us combined, you have everything you need in here. Also, just wanna mention that on the chat right here, we have both Adi and John, our customer success managers, you should know them.

Terrific people and if you have any questions, feel free, leave drop a question in the chat, they will reply.

Maybe we’ll take some live questions throughout the session.

So let’s wait another, I don’t know, thirty seconds and we’ll see if more people are joining, hopefully.

And we’ll take it from there.

Yeah, sounds like a plan.

All right, in the meantime, please, if you can mention in the chat where you’re coming from, like which company, where you’re based, we’ll be happy to look at it.

Let’s look at a little pun.

Denise from Spring ISD.

Oh, fantastic.

All right.

Dallas, Texas, Arizona. I think can hear from Florida.

Janet from Dallas, Texas. Tracy from Arizona.

Dave from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Janina, if if I pronounce it correctly, from Germany.

Oh, Wilkommen. So Wilkommen is a I guess.

Right. Clara from from a 4 A’s.

Dan from Pennsylvania.

That’s mainly from Green Bay.

Great diversity.

Gilad from Israel, Melissa from Ontario, Canada.

Wow, this is extremely diverse.

All right, great. So without further ado, I’ll just mention for us as well that I’m based in Israel and Jason is based in The States from the Chicago area and let’s get things going.

You’re ready?

Yeah, let’s go. You’re ready.

All right, so today, you know, usually you talk to our team or you converse with us on via email or other platforms, maybe you would go on a Zoom call and as you know, as support members, normally our interaction will be about this is not working or how to use this or when this feature is coming out and whatnot.

But this time you get to see Jason and myself actually introducing some cool new features that we have that, well, maybe you’ll talk to us in support about those features pretty soon, but for the time being, we want to introduce some very, very cool stuff that we have in store. Todd, will this be recorded? Yes.

Now those features that we’re about to introduce, they come at different steps of the workflow, right? Usually we start from the screening through the entire interview process, which could be, you know, multiple steps and we end the offer.

Now, the features we’re about to show you, they have one thing in common, which is momentum with quality, right?

One of the things or maybe one of the pieces I would say that we have during the interview process or the entire workflow is, well, How to pick the right candidates, when to talk to them, I’ll just schedule interviews with them, right? How the interview process itself would look like?

So let’s take you through several features that we have that are all about this.

All right, about mitigating time, effort, and keep the ball rolling on the interview workflow.

All right, so let’s start with the first feature, which is about how to find the right candidates early. So I will share my screen, which is already on my demo recruit account that I have.

Can you see my screen?

Jason?

It looks like it’s going on up there.

Still no?

Well, I can see a Oh, yep, there we are. So we currently have an infinity mirror, a little effect going on there.

No, I think it’s only showing the Only the window, let’s do the entire screen. All right, now we can see recruit, right?

Loading, there we Yes, great, all right.

So a technical hiccup, this is usually what happens, you know, live television, what can you do?

All right, so let’s start with one of the coolest features that we have currently on Recruit. We have a lot of cool features obviously, but one of them is the AI resume review.

I’m sure that you’ve all used it before, if not, I encourage you please use it.

Let us know in the chat whether or not you use the review, it’ll be very helpful for us to know and obviously we appreciate any feedback that you can give.

Basically the ARIZMANE review, what it does is if we go to this position that I open here, this is a mock position, right? Everything that I put here is not real. You see I have all the Ninja Turtles here as candidates.

We have a job description, right? For this one, I created a director of marketing for my demo company.

And within the description itself, we can, well, we can put the general description obviously, but we have two things here, which are the requirements, this is what is being shown on job boards once we publish the position and with internal requirements, all right. What I want you to see, I’ll make it a bit larger, if you can see here for the internal requirements, again, I wrote a lot of like, you know, did like GPT stuff for this, create this position, but I just want you to see that I added here Japanese native speaker N1 level, this is how they there are different levels for Japanese, N1 level is the highest, a must. Alright, let’s remember this.

And what I did here basically is I took several candidates and within the workflow I added the AI resume review as a first step, auto start meaning that once we receive an application, this will start immediately.

We can decide if we want it to go by public and internal requirements or just the internal requirements, all right, we can choose whether the requirements will be flexible or strict and then we can choose whether or not an individual candidate will automatically advance to the next step, let’s say if our AI deems the candidate strong fit or good fit, or at a review step for partial and low fit. Review step meaning we’re not rejecting automatically, it means that this is like a flag, right? To look at the candidate and decide whether or not we want to proceed anyway, or well, unfortunately to reject.

So the way that it looks, I created some candidates, some of them are with the right qualifications, some of them are under qualified. So for example, let’s take this candidate right here. So this is Leonardo under Q, that’s the name that I gave this candidate.

The candidate already went through the ARIES of my review and look what I got here. First of all, I got a low fit, we’ll look at it in a moment.

And what I got here is another step called proceed with candidate, right, as I just mentioned.

If we look at the evaluation right here, here’s the CV, again, this is a fake CV. If we look at the advisory review part here, this portion right here, we can see in which areas the AI deemed the candidate well unfit, all right? Position requirements, seven plus years of marketing experience, but the candidate is only three years and four months, right? And here’s a further explanation and here we can tag it if it’s a good recommendation or not, depending if you’re looking at each and every one.

Expertise in digital marketing, brand building, blah blah blah. So this is like a partial, has basic digital marketing experience And let’s see here, ability to lead cross functional initiatives and manage external partners. Has experience coordinating with external partner, it’s in green, meaning it’s a fit.

All right, now when we talk about mitigating the time, I’m sure that you’re all aware and it happens to you from time to time that you have candidates in the pipeline at the beginning of the workflow that you don’t really have time to get to them and they could be very strong candidates.

So that’s the whole idea behind the AI resume review. Instead of us as recruiters going through each and every candidate, we already get a recommendation.

Now here’s the tip for those of you who are using the Arizona review, which should be all of you, when you enter the job requirements, whether external or internal, make sure that they are precise, alright. Let’s not do, you know, English level between good and best, alright, between proficient and native or five to eight years of experience. Let’s make it something that is more concrete so the AI will know how to make a decision more accurately.

So that’s the idea and let’s, and also we need to make the requirements realistic. Things that may come up in a position like in this example, director of marketing.

All right, let’s assume that we had a lot of candidates, a lot of them are under qualified, right? Even though when we look at the CV, we’re saying, you know what, they’re good enough, They’re actually good enough, right? Proceed with candidate, I don’t know, let’s look. I’m looking at the CV, we have a whole summary here.

Looking at the CV and I’m thinking to myself, you know what, maybe seven years is too much, right? Maybe Japanese is a must, is too much.

So what we can do here and that’s the noble thing that we have here. We’ll go back to the description of the position.

Now instead of seven years, let’s make it three years.

I changed it and boom, we got this thing right here, this pop up, finished updating the requirements. You can rerun AI resume review to refresh candidate evaluations.

Alright. Let’s also change the Japanese instead of a mild. Let’s do a nice to have.

Sorry, my Hebrew.

Nice to have.

And let’s reevaluate. Now look, we’re being asked, who do we want to reevaluate? Those that we haven’t interviewed yet, or maybe all candidates in progress, or those that are pending decision after AI resume review, like this candidate right here. It doesn’t really matter for this example, so let’s do pending decision after AI resume review, re evaluate.

And what will happen now is if we go back to that same underqualified candidate, which his name was Leonardo under Q, we can see that now we lost the middle step that we had here for deciding whether or not we want to proceed and we just got a pop up here reviewing this may take a few minutes.

So this is a very cool feature that we have.

Again, the accuracy review on its own, very, very cool.

But now if we see that we have too many candidates or that the AI resume review deems them as partial fit are not good enough and want to expand. Or maybe in time, it also happens sometimes that in time is, you know, we start interviewing candidates and then we start deciding, you know what, maybe we need to change this or we need to change that.

And only then we change the requirements.

Alright, so we changed it.

It finished. I still get a low fit.

Now let’s see here, CA evaluation.

Ah, look, look what happened. So this was all right, so three plus years, this was the change that we implemented.

This is a partial fit and look why, has three plus years of marketing experience, but no leadership tenure because we also said two years of leadership.

And now the Japanese part, look nice to have it marked it as advantage. I didn’t write advantage, right? I didn’t type it, so it added advantage and now it’s a partial fit.

So again, very cool feature, I recommend all of you to try it, you know, play with it, create test candidates and see how it works. If you have any questions, of course, first of all, feel free to drop them in the chat right now, but also feel free to reach out to support and we’ll be happy to assist with any question related to the AI resume review and we have a lot more AI related features coming up soon.

All right, Adi maybe we can get a question if there is one.

Jason, you can read it out.

Absolutely. What do we got here?

Well, let me take a look here.

Who, boy, where am I looking? It seems Adi is fielding the questions in the chat. But if If you wanna keep keep moving along here.

We’ll be having another fantastic fantastic feature to spotlight.

Come again, please.

Oh, yes.

It appears Adi is fielding the questions in the chat.

Do you want to proceed to the following feature you’d like to spotlight?

Sure, let’s continue.

All right, I thought maybe we could answer one question like live, but let’s see.

All right, so let’s say that we finished the, I’m continuing. So we finished this step right here, proceed with candidate, let’s say that it’s a go.

All right, we got to a CV screen by a recruiter. Again, you can decide whatever you want within the workflow.

And now I wanna talk to you about scheduling drag.

Scheduling drag, so this a very common pain point where it takes time to make sure that this person is available or that person is available and what about the candidate? The candidate should be available as well. And now starting sending emails and everything, it could be manual work, no need for that.

So I wanna take you to the workflow within the position. So look, director of marketing, this is the workflow, the way that I constructed the whole thing here is we start by errors and review, we move to CV screen recruiter, phone screen and then interview by a manager. You see the little lightning bolt that we have here?

It means that I edit an automated step in here.

If this step is assigned to you, right, not to you as an owner or as an admin looking at other recruiters, meaning the person who does this step.

So my user here is called Dror owner and I can go right here and I can set, you see the toggle here, can set auto send self scheduling invite when candidates reach this step.

Now, I will disable it for a moment because I want to show you how it looks like.

In order for this to work, what we need to do is, first of all, we need to go to my account, which is on the top right, right here, and we need to connect our recruit account to our Google Calendar or perhaps to the Office three sixty five, depends on what your preference, but we need to make sure that it’s connected.

Once it’s connected, I wanna show you what happens.

Then we can go here, auto send self scheduling invites, we click it, we set the weekly limit, how many candidates, you see it says here limit how many candidates receive self scheduling invites automatically each week. So I’ll put it on, let’s say five candidates, I will save it.

All right, ready to enable automated invites.

An invitation to select the time will be sent, I guess I have someone waiting already. I’ll show you in a moment how it looks like.

We’re getting a counter here, you see it says one of five invites sent this week because I already tested it before ends on June 27.

All right, now I wanna show you how it looks like once we reach this step.

All right, so let’s go back to the candidates.

Of course, if you have any questions, leave them on the chat and I’ll answer if I’m going too fast or if something is not clear enough.

Let’s go back to our candidate Leonardo.

All right, let’s say, let’s assume that after all, you know, said and done, we reached the phone screen and we decided, you know what, this is a very strong hire.

We can continue and submit.

And look what it says here, candidate self scheduling is enabled, submitting your evaluation will send an auto scheduled invite to the candidate. All right, let’s submit.

It says here in queue for self scheduling invite.

All right, it means that now the candidate will get an email to schedule.

If we look here at the bottom under activity with everything that happens with the candidate, it shows us that the candidate already got an email scheduling or in person interview with Dro and I, well that’s me, recruit demo.

And the way that this email looks like, I wanna show you that like the real thing out of my own Gmail.

This is how the email looks like.

This is a free text that I did.

Hi, Leonardo, what’s up? We’d like to invite you for your in person interview. Select the time for your interview. Let’s click it.

Alright. So based on on the interviewer’s availability, look what we got here. Sunday, June 28, pick a time, you know, whatever you want.

Tuesday I’m unavailable because for my own personal calendar, I actually blocked the entire day. So Tuesday is unavailable and let’s do 10AM, confirm.

Now again, this is what the candidate sees, okay? You see this is with the company logo, this will be the recruiter image, the position and confirm you’ll receive a calendar invite shortly with all the details.

All right, the way that it looks like is as follows.

Here is the invite that the candidate received, we’re looking forward to meeting you, interview with the owner, the name of my recruiting profile.

And the interviewer will also get an email, in person interview Leonardo under queue for director of marketing.

All right, now it’s not the same email as you can see, this is a very different type of email and that’s that for this, for the self scheduling portion that we have.

All right, do we have any questions regarding the self scheduling invite?

Of course, we can then go here once we finish everything and it’s done, we will go to the interview part and well, we can start the interview.

All right, do we have any question about this? Maybe on chat.

Jason, if you please take a look.

Let’s see. Oh, these are not new, right?

Come again?

Oh, yes. Question from Yarden. All of these are not new, correct?

It is new.

The way that now that the whole flow that you’re seeing right now is new. Yes, we had some ways to connect the recruit with our own calendars, but now we have this another layer where we send the scheduling link directly to the candidate.

And also what I talked about earlier, the AI resume review. So the resume review by itself already existed, not for that long, but we already had it, but we didn’t have the reevaluation part of it.

All right, moving forward, lastly, what I wanna show you on the Recruit platform is the following. If we go here, it’s an interview reminder that we have now. Now I’ll tell you how it works.

If you go here on the right to library, auto templates, to candidate, and we go to interview invite, whether it’s a video or in person, excuse me, sorry, we’re going to interview reminder. My bad, again, live TV happens. If you go here to interview reminder in person or phone or video, this is the template that we have. Of course you can edit the template, but we have a thing right here on the top, send reminder. Again, we’re talking about scheduling drag and we want to remove all the hassle and stuff. So send a reminder either two hours before the interview, twenty four hours before the interview, or not to send at all.

Now, I just want to make it clear that once this is set, obviously it could be by location. You see that the different languages here, but they actually are representing locales.

So I can set it for each and every one of them.

Once this is set, it is set for the entire locale. This is not by position.

This may be in the works, but currently this is how it works. We can send an interview reminder two hours before the interview, twenty four hours before the interview or not to send at all. And we have again, three templates either in person interview, phone interview, or video interview.

Great, so we’ve completed our recruit portion of the webinar.

I just wanna quickly mention, we have this page right here on the SparkHire recruit help center, which I encourage you to visit, which called integrated job boards. So within recruit, as you know, we can post positions on you know, different job boards, this is a list that gets updated from time to time, as you can see here updated twenty seven days ago, we’re always changing and adding more job boards, so I encourage you to visit this page from time to time.

All those things will be also shown here on recruit web global job boards and also within the position itself.

Correct, if you go to sources.

And that’s it on my part. So I hope that you find it helpful to continue to use Recruit. If you have any questions, please reach out and over to you, Jason.

Fantastic. Great stuff for exciting developments within Recruit. So let’s, go ahead and pivot over here to Meet. So what where I wanna begin here is a quick run through of the recent somewhat recently updated Candidate Experience.

So a couple of things here I do wanna do wanna point out is, first stop here, branded landing page. You’ve got a handful of options as far as how you can brand brand your candidate experience. You can include a header logo up top here. It says Spark here and there.

However, you can absolutely include your own logo, as well as additional information about your organization.

Say you have some photos or a video you wanna include right at the get go, of your can of your Candidates experience, you can add those here as well. You can find those in your branding settings within your account. Let’s go ahead and dive in here real quick. We’ll just do a quick run through of the, the Canvas experience. I’m gonna kill my webcam in the, in the webinar, so we do not encounter a media device error here, in the one way interview.

Alright. So we’re just gonna run through here. We had a couple of, settings and things we need to agree to. We have a fantastic welcome video, though if you include your own, that will take president over the default one. Excellent tutorial video.

I cannot recommend your candidates watch that enough. Alright.

Then we have some best practices for candidates.

And we’re not going super in-depth here just so we can, focus on some of the the more exciting, AI functionality here. One new addition to the candidate experience I do want to highlight here is we do ask your candidates confirm that they are going to be treating the interview with integrity and not using AI to suggest answers or anything of that nature. So we’re gonna hop on in here.

Couple of setup steps here. We do need to allow our webcam and microphone, so we’ll go ahead and allow that.

Run a quick speed test. We do have options for candidates to blur or apply neutral background now.

The heck, we’ll blur that. And that looks good. Do a quick microphone test. That bar is bouncing around. That is looking fantastic. The mic works.

And can you we we do afford your candidates the opportunity to record as many practice videos as they like before really diving in to actually answer the questions. They can do that as many times as they want. I’m just gonna hop on into our one and only question here. Let’s see what we’ve got. Why are you interested in this particular career? So with the way, this question is set up, I can just click on this button to start recording whenever I’m ready.

And there we go. We’ll just record a couple of seconds there for, for example’s sake.

And that’s that’s that’s that. We can retake if we we if we need to, if, if you’ve given your Candidates that option as far as allowing multiple takes. And that’s it. So at this point, you’d have an outro video if you’ve, included an outro video in your Candid experience, and we can request, and the the Candid will have the option opportunity to provide feedback on their experience.

And so where does this interview land, all said and done?

Well, right on in here in your assessments panel. So now we are in here into the company view. Let’s go ahead and refresh this. We have our latest one way pop up here.

So you may notice a few a few new flags here. These are AI proctoring flags.

What the what this is going to do is, alert you to interviews that may have possible misconduct by way of utilizing AI or treating treating the interview experience with less integrity.

Where can we turn this on? Well, we can do this right here in your job settings. Hop over to job management. Go over to job settings. And right here, we’ve got it. Oh, and I am out of the one way, so I can pop my camera back on here in the webinar. Fantastic.

Alright. So right here under proctoring, we have this flag.

Flag AI generated content.

The only requirement we need in order to turn this on is transcriptions. If you turn transcriptions off, that is going to turn proctoring off. You do not necessarily need AI summary and AI video review, though I do highly recommend having those turned on. They’re excellent features.

And then we can turn on proctoring. Simply click save there. Well, I hadn’t actually changed any settings before clicking save, so I’m not gonna have the option to click save. But there we go.

So with proctoring turned on, let’s hop over to our, to our assessments list. So we can see here in this Oh, fascinating. The one I just did said said I might be AI. Let’s take a look there.

So we can see there from the, from the assessments list that could be AI.

So in the upper right corner here, we have our, AI proctoring notification. Could be possible misconduct. In this case, it’s going to give us some reasons. Uncommon or overly varied word choice, phrases not typical in natural speech, unusual unusual structure for spoken answers.

With that said, we do give your team the the, the option to override, these findings if you if you see necessary, So we can do that in the team review. If we disagree with the AI proctoring flag here and wanna mark this as authentic, we can do that right there.

Or if we want to, say say it had come across as authentic via the proctoring. However, we we we’re not quite so sure ourselves. We can absolutely flag that right here and select one or all the way up to three of these options here. Reading scripted answers, received help from another person, or if they had perhaps manipulated their audio or video.

Let’s go ahead and select those. Heck, they were doing all three.

And we’ll submit that. And then the AI flag is updated to a team flag, noting this is a human decision made by your team as opposed to the AI proctoring.

So from there, what I wanna what I wanna show you is the one more place we can view these flags. If we go over to assessments and simply go into the candidate profile here, we’ve got these right here. You can see these right here. This is gonna be team evaluation.

So even if even if you do select to if if you opt to, flag it yourself, it will retain the fact that AI had flagged it initially.

Do you have two other types of, flags, for reference validity? So say, the candidate and the reference submitted their responses to a reference survey from the same IP address, we’re gonna flag that. That could potentially be suspicious.

As well as for predictive behavioral assessments, This will flag it if it didn’t seem as though the candidate understood or perhaps had answered carelessly throughout their predictive behavioral assessment. We’ll flag that as well.

Another thing I do want to hop into here are some more metrics. So let’s go over to this webinar host position. We’ll take access. Let’s check out assessment manager.

We’ll go down here, check out our assessment manager position. We have some new numbers, that can help you help you figure out where potential slowdowns may be occurring in your hiring process. We have a time to submit metric now, as well as a time to evaluate. So here, you’ll be able to better identify areas in in in your process that perhaps may need more attention.

This will show you how long it’s taken candidates to submit their interviews and how long it’s taking your team to evaluate those submitted interviews.

From down here, we can also view this in analytics. So we have the same numbers. This is going to apply for all jobs unless you filter out which, which jobs you’re looking for there.

And that’s what I’ve got for that that’s what I’ve got for me.

Fantastic new features that I definitely think will improve your SmartCare experience.

Let me go ahead and end my screen share here real quick.

All right, Jason, we a question from Katie. Is there a repository that lists all the possible misconduct reasons it is looking for?

Well, you know, I don’t know off the top of head though. It’s definitely something we can look into with our team and find that out for you.

Awesome. All right, guys, if you have any questions, please put them on chat. We can do a couple more minutes.

I wanna mention two things here. One, I’m gonna put on chat right now a website, Kenny.

If you wanna take a look at a roadmap, what’s cooking, upcoming features, that’s the place to go and you’ll see what’s recently released, what’s cooking, what’s planned. So very cool stuff coming up, automated reference check, AI notetaker, cool stuff.

And also I wanna mention about what Jason just shared with us.

So cool stuff on Meet, but also remember for those of you who are very active on Recruit, on the workflow within Recruit you can add those neat features, you can add the one way video interview and you can also add the predictive talent assessment, which is all the questions that we ask candidates before we decide whether or we wanna proceed with them. So everything is available on Recruit as well.

Alright, so we can wait another thirty seconds, let’s see if we get any questions.

And if we don’t get any questions, so first of all, on behalf of both of us, I wanna thank everyone who joined today.

It’s been fun.

Again, a lot of things in store, stay tuned and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

And feel free to give us feedback. We appreciate everything that you say and we take it very seriously. Every feedback starting from this presentation and through features that we have in SparkHire.

We try to be extremely attentive. So, you you are our partners. So let us know what you think, what you need, what you want. And if you have any questions, reach out to support.

Yep, we’re here to help you guys. Thank you all for attending today.

Hope hope you enjoyed our our updates over these new features. And, yeah, if you have any questions, feel free to pop them in here or, you know, reach out to to our support team. And, like, I think we’ve probably got some answers for you.

We’re always happy to help.

Alright. So thank you everyone for joining and take care.