Spark Hire

Pros

What is great about using Spark Hire is that it is so seamless and easy to use. You can jump in and review 15 candidates in less than 30 minutes and get a feel for how these people communicate. One of the biggest things when hiring people is getting below the surface and understanding the 80% of who they are. Its called the iceberg affect. When you interview in person you are only usually getting the best version of that person, the 20% as you would say. Well, when you add Spark Hire to your hiring system it forces your candidates to be genuine and real because most people are uncomfortable on camera which in turn allows you to see the authenticity of that person to make sure that they would be a culture fit for your business and worth taking to the next step of your interviewing process. Additionally the software is so simple to use and to rate your candidates and leave notes so that you can have multiple people in the account and know what is going on with that candidate even if they were not involved in the interview process. Spark Hire has been a huge value add for our business and it is very affordable.

Cons

The one thing that I would say is to make it easier to Rate a candidate overall not just from video to video. I know this is an option but making it easier to find would be helpful.

Pros

Working in HR for a large organization with multiple locations makes it difficult at times to coordinate the interview process. But instead of me providing my feedback, I'd like to share some of the comments I have received from various departments in our organization regarding the Spark Hire video interviewing platform.

"I thought the process was pretty revealing actually. As the viewer it was interesting to see how they handled the format-their comfort level with answering the questions within the time limit, and if they looked in the camera (or not)."

"I found that Spark Hire was very convenient to use and gave me a way to do an initial interview of a large number of candidates in an efficient manner. Since I tend to have large candidate pools, the videos were able to give me an initial assessment to determine who I wanted to do in person interviews with. Particularly effective when dealing with out of area applicants."

"Excellent tool that allowed us to consider more candidates. Previously we had to select 7 or less and coordinate a group schedule to interview face to face. Spark hire allowed us to consider 28 candidates remotely and at each interview panel members pace."

"I really liked using the Spark Hire Video system as it allowed me to review the candidates on my own schedule. I could also review the videos a second or third time while I was reviewing the resumes and applications. "

Cons

Again, I'd like to share feedback I have received from hiring managers. Keep in mind some of these may just be viewer/reviewer error.

"A good candidate might get screened out if they are not as tech savvy as other candidates. That might be fine for a tech job but not a relevant for others."

"What I didn’t like was the review options within Spark. It was essentially a STAR ranking system with comments. Once submitted, you cannot go back and make edits."

"I wish the view of all the videos showed me some kind of summary of how I ranked each person (and even the comments I wrote)."

Pros

Spark Hire is the "new normal" for hiring, helping to make the hiring process more efficient while still maintaining a personal touch. It allows you to set up either one-way or two way interviews with potential candidates, allowing great screening prior to final in-person interviews. It is ideal for all sizes of companies and for most (if not all) positions. I like that the questions can be customized, you can create different custom question sets, create video intros and outros, and the entire service is branded for your company. There is the ability (with some accounts, depends on price) to have multiple jobs open and have multiple users (i.e. the entire hiring team) who review submissions.

The program is incredibly user-friendly from both the company perspective as well as the candidate perspective. There is a great knowledge base as well as video tutorials, and for the company there is a terrific onboarding service. I like that there are a variety of pricing levels with various features to best fit a user's needs. For me, I appreciate that my clients who use Spark Hire can go month-to-month on use when they are not on a complete hiring rampage. We can essentially turn the program on and off on an as-needed basis which makes it incredibly cost effective for our needs. For power users there are annual payment plans to help drive costs lower.

Cons

Up to this point, I have not found any "cons" that would prevent me from using or recommending the product. I guess one "con" would be getting potential candidates to actually get over their reticence about doing a video interview, but honestly if they refuse then they are generally not the type of candidates that my clients would be looking for.

Pros

Sparkhire is a good platform for video interviewing. Whether you're using it for one position or multiple positions, it can handle the job. It's user interfaces are intuitive and the functionality allows us to do many things. In fact we don't even take advantage of all the software is able to do. The one-way interview feature is by fare what we use the most often. It allows us to interview more people to begin with. The set up of the interviews is easy and the feature that lets you record video intros to any question you send is very nice as well.

Cons

The pricing for this software is different. You pay based on the number of jobs you want to use it for at the same time. Since our hiring goes in cycles, many times we only need it for one job, but sometimes we need it for up to 5 jobs. We end up paying for 5 jobs all throughout the year since that is the max number we might need, but we only use it for 1 job much of the year. There are some little features that could be improved, and we'd love for Spark Hire to tie into our current application system (it does some but not ours), but overall we like the product.

Pros

It is amazing to be able to judge a person communication skills before taking up upper managements time in a lengthy interview. We mainly use this software for Flight Controllers at NASA's Mission Control Center. Interviewing with a camera, especially for the first time, can be stressful. This is something Flight Controllers must be able to handle and adapt to. While a person can have an amazing resume, it doesn't truly represent the candidate's communication skills.

Cons

The only issue I have is having to ask the candidate to upload their own resume. I would like to be able to add a resume to a video so management has easy access.