How One Start-Up Navigated COVID-19

We talked to Sean Fahey on how VidCruiter helps HR teams worldwide modernize their recruiting efforts, and this is what he had to say.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Sean Fahey: Fine, thank you. Happy to be healthy and working in an industry that helps people get jobs during this challenging time.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded VidCruiter?

Sean Fahey: I’m a business leader, a serial entrepreneur, and a strategic recruitment advisor. I’m the CEO of VidCruiter, which specializes in video interviewing and remote recruitment. I founded the company after working on a recruitment project that required me to hire 200 people. I quickly realized how slow and inefficient traditional hiring processes were, and I decided to do something about it. Every day for the last decade, I’ve talked with recruiters and hiring teams worldwide to understand their unique challenges better and find appropriate solutions. Hundreds of organizations now count on VidCruiter’s HR tech to hire worldwide. I’m incredibly proud of my career path. It’s significant work.

How does VidCruiter innovate? 

Sean Fahey: Innovation is a word that gets thrown around a lot in start-ups, but it is at the core of what we do at VidCruiter. We take traditional but outdated recruitment processes and modernize them through digital innovation. Instead of tedious phone screening, we innovate with video interviews, which reveal more about job applicants than a telephone call ever could. Instead of unstructured interviews that can cause hiring bias, we digitize custom rating guides into our online hiring platform to make the experience more uniform and fair. We look at every piece of the hiring puzzle and ask ourselves: how can we use technology to make this process better for HR teams, hiring managers, and job seekers alike?

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Sean Fahey: Unlike many businesses that were negatively affected by COVID-19, VidCruiter saw an increase in business because our products solve a real and relevant problem: how to connect hiring managers with promising candidates safely from a distance. Not everyone imposed layoffs and hiring freezes. Some organizations, especially those employing essential service workers, needed to employ many people in a short period. Our challenge became keeping pace with demand. The VidCruiter team hired more staff to assist our quickly growing client base, and we’re all working hard to ensure everyone is supported.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Sean Fahey: There will come a time when every founder needs to make difficult decisions to propel its growth. We learn from our mistakes, and if we’re lucky, we learn from others’ mistakes, so we don’t need to make the same ones ourselves. The biggest thing I’ve learned from making difficult choices is how to practice emotional self-discipline and stay focused on your goals.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Sean Fahey: Stress often accompanies ambition. There’s such a thing as positive stress, which helps push you forward, which can help. If it ever gets too much, I find a mix of exercise and rest helps. Step away from the problem, so you have time to think about it differently.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Sean Fahey: HireVue, SparkHire, and Modern Hire (among others) all offer digital interviews, but no one competes quite like VidCruiter’s software. It’s entirely customized to every client, so they get exactly what’s needed for their unique recruitment needs. We use sophisticated recruitment process modeling to tailor every step, so it mirrors the hiring team’s process and then recommends efficiencies. This approach makes transitioning to remote recruitment much smoother. No one needs to begin entirely from scratch.

Your final thoughts?

Sean Fahey: A lot has changed in 2020, and we’ve collectively learned so much. The way we work will never be quite the same, and that’s a good thing. Remote work opens doors to many exciting opportunities, and I look forward to what that means from a recruitment perspective. 

Once COVID-19 is better controlled, organizations will need help hiring in masses to rebuild the pre-pandemic workforce. But, even with things opening back up, I think remote recruitment is here forever. After hiring teams to leap digital transformation, they don’t want to go back. HR tech brings far too many efficiencies, making their jobs easier. Who would like to go back to what they were doing before? 

Your website?

https://vidcruiter.com/