As part of our ongoing conversation with the recruiting community, RNN editor Martin Burns recently caught up with SparcStart CEO and founder Maury Hanigan. The conversation covered product, vision, and how recruitment marketing has evolved during the pandemic.

SparcStart is an innovative recruiting platform that uses video, social media and mobile capabilities to differentiate jobs and make recruiting more productive. Both of the products she designed, Sparc and Amplify VMS, earned the TopHRProduct Award in the years they were introduced. Her successful career at Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, and as President of Hanigan Consulting Group has cemented her reputation as an HR marketer. Maury is a recognized industry expert and has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Economist, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, CNN, and other leading news media.

For more from SparcStart, please check their webinar: "Getting Employees Comfortable on Camera", featuring director and documentarian Nat Swyer.

‍Martin Burns
I've known you for a few years now, and I've always admired the solution. But we've never talked about what got it started for you, what the foundation was. Why'd you do this? I've been part of a few startups - have been through it myself. And it usually takes oh, something, to kind of key off the idea of, "hey, I want to build something, the problem I want to solve, or I'm frustrated by something, or I can't help it, I have to do this". Usually it's, well, three or more of those.

So: why are you doing this? What's was the motivation?

Maury
It was actually a long, slow build. I had been a computer science major as an undergrad, among other things as a triple major. I'm one of those slacker kids. I went from school to Procter and Gamble and marketing, so I've never been an HR professional as a practitioner. I went to P&G, did classic consumer packaged goods marketing and got involved in a lot of recruiting when I was there. Then went to Pepsi, still in a marketing capacity, ultimately, group marketing manager for Pepsi. And recruiting would drive me nuts. I would spend my whole day doing marketing for the brands and looking at storyboards and planning promotions, and looking at target audiences and communication strategies and all this sort of thing. And then I'd sit down with HR, because I'd have an opening on my team, and they'd show me this job description and say: "Oh, we're going to go market your opportunity." I'd look at this job description and think: "Huh? That's a compliance document, what are you talking about? We might as well put the usage instructions on the back of the box out there, and say 'Here, use Tide, add  a quarter cup to your wash'.”

I understood that, that recruiting was marketing. When you're trained in marketing, you understand there is a target audience, there's a communication strategy, you know, and benefits. We've known how to do marketing well for a long time. And it's not five paragraphs of text and 19 bullet points. Which it often still is. I mean, now we're talking two decades later, people are still marketing jobs with compliance documents, essentially. It's just crazy. And then you look at video, which is how we market basically everything else. We've all had high def cameras in our pockets for decades. This is not bleeding edge technology. And yet... HR continues to recruit with text. And nobody's reading it. Then you get to mobile devices, which is where we're seeing essentially all candidates getting their job information. And they've got this endless scroll of words - mobile devices were never designed for text. There's such a mismatch between the tools people were using and the behaviors that candidates have, and what recruiters are doing. And then recruiters are saying, “oh, you know, we don't have enough candidates.” Of course, you don't, you're not communicating in their language, you might as well be speaking in tongues.

So all of that came together. And that's why I did it. I understood the marketing piece of it, I understood the technology was there and was really easy to implement. All you needed was someone who really understood the enterprise recruiting process and enterprises need for security, that they want to be sure that all the videos that go out there are brand appropriate and brand approved and not proprietary, and so forth. So, you've got to build in not only the scale for enterprise - so you can have 1000s of jobs and hiring manager videos added to job descriptions, globally in the 1000s - but you can do it so a large enterprise feels comfortable and secure, that the quality going out there represents them well. And that's not a small task, but it's a very doable task. And so that's what SparcStart did. We made it simple, secure, and scalable, you know, and all of those things are important. Recruiters already have full time jobs. If you give them a tool that takes them more than two minutes to use, they're not going to do it. And we get that. We have a huge amount of respect for recruiters - they work incredibly hard. So resourcing them well and giving them something that will actually engage candidates is something that's really important. And candidates have a right to good information.

Martin
Agreed - it's interesting how inadvertently disconnected we can make them, how we force them to search for information.

Maury
Yes - absolutely. Building on that, the other thing that's going on is with all the processes being remote, candidates don't feel like they know anybody. They don't have the confidence that they're going to fit into the team, that they're going to thrive, that they're going to learn from these people and respect these people and have solid relationships. Because it's all so disenfranchised and disengaged. We're seeing people on screens for maybe an hour, rather than spending a day in the office with them. So that's really hurt as well. And when you look at people being reluctant to actually pursue an opportunity, they just don't connect to it. And, and we've all added a ton of automation, which you've got to do, and we're all for efficiency, but you've got bots talking to you. You've got bots scheduling your interviews, etc. The problem is that the solutions industry has taken the people out of the process. And recruiting is really about connecting with people.

Martin
For sure. I'm curious, based on a couple things from what you said, I guess my first question is, you're talking about job descriptions. Because you're completely right. I was in a group on Facebook, this was for, I think, for human resources, maybe for recruiting. But someone posted a job description, a job ad, "quote, unquote", for a recruiter. So it was a recruiter, recruiting recruiters kind of person. And it was, just to your point, it was a wreck. It was just bullets with requirements. And this was geared toward recruiters. So, it's like a double-insult in some ways. And I wonder why we keep doing this. If you want to convert someone from vaguely curious about your company, then maybe a new job, to: "oh, my gosh, I can't wait to talk to these people". That's not the way to do it. Why do we keep doing that? And what will it take to change that? Is maybe the current hiring environment so dire, it may actually finally flip that switch, because I think it's a strange phenomenon.

Maury
I think part of the reason we keep doing it is that vendors keep building tools for existing processes, just more efficient ways to handle job descriptions and distribute job descriptions, without ever stopping to rethink the goal, which is to attract candidates. It's not to distribute job descriptions, nobody really wants to distribute job descriptions, what they want, is to hopefully spark interest in a job. That's why we called it "Sparc". And so that's part of the problem. But yes, it's always hard to get people to change behavior. And I think prior to the pandemic, people could be very video-phobic and self-conscious about how they looked on video. And, you know, one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic is that we've all gotten over that. We've all found where our webcams are, we all understand how we sound on video, how we look on video, and we also have come to accept informal video. That was the other big thing: a lot of big corporations were really concerned that informal video meant low quality video. And in part because of the quality of cameras today, those two things aren't the same.  Andwe've seen a real backlash that now formally produced video feels even less credible than it used to, it feels like a commercial. And we find candidates are backing away, what they really want is somebody to just talk to them. And informal video is really powerful at that. To have a hiring manager or a co-worker, just talk to you - tell you what the job's about, what you'll learn, what impact you'll have, why you'd want this job. That's far more credible than bringing in all the lightnings and the boom mics and transcripts and all the rest of it. You lose all of the personal connection that video can give to you.

Martin
Walk our readers through what your solution looks like, in practical terms. So, from a recruiter's perspective, and then a candidate's perspective, how does it actually work?

Maury
The SparcStart platform makes it incredibly easy to create informal hiring-manager video. We have two products: Sparc and Amplify. Sparc is always requisition specific. It's always for a specific job and it's designed to drive candidates to apply for a specific job. It features a 20 second video of the hiring manager and 20 second videos of up to two co-workers that are just meant to spark interest. They're not video job descriptions, they don't describe the whole thing. They just put a human face and a human voice and enough information to pique a candidate's interest. And when you create that Sparc - and it goes through an approval process so you're confident that whatever's out there is appropriate - the video shows up on your career site in the job posting, which is where 92.5% of all visitors go on a career site. Because we're driving people to the job posting everywhere. So that video, and some infographics, show up on your career site dropped in to whatever your existing career site is. And separately, the platform also creates a landing page or microsite for that job, which you can share on social media and you can send directly to candidates. It's designed for mobile, it's a much more visual and interactive piece than just a job description. If you're reaching out through emails, you can attach the Sparc, if you're sharing on LinkedIn or Facebook, you share the Sparc, and it attracts candidates at phenomenally higher rates than job description.

Let me just give you the base stat. When you put a hiring manager video in a job posting on your career site, the conversion of visitors to applicants goes up by 60%. They come, they meet their boss, they feel like they know somebody, they start to envision themselves in the job. They look at that hiring manager, even though it's a short clip, get a sense of their style and their speaking and so forth. The candidate starts to wonder what it would be like to work for that person. And they've started the process of envisioning themselves in the job. And that's when recruiting really starts. They're not just looking at a job description, they're starting to think of themselves in that particular role.

Martin
It's the next level of psychological engagement.

Maury
Yeah, that's really connecting people to people. The candidate, all of a sudden, feels like they know somebody there, they've seen and talk to someone.  It's very different than looking at a text-only job description, or quite honestly, looking at a general employee testimonial. I say all the time that if you put an employee testimonial of Anna, from your San Diego office,  in your career site, and she may be a perfectly lovely woman, she may have a compelling story, but if she works in sales in San Diego, and you're looking at finance job in Milwaukee, you really don't care about Anna and San Diego. What you want to know is what's the team that you're going to work with like?  What's the location you're going to work in? When you get to any kind of technical talent, they want to hear from other developers, they don't want to hear from finance people. And so making that information relevant to candidates is hugely important. Some of this is good candidate experience, you're giving them information that's important to them, and relevant to them. And that helps them make a good decision to opt in or opt out.

Martin
Have you looked at the data on conversion, is it higher among certain groups or professions? Is there a difference, have you ever gone looked at data, say engineers versus accountants versus salespeople?

Maury
Yes, and we are amazed at the range. When I designed this tool, I thought it was going to be used primarily for middle management kinds of roles. I never saw it as a tool for hourly. And yet, we've had phenomenal success with call centers, with housekeeping for hospitality, truck drivers too. We all respond to this need to connect with other humans - it's a core human psychological trait. We've had phenomenal success at the lower end of the skill level. Bu we've also had it used for very senior level jobs, which also surprised me. Because the more senior people get, the more they care about who their peers are going to be and who they're going to work for and so forth. So we've been really surprised that it's spanned so much of the workforce, and globally as well.

Martin
So globally, where do you see more adoption? In general, who's kind of pushing the envelope with this globally? Who's lagging behind? Is there a rhyme or reason?

Maury  
Yes, we're finding the laggards are APAC. There's still tremendous pressure among Japanese and Chinese managers to present yourself perfectly. The idea of informal video is still not well accepted in the culture. We're seeing great adoption in India. And then there are pieces that surprised me. No one's surprised that we've got a great adoption in Ireland. Right? The Irish are storytellers. I expected the Germans to be a little more reticent, and not quite as forthcoming on camera, but we've seen some of the most innovative and fun videos come out of Germany, which just surprised the living daylights out of us. We've got a law firm in London now, who's just put together some great videos. And we thought, boy, if there was ever a conservative organization that was going to be uncomfortable with informal video, white shoe law firm in London would probably be it. But they produced 20 videos over four days. And really have great content that makes them very human and, and really does change the preconceived notion of what these folks are like and what it would be like to work with some. So that's cool. That's interesting.

Martin
So, let's talk about Amplify.

Maury  
Amplify was the the second product we introduced. Because for Sparcs, our process for recruiting and hiring manager video is so easy, we've patented it - it's the only one out there where you don't need to download an app. There are other products where your hiring manager has to get an authorization code, download an app, configure it and so forth, and then record their video in order to use it. But with SparcStart, you don't have to do that. The hiring manager gets an email, they click on a link in the email, and the camera opens on their phone, their laptop, their tablet, whatever they're using, they record their video, they hit submit, and they're done. They can record a 20 second video in 20 seconds. We won the top HR tech Product of the Year Award for it, and we were awarded a US patent for it. It's so easy, we had clients using our platform to record all sorts of other videos. And we are very protective of the Sparc product. The reason it's so successful is people get to meet their boss. That's our promise to candidates. When you open a Sparc, you're going to meet your boss, not some random person in the organization, but you get to meet your boss. And so we were politely calling up clients and asking them to please take down the videos that were not the hiring managers. But we also realized that people wanted to use video through the whole candidate journey. They're using it for employer brand awareness. They're using it for DEI. They're using it all the way through onboarding. And they've liked our platform because it's easy, and it's got the approval process baked in. And they wanted to use it more. So we created Amplify, which is a video creation, approval, editing and sharing platform for all the other video. So no matter what you want to use video for, you've got the same simple video capture process. And then we traffic all the videos behind the scenes so it goes to the right person's approval dashboard. So, you may have somebody in your tech group approving technology videos, or you may have somebody in one country approving videos there for language reasons or whatever. We do all of that invisibly behind the scenes. We've got a full edit suite built in so you can add your logo, your corporate colors, so you've got consistent branding. And we designed it for recruiters, who are not video editors. You want to add a logo you click on logo, you want to add a title, click on title and type it in. You don't need to master any kind of editing program. It's all in one platform, and that's huge. Otherwise, if you try to do video individually, if I send an email to you and ask you to make a video, you respond. I follow up with suggestions and guidelines, you record it, I have to give you some kind of Dropbox or upload link that will take a video that big because you can't email videos back and forth, the file sizes are too large, then I've got to know it's there, I've got to look at it, I've got a tell an approver it's there... too many steps. But when you put it on one platform, and the video sits there, and you can log on and approve it, and edit it, and you can share it. And all your recruiters have access to all of it, it becomes a very efficient and doable process at scale.

Martin  
Okay, that makes sense. You’re building a library of branded content. Which is great. So, you're thinking about the pandemic. What was the impact. Walk me through what happened and what changed from your perspective.

Maury
The pandemic really changed how recruiters and companies are interacting with candidates. And it's separated the companies from the candidates, because candidates aren't coming in for a day of interviews, they're not getting to meet people, they're not getting a familiarity and a comfort level with the person they'd be working for, and the people they'd be working with. It all feels very arm's length. Even if they're doing a live synchronous interview, it's still different than sitting in the same room with someone. And it's only with one person. You're not getting the vibe of the office, you're not getting a sense of how intense or laid back or high energy it is, you're seeing one person in a very static environment, and it's making hard for candidates to feel like they know anyone. It's making it hard for them to feel confident that they're going to thrive in that environment. It's making it hard for them to understand how that job is different than any other job. It's all too arm's length. 

And we've also added all this automation with bots, scheduling and online assessments and so forth. And that's taking the human face and voice out of it even more. We're talking back and forth with bots. And so when a candidate's looking at a potential opportunity, they don't feel like they know anybody there, they don't have that sense of this is a place where I'm going to thrive and succeed. Because it's all just paragraphs of text and bullet points. And so video becomes hugely important. And it's really changed the way companies have thought about it and understand the need to get this human connection back to the idea of even getting a preview of your hiring manager. Even if it's just a 20 second video, all of a sudden, it's a specific person, it's somebody who just talked to you, that's radically different than trying to read a job description, no matter how well written the job description is. And then we need to accept that few job descriptions are all that well written. But the candidates aren't reading them anyway. But they watch video. If you keep it short - and it's got to be short. The two-minute recruiting video, don't even spend your money. A candidate who's at the beginning of their job search, they're not committed enough to commit that kind of time. And generally, the two-minute recruiting video doesn't answer the questions of any specific candidate group. It can't, just by nature of the fact that it's meant for the entire company. But if you want to attract salespeople, if you want to attract tech people, if you want to attract retail workers, if you want to attract warehouse workers, they want to know about the job that they're about to go into and the environment they're going to go into. They want it specific to them. And you can do that when you're doing informal video. There's a real need to create video, it's almost a one to one rather than a one to many approach to creating video.

Martin  
That makes sense. And you went from early in the pandemic, this sort of moment of "oh gosh, what's gonna happen to our business", to the hockey stick growth the industry saw. So is that still continuing, or what's happening with your growth?

Maury
Yes, I think January is going to be a record month on top of record year. Companies are getting comfortable with informal video because of all the Zoom. They understand that not everything is formally produced. In part because teams are still working remotely and may forever be remote, it's not possible to send in a formal production crew. So informal video is the only option they have. And they just understand that need to connect more, they're getting comfortable with informal video. And because they're seeing more and more of it, they understand they're at a competitive disadvantage if their recruiters don't have it. And that's the bigger piece. Because of our growth we've got now so many companies that have got this tool available to them, that if you're a recruiter, and you're sending a text only job description to a candidate, who doesn't have a chance to have any preview of the people they're going to work for and with, it's really hard to make an impression and make a connection there. No matter how good the recruiter is, it's just different when a candidate feels like they know somebody there.

Martin
What's next in terms of products, and planning? Are you going to hold-steady with Sparc and Amplify? Are you thinking about diversifying at all? Without giving away your secrets, obviously.

Maury
The big picture is to continue to simplify the process. We have a very intuitive, very easy to use platform. We are not looking to add features just to add features so we have news, right? You can have feature creep that just complicates the product. Most of our development work is going into integrations with other tools. So we're already integrated with CRMs. We're already integrated with ATSs, we're already integrated with career sites. We're already integrated with those, but we keep expanding that list, so that we make it easier and easier that no matter where you are in your tech stack, you can click on a widget or click on a link and pull video into it. With any of the CRMs, you can reach out to candidates who are in your talent community but what are you sending them -  a text only email? If you could send them a video from a product manager talking about progresses in the market, or you could send them a video from a senior person talking about the vision and the new markets they're getting into or whatever it is, the tools they're using. If you could send them a video from your head of L&D talking about the commitment you make to individuals’ developments and the kinds of things that you want them to do. All of these things can be really compelling. One of our clients had the head of DEI make a video talking about their vision for the organization, and where they're going. A lot of organizations are really struggling with diversity. They look at the content they've got, and they don't have the results they want to talk about. So they talk about the vision and the effort they're making and where they're going. But having a person deliver that is very different than writing it down. It's just very different.

Martin
Well, there's a level of authenticity to it. Emotionally at least,

Maury  
I often say it's a little off topic for us, but one of our clients used the platform early on in the pandemic, it was probably April of 2020. The CFO made a very short video, and he said: "We are working, we are cutting costs here, we're delaying these payments here. We're doing everything we can to avoid layoffs. Our market has dried up and we're doing everything we can, we can't promise you that there won't ever be layoffs, but this is our commitment." And he could have written that down in an email and sent it to everybody, and it wouldn't have had the impact it did. He quite literally filmed it at his kitchen table. Having somebody say to all the employees, “we are committed to keeping you on payroll if we can humanly do that” was just phenomenal. And it was a short video, but there was no other way he could have delivered it as effectively.

Martin
I was wondering too, do you ever have clients use the product for internal teams. We're all distributed now, so if you have a library  of your employees and put little videos of current employees - so you're on a project team, or someone being transferred, you can pull it up and say "here's the five folks on my team. Here's their little bio."

Maury
Yes – we have clients that have done that. And in part just to share what they do outside of work. We one of my favorites was one of our clients, an individual uploaded a video. She was a kayaker who did class four, class five whitewater. She uploaded a video about it, this was her passion and she helped other people get excited about it and she invited people to contact her if they were interested in it. We've seen a lot of that. 

One of the other really good uses of video is in that dead time between the time someone's accepted an offer, and they start - when they're resigning from their own team, and you're going through reference checks and all that kind of thing. Having members of the team just record individual short videos that say "Hey, I heard you're joining us and delighted about that. I'm a Yankees fan, if you're a Mets fan, we're gonna have a problem. But other than that, I'm excited you're coming. Here's the kind of food I like,” or “here's what I do outside of work,” that kind of thing etc. And they can be really short, you know. Just a quick way to present you as a human. And it really helps. When someone's resigning from a team, maybe getting a counteroffer, they don't really know anybody there, that's a big leap to have somebody make that kind of connection. It's all about connection. And it can be easy, it can be short, but it makes a big difference. You can't replicate that in an email.

Martin  
How many of your new clients have a firm handle on their process when they approach you, that really understand what they're doing? They've done process mapping, and they've optimized it? Is that normal? Is that kind of unusual?

Maury  
It's unusual. Usually, they have an immediate need they need to fill. Right now, in this environment it's the lack of candidates. They just aren't getting the candidates they need and they understand they need to do something different. Now, can you go a step further and ask "why don't you have the candidates"? Is it that you're completely unknown? Or is it that you’re a household name but nobody knows what you're really do today in the year 2022. Or is this because your jobs aren't in the right places in front of people's eyeballs? You're spending tons and tons of money on job boards and candidates aren't on job boards. What's the root cause there?

Martin
That makes sense. So you're growing, things are going great. Anything you're worried about - I mean, besides Ukraine and global warming and...

Maury
Yeah. The pandemic is always a concern - what comes after omicron? You know, is there another variant coming? You know, thankfully, omicron hasn't been that serious, particularly now that we've got vaccines, but we don't know that there's not another variant coming. And that's an issue. How much will supply chain continues to disrupt things? And that's a real concern. But in general, I don't think that even when the pandemic is over that text is going to have a big resurgence, that people are really going to want to read five paragraphs of text and a few bullet points. The market has shifted, and they've understood that video is the more efficient communication medium. So the question is just how quickly they adopt it, and adapt to it, and understand that they're going to have a competitive edge if they've got it. Or very soon, that they're going to be at a competitive disadvantage if they don't have it. And that becomes the bigger thing. If they're operating without any kind of video out there, they're just going to get lost.

Martin
I think you're right. I don't think we're gonna go back.

Maury
Yeah. I like to say, when was the last time you spent $18 to go sit in a theater and watch text scroll by? We're not going back.

Martin
Totally true. We're not going back - the question is where we're headed. But I'm pretty sure we'll be using video. Really appreciated this Maury.

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