Reimaging how we schedule interviews and create world-class candidate experiences

[00:00:13] Welcome to episode 126 of the High Volume Hiring Podcast. I am Stephen Rothberg, one of your co-hosts and also the founder of College Recruiter Job Search Site. It's a little bit after lunch where I'm at. I did have pizza last night, and I think in a little bit we're going to see what pizza has to do with candidate applications. Jeanette, was that kind of okay?

[00:00:35] Sure, I was confused, but let's see where this goes. Jeanette Leeds. And today, on episode 126, which is a great number, we're here with Chris Connors. He is the co-founder of Kedit FYI. So welcome, Chris. Thrilled to have you here. We'll talk pizza, I guess. Thank you for having me. And it's funny, I thought you were going to say you had pizza for lunch, and I was about to ask, how are you still waiting? Right? Lots of coffee.

[00:01:04] But it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Super excited to get in all sorts of stuff. Awesome. So why don't we kick it off for our listeners with my typical first question, as many know. Tell us, Chris, like a little bit about you, Kedit FYI. I'm also curious, co-founder, like why'd you start Kedit FYI, which may be all circled together. So give us a scoop. What's the story?

[00:01:25] So I've been in technology my entire career. I've been a candidate many, many times. And several years ago, I was on one of the last interview processes I'd ever been on. And I was so overwhelmed. It was so disjointed to me. There were so many different communication points and email threads and PDFs and prep guides. And there must have been 50 different emails for this one company I was interviewing with.

[00:01:51] It was wild. And I was deep into the process with this company at this point. And there was so much. I never knew where I stood. I never knew how to prepare when upcoming meetings were coming up. I didn't know who I'd be meeting with. I wanted to exceed, right? Yeah.

[00:02:06] Like I was super excited for this potential role. So I spoke to my brother who was a CTO at the time. He's always been the technology mind. I've always been more of the sort of like business development mind. And I was like, why is the interview process like this? It's arguably the most important time of anyone's career, right? When they're interviewing with a company. And why is it so outdated? Why is it archaic? Why is it built and being done the same way it was 20 years ago? Yeah.

[00:02:36] And he's like, it's funny you say that. I work with our recruiting teams daily to figure out how do we make their day-to-day more efficient? How do we bring more automation? It's highly, highly manual. So we just put our heads together and said, let's build something that can service both candidates and recruiting teams. And fast forward to today, it's been a wild journey.

[00:02:57] So the reference to pizza, and thank you for not stealing my thunder, Chris. The reference to pizza is in the fall, Amy Miller, who is, if people who aren't following her LinkedIn definitely need to. She's a tech recruiter with, I believe, Amazon, AWS. I think she does a lot of like recruiting for robotics kinds of roles, like very high tech.

[00:03:20] She posted something that I saw that it essentially said something to the effect of, if we can track a pizza from the moment that we order it and follow its progress all the way to the point that we get it. Why can't candidates do the same thing when they're applying to job offers? And then I think you chimed in and you basically said, that's what we do. So that's when I reached out to you and said, you know, could you be our guest?

[00:03:50] So talk with us about if a candidate is using candidate FYI, is it kind of like tracking a pizza? And how do you do that? Because a lot of companies, they don't want you to know this stuff. So great question. And that's what many people know us as, right? Like almost like the Domino's pizza tracker for your job application. We've all ordered a pizza from Domino's, right? We know that experience.

[00:04:13] I don't know. I live in New York. I'm a Jersey girl. I'm like, there's better pizza out there. But I just, I had to throw that out there. But yes, keep going. Keep going. Jeanette, cigarro is not actually better. So, but well, that's another podcast. Oh God. Yeah. Okay. Keep going, Chris. Sorry. I just couldn't help myself. Keep going. Keep going. But yes, most of us have ordered Domino's. Like remember the college nights where none of the good places were open and it's one in the morning. Where do you turn to? Domino's. Fair, fair. And you've got $7 in your pocket. Yes. Exactly. I'm with you.

[00:04:43] So some quick background on us. So we are a B2B SaaS platform. So we sell to the actual business, the client. So some examples are companies like Discord and Peloton and HE1. Big companies use our software to really create this exceptional experience for their candidates. Now tying that back to the candidate portal. So to give you an example, a company like Discord, right, that is hiring significant, significant amount of roles per year.

[00:05:11] So every single one of their roles activates a candidate portal. Now that candidate portal is powered by candidate FYI. So if I'm a candidate, I apply to a role at Discord. I now get access to this just like immersive living and breathing portal where I can track my job application. It's fully branded to Discord. I can see where I am in the process, what's upcoming, how many stages there are.

[00:05:34] And that is fully synced back to Discord's ATS. So it's working with their typical workflows of moving candidates throughout the process. But then I can prep in there. I can schedule interviews in there. I can see videos, employer branding content. I can get really, really excited about the brand. So that's when I talk about like, you know, why is the interview process the way it's always been? Those email threads and everything where when we order pizza from Domino's, we can track it through its entire journey.

[00:06:01] We apply to a job and that's the experience we got. So we knew that needed to change. How has AI played a role in that? You know, because I feel like I've seen some things over the years where it's like, OK, there's a portal and this stuff, but this feels like there's there's more to it than just like log in. So maybe just talk a little bit more how I don't want to say the modern day version, but the modern day version versus the 20 years ago. So AI is at the core of everything we do. So we are an enterprise platform.

[00:06:31] So we have our candidate portal product. Our main sort of product is our AI coordination product. What this is, is all sorts of AI agents, right? It's scheduling agents. It's intelligence agents. It's all these agents that are helping coordination teams as they're moving candidates throughout the process. Now, everyone on this call knows, right, when you get into either high volume hiring or corporate hiring, there are a lot of interviews that need to get scheduled.

[00:06:57] And those get very time consuming when you're playing this sort of like calendar Tetris game. And so our platform automates a lot of that with the power of AI. Hi, I'm George LaRock, and I'm looking forward to exploring the critical trends shaping the future of work and technology with you over on the WorkTech podcast. Now, this podcast is a little different. I bring together industry leaders, innovators, and investors, and we go deep into market intelligence that matters to HR pros and tech providers alike.

[00:07:26] So give the WorkTech podcast a listen here on the WorkDefined Podcast Network, and please subscribe if you like it. See you there. Don't think I've ever heard calendar Tetris game, but I know exactly what you're talking about. But it's like, what time zone? 130 doesn't work. How about 145? And then before you know it, everybody's retired who's on that same email thread. Think about the candidates, right? It's like your existing way of doing it is like, let me email the candidate, ask them what times work for them. They respond back to me maybe 12 hours later.

[00:07:55] Then I have to go look at the interviewer's calendar. If I don't see any time available, what do I have to do? I have to ping the interviewer on Slack or on Microsoft Teams or send them an email, ask them if they can move anything around, wait on them to respond, go back to the candidate. If nothing works, I got to ask for more time. So think about how much that builds over time. Part of what we want to discuss here is helping these mostly large employers build world-class candidate experiences, right?

[00:08:23] Like very few employers would not want that. When you built the product, put it into production, you've obviously had enhancements along the way. What's like the feature that candidates are the most excited about? And what's the feature that you thought they would be, but actually they didn't seem to care? So two good things. And for the first one, what they're most excited about, it always comes back to the candidate portal.

[00:08:52] Candidates absolutely love that portal, right? Just think about like us, right? If we're applying to a job and one company is just like sending me an email here and there, an outdated PDF, like an outdated prep guide versus this other company who's giving me access to like this insanely built out portal where I can do everything with it. And it's almost like gamified in a way. So candidates love, love, love the portal.

[00:09:18] And one thing we built, which we thought people were going to be super excited about, but they really weren't, was we built a thank you note feature that exists in the portal. So think of like your historic way of thank yous, right? It's usually the candidate thanking the interviewer for their time. But what we built out was in reverse. We built out the ability for the interviewer to thank the candidate, which then appears in their portal. So after an interview, they get a nice note from the interviewer. Thank you so much for your time, et cetera.

[00:09:48] But it never really was the recruiter not using it or was it the candidates? It's like, yeah, they're getting the thank yous. But it turned more into the interviewers not using it because I think what it came down to is like there are in so many back to back to back to back to back interviews that trying to manage and stay on top of that becomes extremely difficult. Yeah, that's so true. So true. I want to go back to you talked about how the candidate experience is like almost gamified.

[00:10:18] Like that's really interesting. Like tell us more about that. So think about that portal experience, right? Like if you are sitting there, you're seeing an absolute tracker, right? We're showing you every single stage of the process. It's giving you all your prep material in there, videos, whatever the company wants to share with the candidate lives within the portal. It's custom by stage, right?

[00:10:43] So every stage is different material, different interviewers, different bios, different experiences throughout all the way up until like onboarding and preboarding where then you're getting ready for your first day. That's great. Yeah. You're seeing your offer, exciting things like that. So really turning into this sort of immersive experience. So Janine and I are both data geeks. True.

[00:11:04] Talk to us about like, is there data to show that by using whether it's the candidate FYI or some kind of equivalent system, a candidate portal that employers are hiring less expensively, faster, better. You know, I'm a senior TA acquisition. I don't really care if my candidates have a nice experience. I want to be able to go to the CFO and say, I made better use of corporate resources.

[00:11:34] Yeah. Pitch me. So two pieces to that. So on the high volume side, which is very important to this audience I want to talk through, is a lot of our customers, we work with their university recruiting and campus recruiting teams. Now they're doing significant, significant high volume, especially during campus season. They could be interviewing thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of candidates. Now for that to be fully human and manual is next to impossible.

[00:12:00] So think about the scale it takes to be able to throw some automation in there. That's where that candidate portal, all that scheduling functionality really comes into play on the high volume side. Because now you're just moving candidate from one stage to the next. And all these things are kicking off automatically. The portal invites, the scheduling requests, the transitions. So it's all happening automatically. So very critical on the high volume side.

[00:12:26] On the efficiency gain side, maybe less team members, stuff like that. We do see across coordination teams almost a 5x output on the amount of interviews RCs can schedule. So recruiting coordinators. So seeing some pretty significant gains on the coordination side of things. I love it. That's awesome. As a former campus recruiter. Do you have PTSD from sending out Outlook calendar invites? Yeah.

[00:12:55] I'll just say one point. I don't even remember what year. I was going from, I think I was in Chicago doing, I don't know. It was like Kellogg University, Chicago recruiting interviews, setting stuff up. And then I was in Boston and like same thing. And at one point I turned to a cab driver when I was going, I was so tired because I was literally up all night scheduling stuff manually. Right. Back and forth. Then I turned to the cab driver while I was in Boston and said, take me to O'Hare.

[00:13:22] And the guy was like, honey, you're a long way of working. So anything that can help recruiters with this massive, you know, admin burden is awesome. So Chris, thank you for sharing everything that Kenny FYI is doing. It's awesome. So no one will have to be in Boston and not know where they are. I can't beat that one. I mean, you can't. You can't. True story. Yeah.

[00:13:52] Awesome. Thank you so much, Chris. Pizza's on me. I love it. Awesome. Oh, and then just really quickly, I know this when everyone sees this, shout out to Faith, College Recruiter CEO. Happy birthday to you. And to my son, Will. Happy graduation from high school. And so, Chris, thank you for celebrating this milestone day with us. June 25th is a good day. Cheers out.