It’s no secret that the US job market is tough right now – job postings are flooded with an overwhelming number of resumes and applications, making it increasingly difficult for recruiters to sort through applicants and determine those that are actually qualified and sutiable for the role. HireHuman is the job marketplace for customer service roles that believe resumes and cover letters aren’t the answer to securing the best applicant for customer-centric roles. Job seekers and recruiters can immediately connect via video, which means recruiters don’t need to sort through endless resumes and conduct phone screenings, instead are able to determine an applicant’s interpersonal skills through a short video application. As HireHuman notes, great customer service agents need to have a high emotional IQ, empathy, and strong communication skills and these traits can’t be conveyed through traditional job recruitment means.
LA Techwatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Michael Fisher to learn more about HireHuman, the company’s imminent launch, and the unconventional way the team is bootstrapping by launching a separate business to fund HireHuman.
Tell us about your product or service HireHuman offers
HireHuman is a customer service job marketplace helping recruiters hire smarter and faster by replacing the traditional resume and cover letter with a short video application. Connecting employers and job seekers by video at the beginning allows recruiters to bypass the inefficient resume and phone screen stage.
We are focused on hiring for customer service roles initially as our research speaking to recruiters across different industries showed that customer service recruiters typically hire a high volume of candidates and are poorly served by the existing resume application. Because of this, they waste time screening resumes and having phone interviews with candidates who are poor fits for such a personality-driven role.
While replacing the resume with video is our core feature, we plan to optimize the customer service hiring process by incorporating additional assessment tools to help evaluate candidate qualifications such as typing speed, computer literacy, and writing ability.
What inspired the start of HireHuman?
As the 6th employee at Carewell, an e-commerce startup supporting family caregivers, I saw firsthand how difficult it was to find and screen qualified customer service reps. I would carefully review resumes and offer phone interviews to what I thought were the best candidates. Over and over, I was shocked to discover that these candidates often lacked the qualities we were looking for: empathy, highly personable, and strong communication. A good resume did not equal a good candidate.
We interviewed dozens of recruiters and heard overwhelmingly from customer service recruiters that they wish they could assess the traits that matter faster. Too much time is being wasted in the resume and phone screen stages.
How is HireHuman different?
From our own experience and research, we understand that in order to assess personality fit and communication skills – the main criteria for a strong customer service candidate – recruiters resort to inferences from the limited information available on a resume. For example, recruiters will look for retail experience as a marker of good communication skills and discount all other resumes. This is an inefficient process, as they are potentially missing out on many equally (or better) qualified candidates.
Other important factors for a successful customer service candidate are computer competency, typing speed, writing ability, and even home internet speed. To assess these qualifications, hiring managers are using several different online tools that each need to be tracked and monitored independently. Because these 3rd party assessments don’t connect to the company’s ATS or preferred job board, recruiters resort to tracking candidates’ assessments on Excel spreadsheets. These disparate assessments add so many steps to the interview process that candidates become fatigued and drop out. HireHuman combines all of these features in one platform, dramatically reducing the time to hire for recruiters and job seekers.
What market is HireHuman targeting and how big is it?
We’re targeting the online job board market which is $10B in the US alone. We’re starting with the 2,800 dedicated customer care centers in the US, which have high volume hiring needs and dedicated recruiters.
What’s your business model?
We’re taking a traditional B2B SaaS pricing approach and charging a tiered usage price based on the number of job postings and the number of candidates for the subscription software.
How are you funding this business?
We created Ballot Bevs in order to delay external funding for as long as we possibly could. I fundraised for a previous startup and know how long and grueling the process can be. This early on into HireHuman we want to retain as much as ownership and independence as possible. Plus, one unexpected and positive outcome of the Ballot Bevs project is that it has allowed us as cofounders to really learn each other’s working styles, strengths, and weaknesses. With this foundation, we’re better prepared for the journey ahead with HireHuman.
We launched Ballot Bevs a few weeks ago and have been blown away by the support of family, friends, and total strangers. We’ve raised almost $10K through the project so far and are continuing to move full steam ahead!
Tell us a bit more about Ballot Bevs.
Ballot Bevs is a collection of limited-edition, election-themed coffee and tea boxes (Fake News Covfefe & Sleepy Joe Tea) using humor to connect with voters. We’re supporting 4 amazing voter engagement organizations with a portion of the proceeds – Black Voters Matter Fund, Rock the Vote, Nonprofit VOTE, and The Sentencing Project – with the rest being using to fund our MVP build for HireHuman. We’re using Ballot Bevs as an alternative early fundraising strategy for our startup and were inspired by past successes from Airbnb and Mailchimp.
Tell us about the process involved with launching Ballot Bevs.
We started building Ballot Bevs in early July and launched just 2 months later. We spent a long time crafting the brand identity and ensuring we had a mission that would resonate with people and feel timely with the current political climate. Once we felt confident with that, we found and worked with some cheap freelance designers, but ended up designing the packaging ourselves to save on costs. We connected with suppliers on Alibaba to produce the boxes and several of the mystery prizes. We sourced the coffee and tea from a couple of local LA-area wholesalers that we found online. From sourcing all the supplies to building a Shopify store to launching a brand in under 2 months, the project was a grind at times, but always fun.
What were the biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge for fundraising with Ballot Bevs was getting the word out without paying a cent in marketing – we just didn’t have the budget. One strategy we came up with was to launch Fake Morning News, a free, SMS-based satire paper that sends a joke news headline based on real current events every morning.
The biggest challenge for fundraising with Ballot Bevs was getting the word out without paying a cent in marketing – we just didn’t have the budget. One strategy we came up with was to launch Fake Morning News, a free, SMS-based satire paper that sends a joke news headline based on real current events every morning.
We launched the service on Product Hunt in August and have leveraged the inherent high engagement of SMS to sell our Ballot Bevs.
How has COVID-19 impacted the business?
The widespread adoption of Zoom and other video-interviewing tools into the hiring process during COVID-19 reassured us that what we were working on was needed more than ever before. We’ve seen both recruiters and job seekers become comfortable with the idea of hiring 100% virtually and using video to replace traditionally in-person interactions. We also know that there is a “Great Rehiring” looming as the economy recovers from COVID-19 and that many of those customer service roles will now be remote. The need to hire faster and better will be more pronounced than ever before and we will be there to capitalize on that.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
With only a short time until the election, we’re working hard to continue promoting Ballot Bevs so that we can raise as much money as possible for the 4 voter engagement organizations we’re supporting: Black Voters Matter, The Sentencing Project, Rock the Vote, and Nonprofit Vote. We’re also looking forward to getting all the supplies and packing materials out of our house – it truly looks like a mini-warehouse right now.
For HireHuman, we’re deep in our MVP build with a planned pilot launch of late November. We’re currently in discussions with several customer service recruiters who are excited by the prospect of getting early access to our pilot. After the pilot we’ll be building in additional candidate assessment tools designed specifically for customer service hiring like typing speed, computer literacy, and writing ability. We’ll also be working to integrate our platform to various ATS systems like Taleo, iCIMS, and Greenhouse.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles?
My advice is to get creative with where you’re sourcing capital. There are lots of similar stories to ours of companies selling unrelated merchandise to fundraise, such as MailChimp selling knitted monkey hats for cats and Airbnb selling election-themed cereal boxes in 2008. One other option is to crowdfund on a platform.
My advice is to get creative with where you’re sourcing capital. There are lots of similar stories to ours of companies selling unrelated merchandise to fundraise, such as MailChimp selling knitted monkey hats for cats and Airbnb selling election-themed cereal boxes in 2008. Onf other option is to crowdfund.
Even without capital, there’s a lot you can do to get your startup off the ground and start demonstrating traction. No-code app builders like Bubble are great for building an MVP you can deploy to customers at little to no cost.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We plan to dominate customer service hiring in the US before expanding to natural adjacencies such as retail, foodservice, and sales jobs. Ultimately, our goal is to kill the resume & cover letter for the vast majority of jobs.
What is your favorite restaurant in LA?
I moved to LA in early August and am definitely still getting my bearings. So far my favorite restaurant has to be Jon & Vinny’s. I’m a pepperoni fanatic and I still can’t get over how good the Little Nat’s pizza is.
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