Q&A with Ben the founder of SkillSnap

Ben Ayme, CEO, draws from his vast recruitment experience to launch SkillSnap in September 2017. SkillSnap is a new way for companies to engage and hire the best applicants.  It is also a new way for applicants to showcase their skills and personalities.

Please tell us about SkillSnap—the idea behind it and the vision for the company?

I founded SkillSnap because I’m passionate about how technology can empower us to make smarter decisions. With many years of recruitment experience, I was frustrated at the time wasted sorting through CVs.  Yet, this is crucially important.  If you don’t invite the right candidates for interviews, you won’t be hiring the right people and your organisation will suffer as a result.  

Another frustration came from the Application Tracking Systems (ATS) which were often born out of complex HR systems.  These were clunky not particularly user friendly and required training.  

CVs are prone to too much information or too little, to exaggerations or understatements, I therefore decided to ‘fix it’.  Thus, SkillSnap was born.  Skillsnaps are interactive profiles which provide, at first glance, all the useful data needed to make an informed hiring decision.  This includes, objectively measured technical and soft skills, a video intro, psychometric questionnaire, samples of work and past employer references.  In short,  all the information which ought to be gathered during a recruitment campaign is collated, in a very user-friendly way at the application stage.

How does SkillSnap work? What are the core capabilities that SkillSnap offer its customers?

SkillSnap enables hiring managers to quickly identify the right applicants in terms of technical ability and cultural fit.  Most of the work is done through our powerful AI, which at this stage acts only as an advisor so that ultimately, the decision to interview and hire remains firmly in ‘human’ control.  Overtime, and as the platform learns what makes each individual organisation and team tick, the AI assistant will schedule the right applicants for interviews automatically.  

To help recruiters attract and engage their audience, we’ve introduced Virtual Reality, giving prospective applicants an immersive feel or a vibe of the workplace.  They can see the office, how future colleagues work or interact with each other and decide if it’s the right environment for them.  This also leads to a greater ‘buy-in’ from applicants who are genuinely interested in the opportunity.  

For the applicant, what is really cool is that skillsnaps become living and breathing reflections of people’s experiences and skills as their careers evolve through time. We derive skills from every experience, for example becoming a parent, teaches us very useful skills such as patience and communication styles which can be appreciated in the workplace.  Skillsnaps are shareable and are more human than CVs since they reveal more about the applicant’s personality.

Why would anyone looking to hire someone use SkillSnap?

Because each year companies waste time and money trying to identify the right applicants as a result of using the CV, its derivatives or archaic recruitment techniques. SkillSnap brings recruitment into the 21st century.  

High staff turnover is hugely expensive, especially when opportunity cost is taken into account. Oxford Economics for example, calculated that the minimum cost of replacing staff is 50% of their annual salary.

We give companies all the data needed to make the right decisions.  And, the decision making process is assisted by our AI. Therefore, companies save time because they need only interview people who are right for the job and are motivated.  These hires will fit in well, be productive and have longer tenures.  

Simply focusing on hiring quickly will not solve the issue of staff turnover which is prohibitively expensive.   Skillsnap goes a long way towards addressing this issue and generating huge savings.

Who do you see as your top competitors? How do you differentiate your offerings/ services from those offered by your  competitors?

Our primary focus is identifying the right individuals.  We cannot see how this can be done efficiently when using CVs.  Our secondary focus is on making the recruitment process smoother, faster, more efficient for BOTH parties.  

It is also just as important for applicants to gain something, if not an immediate job, from SkillSnap. We have focused greatly on making the creation of a skillsnap, simple, quick, intuitive and fun.  It only takes a few minutes to create (much quicker than a CV) and it can also be shared with prospective employers, allowing them to stand out from the competition.

Most of our competitors are focusing on improving the recruitment process such as candidate tracking, interview scheduling and so on, but, as they rely on the poor quality data provided by the CV, we feel we have a great head-start.  

What are the major trends that are impacting the HR and recruiting?

Automation! The bots are coming!  Many of today’s jobs will be replaced by robots or bots in just a few years’ time.  However, there are some jobs which are not suited to automation and these are the ones which are defined by what makes us human, our creativity, our lateral thinking, our humour, our eccentricities, our passions, our  personalities.  Art, design and music whilst assisted by technology will not be replaced by it.  R&D, conceptual science requires human creativity and vision. Even just fixing the plumbing of an old victorian house requires ingenuity - I can guarantee that the pipes will not be where they should!  Joke aside, we are thinking about this a great deal and we are therefore positioning SkillSnap to showcase the useful skills of tomorrow.   

  

What’s next for SkillSnap?

A step at a time, we first want to hire a local team, engage with local companies, build experience, knowledge and data to facilitate an aggressive national and international expansion.