We sat down (virtually) with TalentMinded, a subscription-based full-service recruiting solution, to discuss how they were able to host a Virtual Hiring Event with technology platform Hellohire to help their client Motion fill open roles in April, 2021. Since then Hellohire and TalentMinded have had the opportunity to work together on another hiring event in Ontario. The following interview was conducted after the first event for the British Columbia job market and is between Daniel Kahn, Director of Customer Success and Operations at Hellohire and Jon Bertulli, Project Manager and Customer Success Manager at TalentMinded.
Daniel: Hi Jon, nice to see you. So glad to be speaking with you today. I’m excited to be chatting with you about TalentMinded, TalentMinded’s relationship with Motion, and your experience with Hellohire. Let’s dive right into it.
Can you tell me about TalentMinded, what you do there, and what your relationship with Motion is?
Jon: Yeah of course, thanks for having me. TalentMinded is a subscription based full serviced recruiting solution. We’re based out of Toronto, Canada.
Basically, we partner with our clients to bring our people, process, our branding expertise, and the various technology and tools that we have in full force to help hire more qualified candidates in a shorter time with an elevated candidate experience.
I serve as a Project Manager and Customer Success Manager at TalentMinded, so my role is kind of split into two. One half of my role is on the relationship side working with our clients—you know managing the day-to-day, making sure things are running smoothly. And in the project management side, I work with our clients on the various other things that they need help with. Most obviously being, here is the career fair that we just ran with them—which is obviously why we’re speaking today— but you know I help with other branding projects and other services that we can offer.
Daniel: And tell me a little bit about Motion. What do they do? What kind of roles do they hire for?
Jon: Motion is an accessibility company. They provide wheelchairs, walkers, various accessibility equipment such as lifts. Anything that you can think of in-home or on the go.
A lot of their roles are various sales types of roles, consultant types of roles, service technicians because of course with anything in accessibility there needs to be customization. So, a lot of those types of roles, as well as technicians to help with installing and fixing various equipment.
Daniel: The event that we were working with you on with them was in British Columbia. What’s the job market been like in BC? What kind of challenges were they facing filling roles?
Jon: Motion has been facing immense growth across the country, so we wanted to target BC first and see how things went there first. But we needed to find a different way to engage the candidates and engage with people that we’ve never met before or engaged with before, because that growth is happening in both large cities and small communities. There’s a whole pool of candidates that we haven’t tapped into or that did not know who Motion was, so that’s why we decided to run this career fair.
Daniel: Thinking about somebody who’s never seen Hellohire before at all and isn’t quite sure about the solution that we’ve put together here, could you describe what we put together in your own words?
Jon: It’s a virtual career fair platform [but] I think what we put together is a little bit beyond that though. It’s putting ‘human’ back in human resources, right?
We made those connections, we… In our event we included videos from various managers whether they could be in attendance or not. We facilitated those very valuable conversations and I think it goes even a little bit further than that too. It gives candidates and managers a chance to connect without the standard resume, or the standard screening process that’s very transactional and on your screen or on paper. You don’t get a feel for the other person; you don’t get a feel for the culture of the company; you don’t get a feel for a person’s experience, or their hobbies or interests.
You know, if you think about a sales position or a consultant position, you need to speak to that person to understand: can they make a connection with you? Could they be good with keeping up a relationship? Etc, etc, everything that’s involved with that. And I think that’s what Hellohire really helped with and really opened the door for.
Daniel: Thinking a little bit about looking at resumes, what do you feel like gets missed when you don’t get to speak with a candidate in person—when you’re just looking at the document itself?
Jon: I think this is a really great question. I guess a little bit about me is that I think that I’m maybe a more forgiving type of screener and want to try and give everyone a chance, which isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t have 40 hours a day to interview 40 people every day to push that many people through the process. So, what I think gets missed often is… you know… I mean it’s easy to say and think about it, [but] you miss that kind of personality. Your resume and if you look to all the resume templates, it’s tough to inject your personality into a document.
You know we’re also on the recruiting side, we often get the list of qualifications and it’s tough to move people forward who don’t have the specific qualifications that are for that position right? So, where somebody could maybe explain it in a video call or explain it in an interview or provide examples that they can’t fit on their resume, you miss all that additional information that’s also extremely important and supplemental to what is in this one to two page document
Daniel: When you were starting to put this together as a solution that you were proposing to Motion and you were exploring with Hellohire, how were you defining success? What were the metrics that were important to you?
Jon: More generally, because we’re in recruitment of course we care about that end result of making a quality hire. But, again in general, we track things like time to hire, time to fill, conversion rates [and] we survey candidates on their experience.
Our initial goal or idea was, we needed to look at this opportunity to engage that new pool of candidates. We were kind of going in, like I said it [was] our first time, thinking let’s just make one hire, let’s see how it goes. We need to kind of test the waters a little bit and see will the market attend this type of event? Are these candidates interested in meeting with our managers live, virtually? And it turns out that they are, so it was a good thing that we did.
We saw 30 people register, 16 people actually attend the event, we had a lot of hot leads that came out of the various conversations that our managers had, and we’re still engaging with a lot of those candidates who attended and who did not attend, and expecting a good handful of hires soon.
Daniel: What would you think would be the ROI of using Hellohire for hiring? How would you think about calculating that?
Jon: If I remember correctly, there was a report that went out in 2016 from the society for human resources management. They did a study and found that the average company spends about $4000 or $4100 per hire with a time to fill of 42 days.
It’s still cited in other reports. You know I was trying to do a bit of research a couple weeks ago on this type of stat actually. And it’s still cited now and if it still holds true in today’s time, considering that we’re making multiple hires already from using the platform and having a 2 hour career fair in the middle of the day back in April, I think the ROI was really great. If you take a money and economic standpoint to it, for sure.
I think that the one thing the managers at Motion are extremely pleased with was there was an amazing review left from one of the candidates. They posted it— I believe it was on their Facebook page— and they posted that they had an amazing experience and they used that phrase, ‘putting human back in human resources.’ [The managers] were super happy to hear that. They’re happy that their candidates who showed up and attended the event had a really amazing, sort of, white glove experience, so they’re very excited to hear that it went well in that front too.
Daniel: That’s great to hear! Jon, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk today. It was fantastic working with you on helping Motion meet candidates and fill roles.
I know we’ve got a few other events coming up with TalentMinded and so I’m excited to work with some other members of your team and with you again in the future. So, thank you Jon for chatting today.
Jon: Thanks for having me! Looking forward to those future events too.
If you’d like to try hosting your own virtual hiring event, Try Hellohire for free today.