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  • Humanizing video interviews in the recruitment action plan
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Megan Zolnierowicz | Director of Marketing, Spark Hire

Megan Zolnierowicz is the Director of Marketing at Spark Hire, the #1 video interviewing platform used by over 6,000 organizations in over 100 countries. She focuses on building full-funnel strategies to educate HR and staffing pros on the benefits of Spark Hire's easy-to-use technology. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two-year-old daughter, reading and rearranging her bookshelves.


Note: Click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.


1:41                                

Megan: I started with copywriting, and did a little bit of design, and I was selling advertising for Vox magazine. So when I moved to Chicago, I was continuing to work on the side, and freelance as a social media consultant, and actually was doing that at Four Corners Tavern group as I was recruiting, because I just felt like one job was never enough. And so when the company I was working for moved, I went on full time in social media at Four Corners and had this awesome boss that just kept giving me like, "Oh, you want to do more stuff? Okay." So it was social media, and then it was email. And then it was, you know, the website. And I was just really able to—I loved being able to find our audience and engage with them where they are, rather than just putting messages out to anybody that would pick them up.


Megan's experience with marketing gave her the knowledge of how to build an audience with content strategies and convert visitors into users. Now here's Spark Hire, a company with a brilliant product for recruiters, looking for someone to spearhead marketing.


While some companies are struggling to adapt to change, some companies are setting examples on how to do it effectively, and are even offering solutions to these problems.


Back in 2012, a product that helped you conduct video interviews would have been considered a luxury, and maybe even futuristic. Well, the future is now, and you need top of the class tools if you want to keep moving forward.


4:29

Megan: Spark Hire launched in February, 2012, with a mission in mind on how job seekers are going to be found by companies and also how companies will find job seekers. Our overarching mission is to give organizations a hiring advantage, and as part of that, we streamlined our focus a little bit on how to give teams a better way to screen and present their candidates.


An elegant solution to every recruiter's pet peeve--wasting time on the wrong candidate. So how did they come up with the idea back in 2011?


7:28

Megan: Our CEO, Josh Tolan, [...]was initially working for a lead gen company, [...] and he was starting to see the challenges in the hiring process firsthand, and the amount of time and effort that was being wasted on the wrong candidates. [...]He was sure that that was definitely the case with most recruiters, and he wanted to build a tool that will help people save time, and make recruiters are only interviewing people who are going to be good culture fits, or qualification fits, or overall, the best candidates.

Working remotely has broken stereotypes that you need to be in your office at your desk to be productive, and to move the needle on progress. In fact, it has made many people more productive and creative in the way they spend their time. We asked Megan how her work day experience has changed.


10:38

Megan: I think I sat in a lot of meetings before that were not necessarily as important as they needed to be. And so I would see a lot of time that was spent doing things that didn't move the needle. [...] Now I have this amount of hours every day that I can actually focus on doing things that are gonna move the needle, and what are those things going to be, and prioritizing in terms of what's going to be best for our business, and what's going to be best for the marketing department, and move forward and actually produce the content that we need to better engage with. 

However, not everyone is thrilled with this sudden shift. The uneasiness people feel towards working remotely is also present when it comes to hiring remotely, but it actually removes numerous roadblocks that you would face traditionally. Sometimes, the candidates worry that remote recruitment means that the company is not willing to spend time on them. But in reality, remote recruitment is beneficial to the candidate all the way.


12:15

Megan: I think, especially with the one-way video interview, it feels like they think that companies are spending less time on them, or they don't want to get to know them as well. One way I really believe recruiters can get over this roadblock is by making sure that they are coaching up their candidates, but make sure your candidateunderstands that this is better for them. This gives them an opportunity to really put their best foot forward and communicate in their own wordswhy they're a good fit for the company they're interviewing with.

And it also allows them to see a little bit more about the company they'd be joining and learn if that's good on their end, too. So I just like to make sure that you're taking every opportunity as a recruiter to add personalization and reassert reassurance into the process. And that will usually help the candidate feel a lot more comfortable answering questions on video.

Bad news keeps piling on for several industries, and recruitment has taken a hit as well, but it has also presented recruiters and corporate HR departments with an opportunity for growth that will carry on well beyond the COVID-19 era.


Companies that are on a hiring freeze can focus on building a virtual recruitment system and build processes that fit their needs so that they can be ready when economies start reopening and they have to start hiring again. Companies that had taken time to experiment with remote hiring tools before have had it comparatively easy now. Their opportunities for growth lie in scaling it up and perfecting it with the right tools.


14:03

Megan: So, the companies that have unfortunately had to implement a hiring freeze, I think they can really use this time to take a closer look at their hiring practices and prepare for their post COVID-19 workforce. But for those that are witnessing a surge in demand, some of the tools that I think were considered a nice-to-have before, like virtual interview tools—and were often used and budgeted for accordingly—are now proving very useful for the immediate pivot to remote work.

Closing with an open thought

The pandemic may have taken away our freedom to move and communicate freely in an office or even across the street, but it has not taken away our ability to innovate and reimagine our existing systems.