HireVue’s innovation philosophy: Prioritizing experience, security and data-driven choices

For the last thirty years, I’ve been fortunate to either drive or witness innovation in the talent acquisition space. Over the decades, I’ve worked with some of the brightest tech professionals, customers and partners, and this new phase of my career as Chief Technology Officer at HireVue couldn’t be more exciting to me because of the access I now have to an even wider network of exceptional people.

In my role as CTO I oversee product development (engineering), cloud infrastructure, information security and data engineering. We’re responsible for delivering product initiatives through technology innovations in a secure and scalable fashion. As our teams have been working through the acquisition, we’re doing big, bold strategizing— distilling down the ethos of who we are into digestible frameworks—we’re ensuring that our science, technology, and business plans are aligned where it matters most.

As a part of that exercise, it has become clear to me and the team that any and all innovation we drive as technologists must be built upon three fundamentals: user experience (candidate and customer), security and privacy, and data-driven decisions.

Candidate and customer experience

One of our values at HireVue is to be the “hero for our customers.” For our technology team this means building products with our end-users at the forefront of our minds. We have to understand how everyone from the CHRO to the recruitment specialist will interact with our platform, predict where they have pain points, and make design choices that make their lives easier.

And the same is true for candidates—there should always be two empty chairs in our brainstorms. One for the customer and one for their candidate. What does the person applying for a job feel? What questions do they have? How can we make it easier for them? Then we innovate from there based on best practices.

Security and privacy 

As we build our roadmap with an eye toward candidate and user experience, then we start to answer nitty gritty questions about security and privacy. If we do this for the candidate’s ease of use, what does it do with their data? How can we make this life-changing experience easy and secure?

Half of organizations have experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months, and the recent increase in ransomware attacks year-over-year is higher than the past five years combined. Bad actors are more sophisticated and well-funded than ever, with 4 out of 5 breaches now being attributed to organized crime. This is why we will continue to invest in our best-in-class safeguards to keep candidate and customer information safe. This includes SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and FedRAMP certifications. These frameworks are essential to how we do business and if innovation doesn’t fit within their confines, it isn’t an innovation worth pursuing. 

You can read more about these protections here.

Data-driven decision making

Calling back to our values and being a hero for our customers, the definition of that value goes on to say, “We respect our customers’ journeys and lead them to success by being their champions and experts.” That expertise comes from several places: 

• Rich platform data
• Team member expertise (we have over over 40 PhDs on staff)
• In-house research and audit programs
• 3rd party partnerships with industry groups, analysts and researchers
• Expert Advisory Board input
• Customer Advisory Board 
• Continuous candidate feedback

You combine all of those sources, and it amounts to HireVue having an unparalleled trove of data that helps us to reliably innovate before the competition. 

Looking ahead

Connecting talent to opportunities with innovative technologies has been a central part of my life for so long that at times it just feels second nature, but our newly expanded team and the potential we have to do big, transformative work feels unlike anything in recent memory. It’s like I’m looking at these problems with the enthusiasm I started with, but this time, I’ve got the experience and team to help bring it all to fruition. 

I can’t wait to work with our customers, partners, and candidates on what comes next. I promise it’s going to be unlike anything we’ve done before. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or just want to talk innovation and tech, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Best,
Robert Stephens
Chief Technology Officer