Maury Hanigan Live on Shally's Alley

Hello, hello everybody. Welcome to Shelly's Alley. You are live on Shelly's Alley. Today is— well, it's before Thanksgiving. It's the Friday before Thanksgiving. We're not going to have a Shelly's Alley next week because it's Black Friday. Oh my God, Black Friday, that sounds so ominous, right? But anyways, um, today is February 17th. I'm sorry, not February 17th. What am I saying? Today is, um, November 17th. I wish it was February 17th because then this year would be over. Um, kind of like done with this year. But anyways, I have a very special guest today, Maury Hannigan. Maury and I have had some really interesting conversations over the years, deep philosophical conversations about the state of the industry And I recently bumped into, quite literally, did I bump into you or you bumped into me? One of us bumped into the other at the HRDX conference. And I thought, wow, yeah, I remembered the conversations that we, that we had over the years. I'm like, wow, we just, whenever we get together, we really, we really dig in and talk about big stuff. So it occurred to me, we should, we should bring you back on the show. So that's how we are. For those of you who don't know Mari, you probably do know SparkStart, which is a pretty cool company. She's the founder and CEO. How long has SparkStart been around? It's been a while, right?

10 years.

10 years. Yeah. And I think when we first met, you had just started it. It was really early on.

Yeah. Can I tell everybody how we met originally?

Yeah, tell us how we met. Yeah, tell me how we met because I forgot. No, I'm just kidding. Tell us how we met and tell us what SparkCert is because I think that's an important part too.

I'll start with how we met. When I started the business, I certainly knew sourcers and understood sort of intellectually what they did, but I've never been a sourcer and I wanted to really understand you know, exactly what their world looked like. And you were giving a class, um, and I signed up for it and paid for it and decided to come for a day, understanding I would never be a sorcerer, but I wanted to know what, you know, what it really was from their perspective, because our tool really helps sorcerers. But I want to make sure I spoke that language. And I flew down to Florida— I'm pretty sure it's where it was— and I sat for a day with my mouth hanging open. I listened to you and went, holy cow, I was, I was blown away. And I still tell people that today, that you absolutely blew me out of the water. Um, I had such respect for what you did, but also what you taught people and understood what really good sorcerers did. And it was invaluable for me. I think—

hold on, I'm writing that check that I told you about.

It was in fact— I mean, if you're, if you're going to create a tool to help people You need to really understand what their world looks like and their day looks like. I love that.

More people should do that.

Arm's length. But it was just such a valuable education. So I am one of your devotees. I, you know, kind of bow down to the Shelley altar.

Oh, whatever.

Yeah, a huge, huge fan.

But yes, I really appreciated that you wanted to understand the space, and we spent a lot of time talking about it, which is how we kind of got to know each other. And then That was, was that before you started the company or you just started the company?

I think we were still in product design at that point.

Right. Okay.

It was really early on. Yeah.

And then later on we met again and you had already kickstarted the company and you started to tell me a little bit about what you guys did and I got it right away. And you're like, wow, a lot of people don't quite get it and they don't understand why this is about sourcing. So, um, putting the, putting the cart before the horse, I guess. Why is sourcing so important to Sparkstart?

It's important to Sparkstart because it's for so many organizations, it's the beginning of the candidate journey when that sourcer reaches out to someone. And one of the important things I learned from you is, you know, you can, you can be incredibly sophisticated and focused and, you know, skilled at actually finding people. But if you can't get them to respond to you, then all of that work and all that expertise doesn't go anywhere. And what Spark does is help you connect with candidates. Where— let me define real quickly. Our initial product at Sparkstart was Spark, which is a 20-second video of the hiring manager that goes into a job description and creates its own landing page. So, when a sourcer reaches out to a candidate and instead of sending them, God forbid, a text job description with 5 paragraphs of text and 19 bullet points, they can— because everybody really wants to read those things. They really do. They're interested. They're going to read them beginning to end. But what they can do is a sourcer can now send a 20-second video from the hiring manager, which is only meant to spark interest, right? It's not an entire job description. It's not any long, involved video. But it puts a human face and a human voice on the job. And it lets the potential candidate meet their boss. And companies say all the time, oh, our people are our biggest assets. I'm like, OK, when in the process—

Put your money where your mouth is.

Right. When do they get to meet that strong asset? It's like, oh, after all the applications are done, all the screening's done, all the first round's done, and we finally get to the 3 finalists. Then we let them meet our people. Huh?

Yeah.

Let's put them up front.

And not only that, but we get to meet them like in a really bad situation because they're being under pressure, you know, interviewing, and it's like not exactly the friendliest, you know, environment. No matter how comfortable you try to make somebody when they're sitting there for the interview, candidates are always going to be nervous. I've always been nervous. You can't avoid being nervous in that sort of a pressure situation. And I think if you're not nervous, to some degree, maybe you're just not awake. You know?

But the other thing is, if you've seen, even if it's a short clip of the person you're going to interview with, you get a sense. Are they really focused and kind of, do you need to be on your game from day one? Or is this somebody who's a little more laid back that's likely to chat with you? You know if you need to gear yourself up a little to be on your toes, or if you need to come in a little more relaxed. It just helps you gauge what you're walking into. Because otherwise, all of a sudden, that screen comes on, and you have no idea who's on the other side of that. But if you've watched a little bit of video, you get a little sense for them. It really helps calming candidates down. We've heard a lot of feedback back. The hiring managers are going, "Oh, the interviews are going better." It's like, "I must be getting better at my interview skills." You're like, "Yeah, you are. Here's the contract." So what's really—

so what got me, there was— there was and still is another company out there that was very much kind of bleeding edge in the whole video and personalization. And I was working with them, actually a friend of mine here in Atlanta. And I was really skeptical about what, about what, I mean, I loved the product and what they were doing, but I was really skeptical about what the actual execution with recruiters were. And the problem was that this was essentially Customized videos for outreach. So it's like you said, the sourcing side, you know, you're reaching out to a candidate, it's your first impression, first contact, and the message, the email message, it usually just contains text. If it ever contained anything else, it might be an image or whatever, but nothing really very interactive. And so what they were doing is they were embedding video into that message, but it was video that was personalized at the candidate. And so essentially the recruiter would be sending a video voicemail, kind of. I don't know how else to describe it. Um, and it was personalized to each candidate. So to me, I was like, oh, that's a really good idea. I love that idea and I want to try it. But the problem is it's only going to work in certain situations. It's not universal because there— if I have to send out and let's just face it, nowadays what's happening, I probably need to send out maybe 300 to 500 outreach, you know, initial contact messages to get enough people interested and screened and interviewed to make a hire. Um, let's take the lower end of that, let's say 200. I'm not— 200 videos. Now granted, these were very quick, and what they did, which is really, really, really neat, was they had an intro video which is, hey, um, I'm reaching out to you, whatever. And then they had an outro video that was like the call to action. So really all you had to record that customized was the little middle part. So you had like a, you know, 5-minute intro, 5-minute outro, and like a little— not maybe 5 minutes, I'm talking 5 seconds— and a little part in the middle, hey, I'm reaching out to you because you have blah blah blah. So I thought, wow, that's a great idea. But then I thought, I can't do that at scale, right? And then you came around And I was like, this isn't scale. But then when I started peeling the onion and I looked at what you guys were doing, what just, I mean, just really reached out and kind of smacked me. This was, you gotta understand folks that are listening here, this was very early on when the whole pre-pandemic, right? Video conferencing was still a thing. Zoom wasn't literally on every phone or whatever. And, you know, virtual interviews, virtual meetings didn't really happen. So what really kind of struck me was when I saw a couple of demo examples of real life, one of them might have been— it was like a bomb disposal. Do you remember this?

No.

Or it's been a while, but it was like, this was a guy, it was a Spark. And it was a guy like, here's my job, and they, and they're like doing the thing, and then they turn around and they talk into the phone and they're like, this is what I do every day. And I was like, I want to do that. And it just engaged me. And I want to make sure that people understand how serious I am. This is actually the hiring manager, okay? So this is not a stage actor, this isn't the recruiter. With all respect to my friend who's got that company, that's fine. That's the, you know, hey, I am the recruiter, I'm reaching out. But this is the person who you would actually be interacting with every day on the job. This is going to be your boss, and they're telling you a couple of things that they like about the job or the company or whatever. It's not scripted. Well, maybe it is. You can tell me.

No, never, never, never, never, never. They're not professional actors.

They're not professional actors, right? Right, exactly. That was it. That was it. This guy was like, this is what I do every day. And I was like, oh, there was another one that was a garbage truck person that worked off of the— and there was like a video of them hanging off the back of the truck. And I was like, that almost looks like fun. Like, I'm like, that looks like fun. And it's so different than must-have, must-have it. So to me, what was so engaging about this was to actually tie a direct connection to the hiring manager. And I remember the first question that I asked you about this whole thing when I was like starting to, you know, all right, let me understand it. What happens if the hiring manager's name gets out there and people are now going to recruit that hiring manager? Are you exposing your people to the public? Do you remember the answer that you gave to that?

I hope it was on LinkedIn, they can find them anyway. So it's not really— there's— and we, we always Right. But we always encourage the hiring manager to introduce themselves with their first name only because we don't want candidates reaching out to them. That's why you have recruiters and so forth. But, but still putting your name out there, you know, the prompt on the SparkStart system is just introduce yourself with your first name and either your title or one sentence about what you do. So it's really— it's short and sweet, but it puts it in context, which is really important. People know who it is they're hearing from.

That's what makes the connection.

And it helps with credibility because you understand why this person has the right to talk about what they're talking about. They really know about this job. They're the ones that you're going to report to. And to your point about candidates—

Well, you'll never meet until you interview, if you even interview.

Right, right. And they want to hear from the boss. I'm sure you know Ben Eubanks of Lighthouse Research and Advisory. He did a study a couple of years ago. And he asked candidates what video they were really interested in. And far and away, it was the hiring manager, right? We all care about what's going to impact us. And so things like employee testimonial video, you know, if you're going to work in finance in Milwaukee, you could really care less about Anna in San Diego. She may be a lovely woman. She may have an interesting story, but you really don't care. You want to hear from your boss in your particular function area and so forth. And even from recruiters, while Good candidates understand that recruiters and sourcers are key people in the process. They also understand that they're transitory, that if you take this job, the person you've really got to get along with is your boss. Recruiter could be a fabulous human being, but they're going to move on. And so the boss is really important.

And that the product you're talking about ultimately, yeah, it could be the person you spend, not to sound hokey, the rest of your life with, you know, I mean, if you get a job that you love so much, you end up working with this company. This is, this is a very significant relationship. Your and so for me, that was the part that just kind of woke me up, and I'm like, oh, this is really powerful because it's real, it's raw. It was like Vines. Do you remember Vines? Yeah, and Vines later on— I can't remember what happened to Vines, but it, it either became part of Twitter or something like that. And now, and now everybody is talking about, um, TikTok and Instagram, and it's exactly the same thing, literally.

Informal video, informal video has just completely taken over. It has.

And this was the— it was early, early, early, early early informal video. So that was very captivating. And when you talk about candidate experience, which is where you came from originally, you know, and I think you also sit on the Canada Experience Council.

Yes, I've been for many years. Yeah.

Yeah. It's one of the most important aspects of the candidate experience is connection, right? Because what you— the opposite of that is the black hole of, or the vacuum of, I apply for the job, I never hear back. Nowadays, especially nowadays, there's so many people that are looking for work that ask me this question, like, what, how am I supposed to get through this? I'm applying for 200, 300, 500 jobs. And all I ever get are just automated rejections. And there's absolutely no connection. So this connection, this is the beginning of that, this, pun intended, the spark of that relationship. So to me, candidate experience really begins with before you're a candidate. Yeah, not after. What a lot of people think is the candidate experience is like customer experience. Well, to have customer experience, you have to be a customer. Right, right. Candidate experience is earlier than that. It's before you're even thinking about it. You are clicking through and you see an ad that has— how long are they? 20 seconds?

20-second videos.

Yeah, yeah, it has a 20-second— I mean, it's very, very short— has a 20-second video that is exactly the person you're going to work for. And you go, oh, well, it makes you stop right in your tracks. And now you have a connection. Yes, we know it's video, but you have a connection with this person and with this company. So to me, that was just— that was the magic of it and why I fell in love with the whole idea of putting that out there, putting it in front of— and your answer, what what, you know, back then wasn't you can find them on LinkedIn because this was 10 years ago. But your answer was exactly that. It was, well, two things. First of all, when they introduce themselves, they just use their first name and their title and their company. You know who they are, but you don't know their email address or whatever. And the second thing is, if somebody is going to go all the way to, you know, like try to use this to poach people or whatever, you still have the first line of defenses If you, if your people are happy where they are, you don't have anything to worry about. Which, you know, if you're the one doing the video, you're probably happy where you are. I mean, I'm just kind of hoping, making that connection. But it was all about this is real. And people want that. And they're not abusing the system. They're not looking at this as a way to get around to go talk to the hiring manager first before talking to the recruiters or whatever. And I believe the action item literally is apply for the job.

I mean, it does, you know, there's a button here.

So the easiest path to follow if you're a candidate and you saw a 20-second appeal— not an appeal, but a 20-second example of somebody doing the job— and you're like, I want to do this, is click to apply. Now you're going through the process. So there's no risk really of people trying to use this, um, you know, I don't want to say for getting around the system or whatever, hacking.

Among the other things it does, it also helps differentiate the job. Because you can go through and read job descriptions all afternoon, and they all look the same. I'm sorry. I've rarely read a job description that stood out and made me really be able to visualize the opportunity. But when you meet somebody and you put a human face on it, if you're the hiring manager, Shelly, like all of a sudden mentally I've got a picture of this. And the other thing that happens is candidates, you know, Let's say you're the hiring manager. I watch you do your little introduction. And I start to think, what would it be like to work for him? And when that happens, I've started to envision myself in the job, right? I've tried this job on. And that's a huge piece in taking that next step of saying, gee, is this a job I'm interested in? Is this a job I want? Is this something I want to pursue? Rather than reading job description after job description and not having any sense of the job, the content, the work, anything else. And people, you know, they'd like to hear— if you're talking about technical people, they want to hear from another technical person. You know, if it's a salesperson, they want to hear from the salesperson. They want to hear from someone who's in the environment they're going to be in. And it just brings it to life. It puts a human face on it and brings it to life.

Or if you have no idea what the job is, at least you get some idea of what the job is, you know. Another thing that I've talked about recently is the language in job descriptions Well, let me rephrase that. Let's distinguish job postings. The language in job postings can be discouraging. It can be scary. It can be biased. You know, not gender-neutral. In fact, it can be disadvantageous. That's— am I using that correctly? It can be discouraging to, you know, female, for example, candidates, or, you know, African American candidates, or whatever. So you're almost like already at the top of the funnel, you're sort of like splitting the audience.

Right. And let me tell you, one of the other things that a hiring manager video does. When I started Sparkstart, I was concerned that because most hiring managers are white male, and they still are today, that I was going to— that my product, that Spark, was actually going to hurt diversity. Oh, interesting. So I went out and—

I'm so impressed that you thought about that. Like, you started the product, you're like, I don't want to hurt diversity. That's amazing. Hats off.

Shut the whole thing down if that's good. So I went out and I did a bunch of focus groups with women and people of color and talked to them about it. And I should have figured this out being female, but I didn't. What I heard back was people who said, I don't necessarily need to work for another woman or another person of color. What I need is a boss who's going to respect me, who's going to support my career, who's going to treat me with dignity and professionalism. And as soon as you put a human face on that hiring manager, Like, let's put you again, we're going to put you on the video. You're a white guy, right? So, but when someone sees you, you seem like a reasonably reasonable human being. You know, you're not the monster. And I say all the time, think of your favorite horror movie, right? It's probably shot at night. You know, it's dark. You can't really see the monster. Imagine that same movie if you turned on all the lights. It's not nearly as scary. And that's what happens when you put hiring manager video in there is people get to see the boss and the boss looks like a normal human being most of the time. And you take away that scary, oh, who is this person? Is this going to be some really awful human being who's not going to respect me and not going to treat me well and that kind of stuff? You get a chance to go, oh, this looks like this could be okay. And the applications from diverse candidates goes up by 41%, because you've demystified it and humanized it. And that seems like it's overly simple, but it works. You know, if you really want to do it.

I mean, let's face it, the world is full of all kinds of people, right? That's the whole point of diversity. And so if you are— I'm actually Hispanic. And, you know, as a Hispanic candidate, I don't go applying for Hispanic jobs. Or jobs with Hispanic bosses. It's not a criteria when I look for a job. It's, it's I want a job that I can, you know, where I feel valued and I can enjoy and that I'm, where I have some, you know, whatever the other career objectives are. Not that I have to work with people that are exactly like me. That's the whole point of diversity, right? So let me ask you this question, though. It's something that I believe I've asked you before, but I think I know the answer to, and I'm, I just want to confirm. Is there Is there a lot of like resistance from hiring managers to do the video? Like, oh, I don't want to be on video, or like, because, you know, you know how, at least me personally, when I hear my recordings, they're awful. My voice is terrible. Like, I, I don't want to see myself. I don't want, I don't want to watch these things. They're terrible because it's the worst. I just don't like seeing myself or hearing myself. And I think that's pretty common. Maybe not.

Maybe it's, you know, yeah, videophobia is a real thing. There are people who are really afraid of it. I always feel badly saying that COVID helped anything because it was so horrific for so many. But one thing COVID did is it got us over a lot of videophobia. We've all figured out where our video cameras are. We look like we look, we sound like we sound. And so people who would never make a video were sitting in front of a camera all day long sometimes. So normal.

Right.

That helped normalize it. There's still people who are concerned about it. A couple of big things we do is we— there's nowhere on the SparkStart platform where you can put in a script that somebody has to read.

Right.

Because first of all, written language is different than spoken language. That's the reason there are scriptwriters and, you know, speechwriters and things. So as soon as you try to read something—

Oh my God. Hello, I am Sally Steckerl. I'm the CEO and founder of—

Yeah, it's dreadful. So when you ask people to do that, you're giving them stilted language to begin with. And they're not trained professional actors.

And there's pressure.

And it's more nerve-wracking. It's dreadful. And it doesn't even— I mean, the whole thing about informal video is it's credible, right? Think about if a friend—

Not to mention you can do 50 of them and pick the best one.

Yeah, you can do it over again. But if you've got a friend who's at a concert, they pick up their phone and go, Shelly, I'm at the Wolf Alice concert. Great. You know, they just talk to you. And the closer you can get to that with your recruiting video of somebody just talking to you. So you don't want to script them. You don't want to make it overly formal. We do give people some prompts so they've got some structure. We find the hardest thing is people don't know how to end a video. They don't want to wave at their phone, you know, bye.

See you next time.

Nervous and they keep talking and then they realize they're blabbering on and they don't know how to get out of it. So, so that's why ending with the call to action is so important. You know, for most people, it's just, please apply, send us your application, we hope you join us. You know, that's an easy—

that's a good ending.

So we always give people that, end with a call to action so they know how to get out of it. And keep it short. You've got to keep it short. Please don't let anybody make 2-minute-long recruiting videos. Nobody's watching them for 2 minutes, um, especially at the beginning of a job search. If you're not committed yet, you don't even know if you want to apply to this company, you know, I can sit there and watch 2 minutes.

But Maury, the application takes 2 hours, so why wouldn't I want to watch a 2-hour-long video and then also do a 2-hour-long application? I have 4 hours a day to apply for one job.

I don't know what's wrong with these candidates, you know.

No, my wife is looking for work right now. She recently, um, you know, finished up some work at, um, uh, T-Mobile, and it's just— timing is just really bad because the market is so weird right now. Yeah, you know, the good and the bad. And that was one of the things I was going to talk to you about today, getting, you know, more into that. But man, I just like— I, I feel my heart breaks whenever I see her in front of the computer, and it's like And she'll text me like, "Oh my God, these applications take forever." And it's just like, so it's such a drag. It's so disheartening. It's such a, just a bad— and I'm not even talking about what happens after she applies. This is just the application, right? So first there's the search, which is awful. I mean, you type in keywords and you get like, I— it doesn't matter where you go, LinkedIn, Google, whatever you type in, um, let's just say aircraft flutter engineer, and you get like plumber. Like, what the hell? How did that happen? So it's going through pages and pages, and then you find something that looks good and you click on it, and it's a virtual make, make money from home opportunity that looks like it's literally a pyramid marketing scheme. And it's like, what? So finally you get a job, and then you click to apply, and it's like, upload your resume. Okay, now that you've uploaded your resume, please answer all the questions about the information that is on your resume. Again, and then disclose this, and then disclose— in 20 minutes later, you haven't even applied for the job. So it's just almost like I don't even want to apply. What I'm trying to tell you is she doesn't even want to apply half the time. This is on the job posting, what you're talking about. This is right there on the job posting before they even click to apply.

And I'll tell you, the, the companies that are doing it well— so Spark does hiring manager video into job descriptions, but we also have a product, Amplify, which is for all kind of your other employer brand videos. People who do this well understand that you need to keep people connected through the entire candidate experience. That can even include in an application, like, let's take a look at the location where you'll be working.

Let's talk about that.

Yeah, let's talk about that.

I want to talk about that.

Video here that you can add in. We find it especially when people are doing campus recruiting. You know, by the time you make that offer to your summer intern at the end of the summer, you're going to go almost a whole year before they join you. Like, how do you keep them connected? So there's so many touch points where you want to just remind the candidate why they're, why they're engaged with you, why they really want to continue to pursue you as their employer. And video can do that.

So we're talking about something that while they're completing the process, there might be a little 20-second video about the location or something like that.

Yeah, okay, all sorts of things. Um, wait, just to sort of segue, because we were talking earlier about what's going on in the industry and so forth, um, this is a good, good transition to it. We're obviously seeing so much more automation and AI, machine learning, you know, all of that kind of thing. Um, we, we were working with a client who had automated the entire application process, right? This is for a warehouse position. The candidate would see it out on their phone. They'd click on it. They'd apply. If they made it through the screening questions, they'd take an assessment right on their phone. If they made it through that, they were given an opportunity to schedule an interview to come in for a tour of the warehouse and to receive their offer in person. Right. And the company was all excited. They had this very efficient process that was completely automated all the way through. And it was great, except that 89% of the people never showed. People who had completed an application, completed the assessment, picked a time to come in to get their offer, never showed.

For an offer? They got an offer?

For an offer. For an offer. All they had to do was show up. And they didn't get the offer. So, what they did is they started putting the— the candidates got 3 reminders of the the time that they had picked to come in. 2 days before, a day before, and then 3 hours before. You know, and they were all text reminders. So what we did with them is help them add a video to each of those. And the one that really made the biggest difference was recorded a video of the woman who sat at the reception desk at this warehouse. And she just said, "Hi, I'm Priya. You know, when you come in, come over to me. I'll have a name badge for you." I'm expecting you and I'll make sure you get connected to the right people. And it was just the same video for everybody. It didn't have anyone's name in it. But all of a sudden, and they put in the video a picture of what the entrance looked like that the people were supposed to go into. So, it made them— there was somebody whose face they were going to recognize, somebody who was waiting for them, somebody who had their name badge. It made a huge difference. It dropped their gross they're ghosting by a third. So we talk about this whole application process. And where do you need to put human faces back in, human voices back in? And the answer is pretty much at every touchpoint. Right? I was talking to someone the other day. And this is the best quote I've heard in a long time. He said, with these automated systems for candidates, applying for a job is a little bit like a video game. You can start it and stop it whenever you want with no repercussions. You're not connected to anybody. You're not talking to anybody. You can just, you know, you can start it and if it's like, ah, never mind, I'm going to bail out of this and walk away. And candidates do that by the millions right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why more now than before though?

Because it's more automated.

You know, so they're, they're bailing out because it's more so the automation Back me up here, the automation served to do what? What was the purpose of the automation to begin with?

Essentially to speed up the process, but primarily to cut costs.

Speed up the process for whom?

For everyone, actually. The more you— yeah, if you can take time out of it. I mean, in theory, the, the client who had the application online, it was immediately assessed, you know, online, The assessment was given out, you know, that was, that was graded essentially right away. All those things happened simultaneously. So you could get a candidate through the whole process in an hour. And they could get their decision in an hour. So it did speed things up for people. The problem is, they didn't feel like they knew anybody. A lot of the candidates didn't didn't even know if the job was real. You know, it's— I'll tell you, my, my son applied for a job. He went all the way through the process, never talked to a human, got a job as an EMT, and then he got all the pre-employment forms. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't put your Social Security number, you know, and any of the other stuff in there until you've talked to somebody and you know that this is for real. There are a ton of scams out there.

There are lots of them.

Lots and lots of scams. And it— from a candidate perspective, how do you know? How do you know where this is?

Uh, well, I can tell you how to know, and that's something that actually I teach, believe it or not.

But how does the candidate—

I mean, no, I'm saying this is something I teach candidates. I teach candidates, uh, how to detect this. You can't be 100% certain, but I do teach them how to detect it. But the reality is what you just said, that's exactly right. You don't disclose anything that is you know, like especially Social Security numbers or anything that's extremely sensitive like that. You don't disclose that in an online application before you actually speak to somebody and confirm that they're from that company. One of the easiest ways is to make sure that you're getting an email from somebody on that domain. You know, if I get an email from mari@sparkstart.com, they— that the probability that you actually work at that company is a lot higher, right?

As long as you know how to check a masked email.

That's right. As long as— that's right. And that's one of the things that I talk about. But that's exactly right. The problem is that, um, people just don't even check for the email. So— and there's more fraud too. There's more fraud than, than just the Social Security number. There's, you know, jobs that require, uh, that you pay up front to travel. And like, literally, they take your money and ghost you. I mean, it's— you just gave them money. It's like, never pay for, you know, buy your uniform, buy your whatever.

Oh yeah, right, exactly. All the time. And you've gotta, you've gotta put some of the human piece back into it just for credibility. It's one of the reasons we're such big fans of informal video. There's something credible about informal video. When it gets too slick and too polished, people say, or heaven forbid, AI-generated video right now. There's a piece of it that just doesn't feel real. And we have, you're going back to the hiring managers, do they feel self-conscious making video and not like the way they work? And they want the videos to be perfect. And we always say, it's okay if you lose track of your sentence or you, um, or you stop or you whatever, because that's the way we speak. We very rarely speak in a full sentence beginning to end. At least I don't. I interrupt myself all the time with, yeah, yeah, that's how we speak. It's normal speech.

That's natural language. Take that, ChatGPT.

Yeah, mess up and throw in some ums every once in a while.

Yeah, put in a few ums. So Michael wants to know of a good example, and this is incredibly unfair because I know you have some great clients, customers that are using the technology. But if you were to literally just rattle off a couple, you know, go check out blah blah careers, like, I don't know, careers.underarmor.com or anything like that, so they can see a job application with the videos in it. They want to know about that.

I certainly could. One of the things we do for clients is they don't have to put Hiring manager videos on all their jobs. We've automated it. So every time a requisition gets opened, the hiring manager gets an email saying, you know, please record a 20-second introduction. They have to download an app or anything. They can just click on a button in the email and their camera will open on their phone or their laptop or whatever they're using. But some hiring managers choose not to do that. So we have set it up so when they do make a video, and it gets approved because someone has to approve everyone, so you have to worry about, you know, proprietary information or whatever, it will show up. So you can go to a website and unfortunately you might have to hunt around to actually find it.

Not all job descriptions on that company's website will have it, right?

Right, right. You can take a look at Regeneron. They're one of my favorite clients. Talk about a place with a genuinely strong, positive culture. So you just, you watch these folks talk about their jobs and they are all about delivering, you know, medicines that help people and help their life, extend their lives and help their lives. And so it's really a joy to listen to people talk about what they do in quality control or what they do in manufacturing and what they do in research and so forth. And they're short, but you get a real sense of these are people people really genuinely care about what they do every day, no matter what function they're in. I saw one yesterday from someone who was working on the HVAC systems. And they understand that this isn't like keeping the air conditioning in somebody's house cool. These are in very serious science labs.

Life and death kind of stuff.

Yeah. And so, all the way through the organization, you really get a wonderful sense of that. But anybody can reach out to me. I can send you links for live ones. We obviously know which one, which jobs have them. I'm more—

but just to be clear, not every company, I mean, not every job at the company will have it. Yeah, because it's just, right, you have to kind of pick the ones that you want. The hiring manager may not want to do it, etc. So, so, um, tell me a little bit more about this. So we, we started with the automation. The automation was designed to reduce friction in the process, to make it easier for everybody. But then we kind of skipped past the why is it getting worse now? Why are why is abandonment higher now? Is it just the automation, or is it— because the automation was designed to reduce friction, so you would think reduced friction would mean higher levels of completion rather than higher levels of abandonment. So what's the connection between those two?

Well, and I refer to it as the efficiency paradox, you know, as your drive to get more more efficient, particularly in recruiting, and take people out of it because machines respond faster and can handle larger workloads and so forth. What happens is you lose all this human connection, and people are back to feeling like they're just, you know, playing video games or randomly clicking on things, putting things in carts and then abandoning carts and stuff. It's feeding into all that behavior. And then the employer actually spends more money because they've got to fill a bigger front end because the fallout is so great. So the more automation, the more you lose that human touch. It's like, you asked me to be on the show, that you and I have a relationship, a connection. I was absolutely going to show up today. There was no way I was not going to.

Yeah, we have a 57% no-show rate on this show.

But, but you know, if If it was something I was going to type into with somebody I'd never met that maybe I was going to be there or something, that's a whole lot easier to forget about, to pause.

Because there's no connection.

Yeah. All right.

So advantage, automation reduces friction. Disadvantage, automation increases anonymity or lack of consequence or lack of connection, or therefore it's essentially disconnecting more from the process. So how do we automate the connection?

If you need to do it at scale, which I understand a lot of people need to do it at scale, the answer is video. The video puts that human voice and that human face back in it. You can use the technology to grab videos that will make sense. Think about it. I don't think any of us love chatbots. Maybe there are people who do. I find it frustrating.

I love breaking them. Like I love telling ChatGPT, GPT to tell me how many E's there are in the letter between. It always gets it wrong.

Yeah, but, but anytime you can bring somebody in, you know, and you can create video, you can create a whole video library. We've got one client who's got 3,000 videos in their library, right? So people can find answers, they can find folks who can talk about different jobs, they can talk about career advancement, they can talk about sustainability, they can talk about social responsibility, they can talk about anything that you'd like to know a little bit more. You can find a human who can tell you a little bit about it. And that way you can do it at scale. And that's essential. You want to put that human voice on it. You want to keep it very personal and credible. And I can't say the word credible often enough because it's incredible.

No, I'm just kidding.

It really makes a difference. A lot of people think, oh, informal video is somehow bad quality video. That's not the case. The quality of the camera on your phone right now is as good as most professional cameras at the moment.

Yeah, you gotta watch the production, you know, audio, right? Right, audio is background noise and things like that.

Yeah, it's more the microphone on your phone is designed to pick up from an inch from your mouth. So when you start using your phone to film other things, or you hold it away from you and it's now 3 feet away, but on Amazon you can pick up a little lavalier mic for $3. You know, you don't need the $60 one. A $3 one will work absolutely fine for these purposes because it gets right to your— right, right. And you can produce really good quality video easily and fast. And then you just, you need to put it on one platform so everybody can grab it and organize it and find it easily. Welcome Sparkstart. But there are ways to do that. It's probably not SharePoint, but you know, you can make that easy.

So video is one of the answers. What else is going on? What is going on there in the, out there in the candidate experience realm? So we've got the, you know, the paradox of the automation, We've got the connectivity through video. Are you seeing any other massive changes? We were talking about this at HR Tech. You see any other massive changes and kind of shifts in the entire industry of, you know, the talent market, the job market, the employment market? Anything else that's—

I think there are two of them. One is we're seeing much more focus on internal mobility, of hanging on to the folks you've got and loosening up those ties on how often people can change jobs. I mean, I understand you don't want people jumping every 6 months to a new job, because you can't really see the results of what they're doing when they're jumping that often. But if they're going to leave you anyway, and you're going to hire a new person every 6 months to replace them, all you've done is added recruiting costs to all of this. So we're seeing a lot more openness to internal mobility. We're also seeing on the recruiting front a lot more employers who are really looking at employee advocacy programs and having employee ambassadors and understanding— you, you will love this. Again, I was talking to— I talk to folks all the time in the industry, and we were talking about informing informal video. And he was showing video from this organization that had been made by employees and posted out on their own personal social media and showing it to the head of employer brand and actually the head of TA. And one of the videos was a young woman who was talking about getting her job at the organization. And she was going through what the process was like and so forth. And the executive's comment was, that's not sanctioned. Sanctioned?

Not sanctioned. It's an unsanctioned action.

It's not sanctioned. Um, but this young lady made a video and put it on her personal, you know, channel, social channels, but had company name in it and was very straightforward. Um, so the, you know, and you can take the, you know, it's not sanctioned, we're going to shut this whole thing down Or you can say, our employees are out there talking about the company anyway. Let's see if we can harness some of that energy and their desire to share. And if you need a fundamentally positive corporate culture to do this, and if you don't have one, your problem is not recruiting. You need to go fix your culture if it's not a fundamentally positive culture. But if you've got a fundamentally positive culture, and people are getting satisfaction out of their work and feel like they're contributing and they're respecting, then you can take all of that energy and tap it and use it to help you in your recruiting. So, we're seeing—

Blurred.

Yeah, yeah.

Blurring, I guess.

We're seeing people that are, you know, and companies are saying in the same way we saw companies that started to support their alumni networks, right? It used to be when you quit the company, You were pushed out on status. Yeah, didn't want to hear from you. You weren't a good employee anyway was kind of the standard for us. And now all of a sudden it's like, oh gee, maybe you went to work for, you know, sort of somebody who would come back into our environment, part of our ecosystem, and really started to embrace that. So we're seeing companies starting to embrace employees who are sharing on social and giving them some of the tools, giving them resources, giving them recognition. How about that? We're seeing companies that are giving employees points that they can trade in for vacations or sweatshirts or those kinds of things when they share company news and so forth. And just instead of trying to control it so tightly, saying, OK, there's, there's energy here and potential here. Let's support it and make sure it's constructive and where we want it to be. But that's very different than we have our 2-minute corporate video and this is our word to the world kind of thing.

Marketing-sanctioned, blessed by PR, watered down to the point where it might have been created by ChatGPT.

Right. And legal crossing out every word that meant anything.

Yeah, every word that could potentially be used against you in a court of law. So I want to— the real covert reason why I wanted to have you on the show. The truth comes out. Because I wanted to ask you this one question, and I don't expect you to be able to have an answer right now because this is something I've been thinking about for a while. And, um, I think it's pretty early on, and I hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag, but what do you think about influencer marketing, creator-driven commerce? There was an article recently, uh, from I don't know if it's an article, actually a research study from Goldman Sachs that said that the value of the creator e-commerce or the creator commerce industry currently today is $250 billion with a B, and that by the end of '27, it'll be at least $470, if not closer to $500 billion. That is some money. Um, and what I wanted to ask you is, are you ready for that? And what is that going to look like in recruiting? Is there creator-driven, influencer-based recruiting?

I can't say any specifics, but I'm going to be flabbergasted if it's not already happening.

It's happening for multi-level marketing. It's always happened for multi-level marketing. It's always happened for recruiting people to I mean, selling and recruiting kind of get blurred, right? If you're recruiting people to join a cause, recruiting people to sign a petition, you know, so there's been a lot of that, but I'm talking about employment.

Yeah, no, I, again, I'm— I would be surprised if it weren't going on. I doubt anyone's going to be public about we're paying this individual, you know, so much advertising.

You pay Is your company free? Can I get Sparkster for free?

Close, but not quite.

Yeah, so what, you know, so if I'm paying Sparkster to do their job that I'm hiring them for because I want to, because I think it's a great idea and it works, why wouldn't I also say, hey, I'm also paying LinkedIn, huh? Gee, big surprise there. Why would I be ashamed of telling somebody that I'm paying an influencer to advertise my jobs?

Because they want the illusion that the influencer is genuinely recommending it rather than spouting paid whatever.

We just stepped on a landmine. There's a lot of law around that right now. Yeah. Around, you know, the illusion. This is not a paid sponsorship, or this is a paid— yeah.

But in our industry, I mean, in the HR tech industry, there are a ton of thought leaders who are getting $3,000 a month, you know, to favorably talk about products out there. Some of those folks are straightforward about it. Some of those folks never mention a word that they're being paid.

Regulations are going to change on that because it's the same kind of thing. But I'm talking about jobs.

Yeah, for jobs. Yep. I think that's—

I've been thinking about that a lot, and I'm wondering, um, if you're ready for that and can we create a product together? No, I'm just kidding, because I think there is going to be some— there's going to be a way to do that, right? It's, it's a very— it's very early in the creator commerce industry still. I mean, it's, it's been maybe 11 years since kind of the beginning of it. And if you go back to like affiliate marketing and all that, okay, it's, you know, but, but what we're talking about now, these micro, uh, videos— I'm probably not using the right word, but you know, these 20-second videos, these videos about lifestyle and travel and you know, they're, whether they're disclosing it or not, are definitely the new marketing, you know. And so we're eventually going to catch up to that in talent acquisition and recruiting, I think.

Yeah, matter of fact, one company we were talking to recently is a unionized environment. And we were talking to them about, you know, employee testimonials and what they're using. And they said, under the union contract, we have to pay employees if we ask them to do that. So even just a day in the life or any kind of, you know, it would be true of even a hiring manager video under the union contract.

But you're paying them to come to work, so why not do it while you're at work? Or they have to pay them again?

Not part of the union contract of the duties that they're supposed to do.

You have to pay again. So like another— okay, yeah, but just— yeah, so why not?

Yeah, it's very, very strict environment.

Reasonable to pay somebody to do something if you're asking them to do it. If they're an employee and you're asking them to do something, why not pay for them, right? So yeah, I get it.

Yeah, so it's, you know, we're gonna see this evolve. And it's, you know, it's a little bit weak because so many people use video to support their DEI efforts. You know, there's always this difficult piece of, gee, we have a Black female, do we ask her to make a video or is she gonna feel exploited? You know, but then do we have all videos of nothing but white men? And my answer is always, how about you recognize the Black female as an adult and you ask her if she would like to? Because some people don't want to be the Black female or the Black man. And other people say, I do want to be, you know, an example to other people to realize that they can succeed in this organization. And it's my way of giving back.

So you talk about scripted. Like, are you going back to the original, "Hello, my name is Shelly Steckel, and I am the gay Black male at—" You know, let's not make it too obvious, right? So it's got to be organic. If she, she or he or they are the hiring manager, and this is about hiring managers, then that's the decision, not whether or not they're race or gender.

But even for employer branding, I mean, I think we have to respect both mindsets. There are some people who really do want to be ambassadors. It's part of how they give back to their community is they become, you know, someone who looks like me who's succeeding here. And they want to talk about that. And then there are other people who don't. And you respect it both ways. But sometimes I think we're so afraid to have those adult conversations with people to say, Shelly, are you comfortable being an Hispanic man and saying so? And if you don't want to be the Hispanic guy, that's okay. Like, we respect that.

But if you say, hey, I'm okay with being the overweight over-50 guy though, okay, the Jewish overweight over-50 Hispanic guy.

Boy, we haven't got very many people in that column. Oh man.

All right, well, I got it out there. I'm still thinking about it. I do think that there's going to be There isn't anything obvious right now about it, but I think there is going to be a shift to that naturally because there's a shift to that in commerce and it's organic and it makes a lot of sense. And yes, there are people exploiting influencers, there are influencers exploiting people, there's, you know, it's the wild— I hate saying this analogy, it's the wild west, the early days, it's the frontier. Let's call it that way because wild west is a little bit exclusive. It's the frontier time. Of this kind of marketing, right? So naturally, I wanted to ask you about it because I think your company is in a position, your technology is in a position where it would be easy to solve for that if we could figure out that other part, the in-between part of the art. Do we have to disclose it? Is that, you know, those other things which are bigger questions The technology is definitely there, and it's happening in social media already. And the reason I wanted to bring this up is because what we were talking about as far as like non-sanctioned employees using unsanctioned content on social media are actually recruiting and getting results. A hiring manager goes on their LinkedIn and posts a blog post about their company hiring, and they get people to apply. And we want that, right? We want that. So What's the difference between that and doing a video? And on LinkedIn, you can actually do that now with creator videos. I don't know if, um, you guys are able to post your video to that. We can post—

yes, we can post directly to LinkedIn.

There you go. So that's, that's awesome. That's what I was talking about. So it's really not that big a difference between that and an influencer that is not an employee. And that's the key difference, is, is influencers and, and And creators are not— they don't work for your company. The influencer is marketing your brand and doesn't necessarily work for your brand. They are independent. They work for themselves. So yeah, yeah.

So yeah, just me saying Regeneron's a— looks like, you know, genuinely great place to work. I'm not an influencer. That was not a paid endorsement. It was an observation of lots of people. That was an influence. Yeah, yeah. But actually, There's probably a business out there, someone, of being an agency to connect influencers with, you know, TA departments to say, hey, if you're looking for radio frequency engineers, I can get this individual to be, you know, to endorse your organization. And you'd have to create the stable on both sides, but there's probably a talent agency out there that does those kinds of things. I don't want to be that talent agency.

Um, but yeah, talent agency is a different model. Yeah, that's it. That's representing, uh, that's a representation. There's a whole lot of legal and other things like that that have to do with contracts and everything. Um, so yeah, I get that. And most influencers that are at the top of their game have an agent that represents them anyways. So even if you had an agency for that, you would still deal with the— dealing agency to agency. Just like, just like in Hollywood.

Well, it might be, it'd be different. Think about engineers. It's probably not one of the fashion influencers who's going to be credible there, but it might be somebody who's got a very high profile on GitHub that you could hire, you know, that their only claim to fame is because they know their stuff. And if they had positive things to say about an organization or its career paths or the technology they're using or something. It's a whole different stable of individuals who would be influencers for employment versus the people who are out there that are getting, you know, it's not, you know, any of these stars that are out there right now as general influencers. It's people in the industry.

Specific. Yeah. Micro-influencers is what they call them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have come to the end of our time together again. And as you predicted. We couldn't— we— if I didn't pull the emergency brake on this train, would go on forever. I do want to have— I, I do want to ask you my last two questions for every guest. The first of those is, what would you like our audience to think about and mull over? So it's not— it's not a— I don't want to pitch, or, uh, or, um, more like a question, a, a thought-provoking idea that you want them to think about. Over the next few days.

Um, how can you give candidates information that they want, not what you want them to see, what you want to tell them? And how, how can you— I understand you've got to do this at scale, but how can you really help them make a well-informed decision to opt in or opt out that's going to work for both of you? So not just Here, let's push this information at them because we want them to believe this. But, you know, I've always loved— I think the best job descriptions out there are actually from waste management, who's never been a client, because in their job descriptions they say, you will be outdoors in either this kind of heat or this kind of cold and these kind of conditions. You know, this is part of the job. They really tell people what they're getting into, which I really respect for them. It's that kind of information, I think, where we each have an opportunity. And so it doesn't have to be rewriting the job description, because I understand compliance will, you know, hold you up forever. But how do you get information to candidates that will genuinely help them determine whether this is a job where they're going to thrive? Because that's what you want. You want the candidate to thrive. You want them to be in the right match when the When the match is right, it's good for everybody. And when it's not right, it's bad for everybody. So I understand people can get focused on just get somebody in here because we've got to fill this role. But I mean, hopefully the joy of recruiting is making good matches for everybody. So how do you get information out there that's going to help do that? That's what I'd like them to think about. If they come up with an answer, let me know.

Yeah, let Maureen know, sparkstart.com. And my last question is, who should be our next guest?

Oh, good one. Um, who— what do we want to talk about? Um, do you know Steve Tchutchak? He's now at AMS, has been in the industry for a long time. Um, his focus has always been campus And I always think it's interesting to look at how students are responding to things. I'm not a big believer in trying to lump all generations together and say that they are a homogeneous group. However, I think when you get, you know, campus hires really are bellwether of a lot of particularly professional roles. I think, and Steve is delightful.

So I'm going to recommend you talk to him. On it. Thank you very much, Maury. It's been a pleasure. Look forward to, you know, seeing you at the next HR Tech, hopefully sooner, not waiting 5 years between bumping into you. And yeah, sooner than that, I'm sure. And thank you very much. Thank you. All right, everybody, have a great weekend. Happy Thanksgiving to y'all. Remember, no show on Friday, Black Friday, go shopping, and be kind to each other. Bye-bye. Thanks.