Interview with Kevin Marasco, CMO at HireVue

We talked to Kevin Marasco, CMO, about how HireVue’s video engagement platform helps recruiters and coaches. Marasco explained that a combination of video interviews and predictive analytics powers performance scoring, based on personality and language attributes. According to Marasco, this allows managers to make data-driven decisions about hiring and coaching. 

Introduction to HireVue

Give us a brief overview of HireVue.

HireVue’s the team acceleration company. We use digital video and predictive analytics to build and coach the world’s best teams.

Our purpose is to give people a voice. We believe people represent unique stories, experiences and potential that doesn’t always come through on your typical resume or profile. So we offer individuals the ability to share their stories through digital video, where they can show the attributes that really matter – things like attitude, ambition and potential. This levels the playing field for candidates so that they can find and do more meaningful work. Busy candidates and team leaders can stay focused on their customers and day jobs, and respond at their own convenience, on demand.

We are also leveraging predictive analytics. We are analyzing a set of 15,000 attributes, which includes audio, video, and language analytics. We’re taking the words that are said by, for example, potential candidates, and comparing them to a company’s top performers. The platform also delivers language analysis based on audio and video, personality attributes, engagement, motivation and distress levels.

For team leaders, HireVue’s software enables smarter, data-driven people decisions in a fraction of the time. HireVue customers – which include 27 of the Fortune 100 — are creating bold business advantages and leading their industries with 50 percent faster growth, 29 percent less turnovers and 13 percent more top performers.

Recruiting, Coaching, & Predictive Analytics

Can you talk about HireVue’s expansion beyond the recruiting space?

HireVue’s roots are in recruiting, helping companies with everything they need to source, identify and select the best talent faster. This includes our signature on-demand and live digital interviewing technology; HireVue Insights, a predictive analytics and deep learning engine; HireVue Coordinate, a powerful interview coordination and scheduling solution; HireVue CodeVue, a library of technical programming challenges; and HireVue’s Mobile apps for candidates and managers.

In response to customer demand, we recently launched our Coach product suite, which includes everything a company needs to ramp, train and coach a team to higher performance. This suite includes HireVue Accelerate, a cloud-based video solution that provides a more effective way to coach, teach and improve sales rep performance; and HireVue for Salesforce Chatter, which allows reps to share valuable tips, tricks and insights with the broader team for faster onboarding and ongoing coaching.

Is the coaching component a different use case of the same product that customers use in a hiring context?

It utilizes the same core video, mobile and predictive analytics components with structured challenges and questions. It’s also similar in the quest to identify and model excellence within a company.

For example, by examining the work of top sales reps—what they do, how they do it, and how they deliver a message—we help customers develop excellence libraries to help other sales reps and new employees see how they compare, and to better understand how to handle different situations. What’s really cool is that customers can then use this same information to build their data-driven hiring model and recruit talent based off the same criteria.

From a sales leader perspective, we help managers identify which reps need more coaching or assistance to maximize their learning process, and simultaneously elevate the bar for hiring new reps. This is developed through a set of questions and responses for each individual, but it can also be done for a whole team at once. Customers can assess how effective an employee is at understanding customers, and how different sales reps can articulate the company’s value proposition or pitch.

How much time does it take for the predictive platform to start working and be effective?

Companies can use our general model immediately. Based on millions of interview responses and evaluations, this provides companies with a smarter way to prioritize and screen in candidates vs. half haphazardly screen them out using guesswork, or last-in-first-out or first-in-first-out workflow. The platform also provides companies with visibility into candidate engagement and motivation level, distress, and personality – without the hassle for a separate behavioral or personality assessment. Finally, it enables companies to use HireVue as a sourcing tool by allowing recruiters to search actual interview responses for critical skills, phrases and keywords.

But that’s just the beginning. The predictive platform gets smarter over time based on a team’s evaluation and performance data. So there is immediate value right out of the gate, but the value increases over time with machine learning. It also helps calibrate recruiters and hiring managers, and use actual data to show who your best – and worst – evaluators of talent are.

HireVue Users & Use Cases

Who are HireVue’s target customers?

Any company on the planet that wants to build and coach a world-class team.  In general, the economics and cost benefits make sense for any organization with more than 100 employees, regardless of industry or location.  Current customers include over 20% of the Fortune 100, and hundreds of small, fast-growing businesses. We’re signing, on average, a new customer each business day.

Unlike a lot of HR software, team leaders and candidates love HireVue. Our mobile apps are the highest-rated in the industry, with over 500,000 downloads and more than one million mobile interviews. It improves our customers’ candidate experience and Net Promoter Score. Customers such as American Express, Under Armor, Delta, and Chipotle are raising the bar on their talent while delivering a more modern, digital user experience.

Do you consider HireVue to be a competitor for recruitment platforms, or do you work with them?

We definitely work with recruiting platforms; HireVue is built to accelerate the recruiting process, while enriching interaction, engagement and modernizing the overall user experience. We’ll never be an ATS, which are built more for tracking and compliance.

Where we struggle is with analysts, even with review sites like TrustRadius, because everyone wants to put us into a box. We’re not an ATS or traditional recruiting platform; we’re HireVue, and we’re unique. We’re the team acceleration company, using video, mobile, and predictive analytics to help build and coach the world’s best teams. We help team leaders and candidates as much as we do recruiting and HR pro’s.

To share your own user insights about HireVue, write a review on TrustRadius. For more information about pros, cons, use cases, and ROI, find and filter user reviews of HireVue here.