Johnny Farquhar's Brand Voice

"He started to knock on the doors of the heads of that department and just kept on bashing, bashing, bashing. Until one of them responded and said, yep, if you want to pop in tomorrow morning, 9:00am sharp, well, let's have a chat. Which obviously scared the pants off him. He stayed up all night just doing all of the prep work he could and went in there and as we all expected, he smashed it out of the park."

"I don't even think they bothered talking to anybody else. From my recollection of the way it went is there might have been several thousand people that were suitable for this job based on going to market and then internal applications and they gave it to him. And that was a lateral hire, it wasn't a graduate hire. And he went on to become one of their highest performing employees in those first couple of years."

"Paper didn't work for him. Getting in front of someone, being able to talk through your value and [show] your communication skills."

"The old adage of 'if only they took five minutes to meet me.' Well, you don't need five minutes, but what you could do — because no one's got five minutes for every candidate — the idea came with how can we start to append videos to the application so that the employers or the recruiters HR can meet more people."

"It was to actually level the playing field and make sure that everyone got their fair chance. So we packaged that up and put it together as a video based job board. Businesses could use videos to promote the job, candidates could submit with videos and that's how we got started."

"What we didn't count on, I guess was that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So even though we had a solution where you could volunteer a video, 9 out of 10 candidates wouldn't volunteer a video. And then they'd still complain that they didn't get a fair chance to showcase what they were capable of doing."

"We moved forward and modified the solution so that the employers required the video as part of the process. And what do you know, there was little to no pushback from candidates because if the employer said, you've got to go make me a video to actually apply for this job and you really want the job, and that was that."

"This is the kicker, we said, you can meet more people in less time. The answer is, or what we found is that they could absolutely meet more people. But consuming an additional one or two minutes of video with every paper based application, which historically would take seven seconds to chip through, meant that it became very time consuming at the front end for the recruiter doing the screening."

"It was so traumatic that it's just such a relief now to know that people are using the system, people are applying for jobs. It is constantly being used. The volume's not high right now just because we've relaunched, but there is still volume. And I don't hear a peep, I don't hear a squeak."

"From all of that, from breaking toes on rocks all those years, we now have built a platform which is like, over the years we've acquired a lot of business intelligence. The flow is clean, the flow is robust, the messaging is clear."

"It took us eight years, but we got to a point where we're not awake until the early hours of the morning. Sweating about a job that's going to be created. Sweating about a customer's experience. We're ticking all those boxes and we're covering everything off. We've done it."

"For the businesses, let a really tailored SLM screening assistant that we've dubbed SASS be treated like an extension of their existing team to do pre screening of all of the candidates documents and audio and video as it comes in to make the recruiters lives easier."

"We are on a features printing, we're building features out at the moment that it quantum leaps forward in terms of the value add for businesses and the product itself."

"I reckon I was doing 18 hour days responding to vicious hate mail about the substandard quality of the video creation process, of the application process, how it wrecked all these kids lives and all of their good work had gone to waste. Their dream job with say a law firm was completely fucked all because of our software."

"I was getting hundreds and hundreds of messages. We had a live chat channel... And just, it just got me so down. And so every time my job went live I get PTSD."

"There was a part of me that thought... maybe this is where PreviewMe might actually start to add some real value because there's going to be less jobs out there and more people applying for them. So volumes are going to spike... And I couldn't. We couldn't have been more wrong."

"There were more jobs than ever before with no one that wanted to fill them... they were paying more for someone to work less who was not the right person just to have someone."

"We got up to 100 or so customers on board that were paying in some way, shape or form, which again is like, it's a milestone for a business. But then the video became a barrier to people applying."

"We looked at what we had and what we had been doing internally is creating short videos to help us sell PreviewMe, which is helping us get a lot of meetings... We found that we were getting really good engagement with our PreviewMe as a sales tool."

"The failure was we didn't offer a solution that was able to pinpoint with a high degree of certainty the dollar value impact of having it... as soon as it became seen as a nice to have, not a must have, then it was just discontinued."

"The business failure is that the sales pivot was a failure, but it kept us alive for a little bit longer, kept us relevant."

"This is the kicker, we said, you can meet more people in less time. The answer is, or what we found is that they could absolutely meet more people. But consuming an additional one or two minutes of video with every paper based application, which historically would take seven seconds to chip through, meant that it became very time consuming at the front end for the recruiter doing the screening."

"If you do include a brick in the road like video or audio, there is a natural deterrent. You could shave down 100 applications that are just — you can take 100 applications that are paper based knowing that they've been half [heartedly] put together by AI. You could turn that into 50 applications of people that are genuinely interested because they took the time to make a video."

"You've got less volume and you've got a richer content pool. The applications content is far richer and more in depth and more personal."

"All PreviewMe is doing is curating, rating the applicants in order of most suitable to least suitable based on the hiring criteria that you set. So you know who to talk to first."

"The system has consumed what your interpretation of the hiring criteria, it understands your business, it understands job requirements and then it's also reviewed the application content, answers to any questions, commented on their communication skills, their speech... And then they're numerically ranked."

"Then the recruiter takes over and becomes a very human process."

"It became one of the strongest candidate markets that I think anyone in any living person has probably seen in a long time... And that's now being followed by a bounce back and a flip to an employer led market."

"We now have an employer rather than a candidate led market. AI — the emergence of AI and the ease of which applications can be created for jobs, the sameness that comes with the tsunami of applications."

"Hopefully it's going to help hiring managers cut through and be presented with the most suitable candidates based on content and then let the recruiter and the EQ of the recruiter, the experience of the recruiter, consume the best videos."

"Talking to the best, most suitable people earlier in the recruitment process. So you can start having those human conversations that a computer can't do."

"I reckon I was doing 18 hour days responding to vicious hate mail about the substandard quality of the video creation process... And just, it just got me so down. And so every time my job went live I get PTSD."

"We couldn't have been more wrong... There were more jobs than ever before with no one that wanted to fill them."

"The business failure is that the sales pivot was a failure, but it kept us alive for a little bit longer, kept us relevant."

"Just when we thought that it was going to be shut up shop... computing power came to the rescue."

"For the businesses, let a really tailored SLM screening assistant that we've dubbed SASS be treated like an extension of their existing team to do pre screening of all of the candidates documents and audio and video as it comes in to make the recruiters lives easier."

"The system has consumed what your interpretation of the hiring criteria, it understands your business, it understands job requirements and then it's also reviewed the application content, answers to any questions, commented on their communication skills, their speech... And then they're numerically ranked."

"We got up to 100 or so customers on board that were paying in some way, shape or form, which again is like, it's a milestone for a business."

"He had law in economics and came out of Otago University and he would have applied for about 70 jobs... he wound up having to do logistics of box packing in a warehouse in South Auckland."

"I don't even think they bothered talking to anybody else... he went on to become one of their highest performing employees."

"Paper didn't work for him. Getting in front of someone, being able to talk through your value and [show] your communication skills."