E375 Recruiting Community: Anthony Reynolds, CEO HireVue, and the Modern Hire Acquisition.

Our guest this week: Anthony Reynolds, CEO of Hirevue. Anthony will be sharing the story behind HireVue's recent acquisition of Modern Hire, and share what's next.

E375 Recruiting Community: Anthony Reynolds, CEO HireVue, and the Modern Hire Acquisition.

Our guest this week: Anthony Reynolds, CEO of Hirevue. Anthony will be sharing the story behind HireVue's recent acquisition of Modern Hire, and share what's next.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 
..on Ted Lasso, so I just couldn’t he look he got on my nerves. I couldn’t watch him. I didn’t get what it was about, but now I can’t I can’t turn it off.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 0:08
Yeah. So good. It’s so good. You almost have to watch it a couple of times. Because to get all the points that are being made because it moves so fast, but it really is quite clever.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:21
Is is that though is that the only show your your binging you got Do you have another one in your pocket?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 0:26
I only started do one at a time. So ready now it’s Ted last so but I’m a big fan of a bunch of different shows. One that I was also a big fan of was Ozarks, Jason Bateman. I thought that was a great one. couldn’t stop watching that one. So good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:43
I was so I was so floored by Bateman. That’s when I realized he was an amazing actor, too. Wasn’t just, he’s just phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely phenomenal. Gerry, what are you watching?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:55
I try I try to still watch a lot of traditional TV like, you know, Sunday morning kind of thing, but I don’t binge much. Although lately, I will say that I’ve been reviewing all of the John Wick. smart guys so that I can enjoy this fourth. It’s cool.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:16
Yeah. John Wick four. Unbelievable. Yeah, I was a little bit long, but yeah. All right. Gentlemen, you ready to get going?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 1:25
Yeah, let’s do it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:26
Alright, here we go.

CXR Announcer 1:28
Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcasts for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management. listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:57
Think a year ago, we talked about getting rid of that music and now I can’t stop getting jiggy with it. Like every time it comes on. I just I want to keep playing it. I want to welcome you. If you have dialed in, if you’re listening to us, if you’re watching us, that’s wonderful. Welcome to the recruiting community podcast show. I’m Chris Why don’t we host for the next 20 minutes or so I have my spirit animal. Gerry Crispin is a spirit animal.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 2:21
Whatever. I never, never know.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:23
Spirit animal Gerry’s here today? Well, look, we do this show weekly. If you if you’re with us live, and you’ve got a chat window that’s there. We’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, I think we’re a couple channels on each of those. But if you’re with us live, and there’s a chat window, go ahead and jump in and say hello. That’s a great chance for you if you want to go ahead and drop in your LinkedIn profile and do a little networking there. If you’ve got questions for our guests that I’m super excited about our guest today and some stuff we’re going to share and talk a little bit about, and you can chime in and who knows that we’d like you enough. And your comment isn’t dumb. We’re going to put it up on the screen, and we’re going to share that for you. But Gerry before before we do that, before we jump in with our guests, there’s some work that’s been done out of our nonprofit that we’ve been touting, and it’s it’s TA Talk Tank, and folks can see that I think we actually even have a little Boom, look at that. It’s fancy TATalkTank.com. And I think the idea here is we’ve we’ve sort of reimagined mentoring. So it’s not a big complicated mentoring platform. It’s it’s fast, it’s rapid fire approach to making these connections. It’s free. And I have to tell you, I got another I had two conversations last week, I got another request this morning, when I was back in the office just had the cousin strips, I’m back in the office, I got another request. And then I reached out early this morning because there’s a leader I’d like to really learn a little bit from and connect on there. So I’m happy with the platform so far. It’s crushing it, but give us kind of give us your take on it. What do you what do you think about this project so far?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 2:23
I love it. I you know, it’s it’s the point is is casual and mentoring probably is not the right word. It’s, it’s like, pick your brain. You know, let’s let’s do a virtual coffee, whatever. I like the fact that it’s really committed to just, you know, one event, if you will, and if it goes beyond that great. But But fundamentally anybody who wanted to think about job career, or you know, life in general in relation to TA, and you see a profile of somebody that you would love whose brain you’d like to pick, they volunteered by putting themselves out there, they volunteered to you know, to have that conversation and I’ve got a couple setup. Actually one today, so I’m you know, I look forward to it. And I hope that everyone who engages in sit in saying hey, I want to pick your brain can we have a virtual coffee about X, Y and Z? I hope they become a mentor and profile themselves. to pay it forward,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:01
Because you can do both. You can be a mentor or mentee on it. And I think you’re right. The mentoring, maybe not the right word, maybe a little too formal, but I will steal it was somebody else’s line. But they mentioned there was a point in their career where they sat down and had about a 45 minute conversation with a colleague that completely changed the direction of their career. It just made them think about something different. I think that’s what we’re looking to sort of replicate. Yeah. Okay. So look, it’s free. It’s done by our nonprofit, if you’re interested, if you want to be part of it, a mentor, mentee, check it out. It’s TA Talk Tank.com. It’s really it’s just that easy. So with that, let’s welcome our guest today. I think it’s his first time on the show. There he is Mr. Reynolds. How are you,

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 5:45
Chris? Hey, Gerry, thanks for having me. We’re super

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:48
excited that you’re here. Always love catching up with you. We’ve we’ve had the opportunity to really get to know you a little bit better within the last year or so. And that’s just been wonderful. But you’ve got some pretty big news to talk about today. So but before we get into that, Anthony, let me let me ask you to just kind of give give a little bit of a an escalator pitch on who is Anthony Reynolds, a little bit of history there. And why do we care what Anthony Reynolds has to say today?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 6:17
All right, I’ll try. I’m trying let’s see how I do you guys. Yeah, no. I’m Anthony Reynolds. I’m CEO of HireVue. I joined in February 2022. As the CEO, I’m based in California and the Bay Area, I live in a town called Los Gatos. And I’m originally from Canada, I’m actually born and raised in Canada, and I moved to the Bay Area in 2005. I’ve been in enterprise software for the last 25 or so years. And if you look at kind of the red thread through my career, a lot in data analytics line of business applications. And so just super excited about the opportunity we have here at HireVue. And, you know, some exciting news, as Chris talked about, that. We’re gonna talk about today.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:07
So for those who may have been living under a rock for the last a decade or so can you can you tell them what HireVue does?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 7:16
Yeah, sure. So we are we invented the entire video interviewing space. And so what we do is Video on Demand interviewing and assessments all backed by science. And then we add the automation around text invites and reminders so that candidates can engage with our talent experience platform, in a real time way. And, you know, we’re the leaders in the space. And we’ve been doing this since 2004. And everything that we do is powered by artificial intelligence in making fair, better hiring decisions and improving the experience for both recruiters and candidates.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:00
Yeah, I love it. I love it. So you’ve had a competitor for a little bit a while that you’ve recently acquired, right? So modern hires sort of been in the space sales teams have been punching each other in the nose back and forth some friendly competition. The teams on both, I have to say, are really awesome people on both sides of that equation. But But why would? Why would HireVue by acquire modern hire like what’s in it for HireVue?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 8:28
Well, when I came to HireVue, we had a thesis that there is an incredible opportunity ahead of us, right. And we felt that in the pre hiring talent experience. Segment, there was an opportunity to scale and grow. And so when we looked around, at opportunities to scale the business, we looked at both how we would organically grow and things that we would do to develop and innovate around our own product solution. And we also looked at what were the things he in organically from a mergers and acquisition perspective. Now, we’re very fortunate in terms of our size and our scope, but also our investment in partner that we have in Carlisle that supported our thesis to grow and scale. And so we made the acquisition of modern hire, we announced that on May 9, and we’re super excited about the opportunity it has in bringing these two great companies together. And as you mentioned, two great teams.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:31
Yeah, they’re great, folks. So what would I guess if you were going to summarize an ante what what would be the, the big wins? Alright, the big takeaways, right, as a result of the acquisition, right, so So for customers as an example, what are they going to get out of this?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 9:46
I mean, there, there’s really close alignment from a vision and mission perspective, in terms of how we think about connecting talent opportunity, and so both organizations see that the and the other funds mental thing is that both organizations have a foundation of science as the background or backbone of the company. And so between the two companies, we now have 60 plus PhDs in IO, psychology, data science. So that foundation in science is very important. We also are big proponents of ethical AI in terms of making it transparent and open. And you’ll remember that HireVue a year ago was the first HR tech vendor to produce an AI explainability statement, which in a 30 page, white paper details, how we tune build, test all of our AI right in this is all in the spirit of making it a fair hiring process for candidates to find the right jobs at the right time. And then when you look at the product complement, there’s a great opportunity for HireVue customers to benefit from the Virtual Job tryout. So what are the realistic job previews that modern hire provides today? At the same time for modern hire customers, they now can benefit from all the text chat invites reminders, job search, calendaring, all the automation functionality that HireVue has been so dedicated to innovating around over the last couple of years. And then the third thing is really now we’ve got an assessment for any job. Right. And so doesn’t matter what job you’re looking for, we have an assessment to help you get hired into that right position.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:38
I love that. So Anthony, I think this morning, so there was an aim headline Peters of AIM group, which we love those guys. Everybody should check them out. I think they said AI there was a quote that came out of an interview, but AI was going to be the foundation of interaction between candidates and companies. Yes, hands down, right, the foundation of interaction between a company and I think in that same newsletter, they said recruiter.com announced they’re going to spin off and create create their own AI company. Yeah. So so in that same vein, right, we’re talking about AI, we’re coming to the science, how do you think? How do you think AI are even this generative AI that everybody is going to try to figure out how to take advantage of how do you think that’s going to help augment the product solution? And HireVue, especially with this, this new acquisition?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 12:28
Well, first off, Chris, we’ve been doing AI for the last seven years here at HireVue. Right in everything that we build our AI on is around natural language processing, in how it assessment scores, candidates. But there’s a lot of work that goes into building good AI in terms of having the guardrails in terms of testing and how we think about that I mentioned the AI explainability statement, which goes into a lot of detail on how that’s built. I think for other companies, and sometimes for the general population. AI is seen as a little bit of this black box, right? They don’t know how the AI is making decisions. And we’ve really tried to lead from the front in being open and transparent around it. Now, the good news is generative AI or Chad GPT, in the last six months is really consumerized AI, so that everyone now has a viewpoint on what it is in what it can do. Right. And so for us, it has a number of interesting applications. But we want to as we move forward, move carefully in the context of everything that we do has those same guardrails in terms of how we’re testing and how we’re looking at it. But in the pre screen environment of or pre hire environment in which we operate. There’s a number of interesting applications, right? So first off at HireVue, we’re very much skills first, we’re big believers in skills first. And so you can use something like chat GPT to create a role description. Right on what is the role need to look like? The other thing that’s very interesting, or the application that I find fascinating, is if it if you buy into this idea of skills are a good predictor of future potential jobs. You can then go into chat GPT and you can say, Hey, what are the other possible jobs that might be applicable for me? Okay, and so let’s compare and contrast. Maybe Old World to new world, new world being kind of the Hey, software’s eating the world in every industry is being more tech led right now. One of the biggest skill sets that retailers are now looking for is actually technical skill sets. Right? Now, if I go into chat GPT, and I’m a financial analyst at an investment bank, and I was recently on a panel for a large global investment bank, and I said, Look, last night, I actually went in and I put financial analyst for an investment event. Well, what are other opportunities that I might qualify for? Well, it turns out those skill sets are very good for being ahead of financial planning and analysis with inside of company. It also turns out, you could be a member of a corporate development team looking at mergers and acquisitions. It also turns out, you could have good opportunities in the venture capital arena, or in the hedge fund arena. Okay, that’s the interesting, I put in here. What are the applicable jobs for a CEO? Now, Chad GPT, in this area wasn’t so friendly. He said, Hey, I could do an operations role. They said, Hey, I might be a good strategy role. I might.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 16:12
But turnover is so high among CEOs that it’s just, you know, not so good.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 16:17
I kind of felt like I was getting a demotion. So I think we need to explain that a little better. But in all seriousness, right, um, I went a couple steps further, and I looked at primary school teachers, okay. In any of us who have kids that have gone to school, we have the most admiration for school teachers, right in what they do in educating our kids. Turns out those skills are incredibly valuable. Okay, an elementary school teacher can be a curriculum developer, in a tech company, they can be head of training and enablement. They can even be in pre sales, they’re very good at taking a lot of deset. Of, of information in aggregating it and making it simple. And so when you think of old world versus New World, and by the way, in the next 10 years fact, there is going to be nearly 100 million new jobs that didn’t exist today, that are new jobs. Okay. Go and look, there is such a thing as a prompt engineer now, which is a GPT engineer, that Job did not exist six months ago.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 17:39
A lot of those teachers want them unfortunately, rather than stay in teaching. So that’s, that’s a whole different if

Chris Hoyt, CXR 17:45
you’ve spent some time if you’ve spent some time sort of futzing around with chat GPT, trying to try to get to the end of a real challenge. You know, you wish you had a prompt engineer, you know, at your fingertips.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 17:58
So So Anthony, one of the one of the questions that I have. And I think it’s important for us as we move forward in this, this whole area of AI. And I love the fact I mean, one of the things that I really admire in terms of the moves that you’ve made, and the moves that modern hires made is that you have accumulated a significant number of really experienced scientists in the talent acquisition field. That is pretty powerful, in my opinion. And I don’t think people recognize how important that should be in the future. And as you as you build quality into the claims that you make, yeah, it seems to me that increasingly in our industry, we need to have independent views, if you will, of how well you have done to meet those claims. And I’m, I’m a fan of the fact that at this point, if you do all the work, and you’ve gotten it, you’ve figured it out in terms of how you’re going to improve the value of your service to a an employer, that employer should be saying, Okay, how has an independent how have you independently tested? Because you mentioned that a couple times? Have you independently tested what you claim you can do? And who is it that’s doing that? Yeah. And so increasingly, I’m curious, are you looking to partner with independent groups that have the skill sets to test or challenge, if you will, your claim of the work that you’ve done, as well as, what do you think about the fact that we should be as a voice of the industry, pushing more for our peers and colleagues to also be able to do The same thing?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 20:01
Well, Gerry, I’m a big proponent of what you just mentioned, I think it starts from the top. And from a leadership perspective, one of the moves I made in bringing these two great teams together, is having a Chief Science Officer Mike hoody, who reports directly to me, he was a founder of shaker, part of my executive management team, as that person that’s going to help us navigate this journey. But I would then go to I’m a big believer in the openness and the transparency of everything we do. I do think as an industry and as a group of vendors, it’s on us to seek out these independent viewpoints to validate the work that we’re doing. And we subscribe to that. And we’re doing that actively today. And third, I would say, it’s on us also to work with the different regulators and legislators around the globe. Now, that’s not an easy task. As you know, it’s very fragmented. It’s very fragmented between what’s going on in Europe versus what’s going on in the US. And even within the US, at a state city level. It’s very fragmented yet, but it’s on us as a group and as an industry to help first educate and then shape the appropriate guardrails that need to be in place. So that everything that we’re doing is in the context of ethical AI, to make better hiring decisions and to mitigate any bias that’s in the process.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 21:44
I absolutely agree. And I’m convinced that as a collective industry, if not just you, but if you and others had reached out, if you will, and found independent groups to be able to kind of test where you’re at. And then we got that independent group of let’s say, 15, or 20 different folks who are servicing folks like yourself, yeah, together so that they could establish some standards for the methodologies around how they do that, then I think we’d be in a better position as a collective group to influence those regulators, if you will, who are out there setting up all those fragmented laws, if you will, yeah, perhaps they would be able to be a little more consistent and supportive of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 22:40
No, it’s on us. And we need to lead from the front. And we will continue to do that at higher view in working with the different groups. And frankly, working with folks like Chris and yourself that are very good at bringing industry leadership together on some of these viewpoints. So totally aligned, they’re great.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 23:02
I love I love that engagement level too. And that, you know, it scares me to think that we aren’t influencing or shaping that as an industry and that some of our government officials who seem to have trouble operating their own phones would be making decisions around you know, technology and how it works for hiring. That scares me a little bit. Anti let me ask you one more. One more question before we because I want to be mindful of your time. Are you guys you conquering the world? Are there? Are there future plans for more acquisitions? Do you have? Do you have more down the road that you’re looking to sort of snatch up and expand? Well,

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 23:35
like I said, we announced the acquisition on May 9. And we’re going to take the next few months around the integration and make sure from a people product process perspective. We’re looking at the best of and bringing these two great companies together. But yeah, as we go forward over the next 1224 months, we’re looking out into the market and saying, How can we continue to grow and scale that’s one of the things we’re super excited about now is just the scale of the operations globally, from Europe to Asia back to North America. In being able to serve our customers and bringing these two cuts companies together. We now serve 62 of the Fortune 100. We have 11 150 customers across almost every industry. We serve some of the biggest agencies in the federal government because of course HireVue is FedRAMP certified. And so we’re just going to be maniacally focused on delivering value to our customers and continuing to innovate while looking for opportunities in the marketplace to grow and scale. I love it.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 24:44
Tagline maniacally focused.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 24:45
I was gonna say I’m stealing maniacally focused on if maniacally focused.com isn’t already taken. Right after this. Well look at Anthony, I got a lot. I have one more question for you.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 24:59
That’s good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 25:00
We so we asked, we asked at the end of, at the end of every show, we asked all of our guests if they were going to write a book. Right now about the space or about this topic, what would the title of that book be?

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 25:15
Oh you know, to me, it’s it’s all about getting the right people in the right jobs at the right time. Let’s just make it Sesame Street simple. You know, getting the right people in the right jobs at the right time. And there’s so much to unpack on that. And maybe we do another podcast. But you know, I’m, I continually see kids coming out of college that are looking for internships, I sit in Silicon Valley, and I have friends that are executives like Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, and they can’t find interns and new grads in there’s, you know, we need to help figure this out. And so everything that we’re that we’re trying to do at hire view, is to connect that talent opportunity. And that’s our mission. And we still have a lot of work to do in that area.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 26:14
I love it. Well, you got a servant’s heart. I mean, it’s obvious. I love that stuff. So at the last very last question, present company excluded. Yeah, who do you give the first signed copy to? Oh.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 26:34
Probably, I probably give it to one of my lifelong mentors, John Schwartz. He’s the chairman of Vizier. You guys probably know him. He’s the person that brought me down to the Bay Area in 2005. I worked for him at Business Objects. from a career perspective. He’s taught me a lot about what it means to be a good leader and a good and a good human. So I probably I probably penned it to him and sent it to him.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 27:01
I don’t know him, but we know Lexie Martin, who’s also vizier and just a lovely person.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 27:07
Yeah,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 27:07
I love it. I love Anthony. You are a super maniacally busy, man. So so we’re wildly grateful. Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you joining us for quick chat.

Anthony Reynolds, Hirevue 27:19
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Gerry. Always a pleasure be Well,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 27:22
ya know, hanging out in the greenroom. Don’t go anywhere. I’m gonna put you back in there. Really quickly. One final reminder Gerry and I have gone for you. If you didn’t catch it as being a show TATalkTank.com It is free you can be a mentor coach, mentee coachee but join in TATalkTank.com We’re making words up it’s the end of the show Gerry Yeah, but you could join that labor of love put together by the CXR foundation nonprofit that we’ve got if you have interest in that check out TATalkTank.com we’ve got interest in the foundation and the work that goes on there. I think we have another couple of really really cool projects that are coming up CXR.foundation and with that, we’re just going to say goodbye to everybody so Gerry Say Goodbye, everybody.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 28:01
Goodbye, everybody.

CXR Announcer 28:05
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