“GetHired.com eliminates the pain points of a lengthy hiring process by reinventing the way that employers and job seekers connect in today’s digital world.”

Suki Shah is a serial entrepreneur who understands from experience that the hiring process is often the biggest hurdle in growing a company. Posting open positions on job boards like Monster.com or Craigslist is time-consuming and expensive – and may elicit hundreds of email inquiries per post.

GetHired.com is reinventing the way that employers and job seekers connect in today’s digital world. It combines the visibility of a job board with the functionality of an applicant tracking system – allowing employers to find and pre-screen candidates using audio and video, conduct real-time virtual interviews and manage the entire onboarding process. GetHired.com produces better-quality candidates, in less time, at no cost.

MO: What problem is GetHired solving? Can you talk about the development process behind the site?

Suki: Existing jobs boards have not seen much innovation in the past several years. They are expensive for employers (up to $650 or more per position posted), and they rely on the resume as one of the only ways to screen applicants. So, the burden falls on employers to sift through hundreds of resumes to find job seekers who are qualified for a position on paper, but may lack a cultural or personal fit at the company.

GetHired.com is a free service that encourages job seekers to differentiate themselves beyond a traditional resume, ultimately assisting employers in the applicant discovery process. Candidates who invest time and energy in completing more thorough applications have an increased likelihood of getting interviews and getting hired.

MO: How have you managed to gain immediate traction among employers/recruiters and job seekers?

Suki: Despite a slowly improving economy, employers are having more trouble than ever finding qualified applicants for open positions. Too often, they are innundated with sub-par resumes and have no way established way to monitor, connect with or track top talent. GetHired.com eliminates the pain points of a lengthy hiring process by reinventing the way that employers and job seekers connect in today’s digital world.

For job seekers, GetHired.com provides a comprehensive toolkit that helps them to stay organized as they uncover jobs at top companies and differentiate themselves in the hiring process. For employers, GetHired.com provides not only access to top talent, but insight into the personality and specialized skill sets of today’s job seekers.

MO: You’ve launched GetHired.com in both the US and India. Have you had to vary the marketing approach or strategy for each country?

Suki: When GetHired.com launched on January 30, 2012, we were happy to receive registered users from more than 90 countries around the world. Obviously, this was an unexpected (but welcome) surprise! While we thought we had done an excellent job in conducting cross-browser testing (testing our site on all major browsers like Microsoft Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and more to insure it always worked the same across every platform) we hadn’t anticipated such a strong demand in international countries and what we found was that many of those users had slightly older browsers, so our site was hanging and they weren’t able to access many features.

After that experience, we decided to limit use of GetHired.com to the U.S. and India so that we could concentrate on delivering the best user experience possible. In India, much of our traction has been the result of word-of-mouth and organic growth. Although the same can be said about the U.S., we’re also eager to get the word out to local and national media outlets here, which we’ve been doing through public relations.

MO: I enjoyed reading in your blog that hiring managers are starting to ask unexpected questions during the interview process to determine if a candidate can think on their feet and respond to the questions that they are asked (not the ones they hoped they would be asked.) In that case, if you could be any super hero which one would you choose and why?

Suki: Great question! My personal hero is Sir Richard Branson, who is an extremely successful businessman and the owner of Virgin Group. Branson has dyslexia and therefore did not perform well academically as a student . . . but he rose above those challenges and discovered that he has an innate ability to connect with others. His adventures and his success has made history.

The most important attribute of any entrepreneur is an ability to make connections with people who share a similar vision – and then to move forward. To just make “it” happen, whatever you’ve decided “it” is.

MO: What lessons did you learn from setting up your first company, Statacor Biosciences, that you were able to apply to GetHired.com?

Suki: I started Statacor when I was 24, which quickly scaled to employing more than 25 people in seven states. During this growth, I struggled to find top talent for open positions and began to reimagine the hiring process from the ground, up.

Naresh Patel, chief technology officer at the disease management company, worked closely with me to create a platform that would help us to source better-quality candidates, in less time, at no cost. Together, we created an 800-number that would allow job seekers looking for work at our company to call into a designated phone line and automatically respond to an audio prompt. Simultaneously, job seekers would upload their resume for background purposes.

The audio prompt, alone, cut down the number of applicants per open position at our organization from around 500 people to thirty job seekers. Astounded that only six percent of job seekers would take the time and energy to complete the audio application process – and that of those, I could quickly narrow down top communicators and candidates with specific skill sets to invite to a one-on-one interview, I continued to ponder how to make the process even more efficient.

Enabling video was the next logical step. And so, Naresh and I worked together to create a comprehensive video-based social recruiting platform and job board to help find the most skilled job seekers. The platform drastically cut the time it took to hire top quality candidates. And, we realized its potential to help other business owners to connect with top talent at no cost.

We decided to devote more time and resources to the project, and founded GetHired.com to help employers – especially small businesses and entrepreneurs – to find top talent for their open positions using video and voice as pre-screening and applicant tracking tools. GetHired.com is the first job board to embed video capabilities directly into its social recruiting platform so that job seekers can record and submit personal, dynamic responses to an employer’s most pressing pre-screening questions at the start of the hiring process. As a result, employers are able to quickly find top candidates with good communication skills who are a cultural fit for their organization.

Today, using the GetHired.com platform, employers can provide both active and passive job seekers with the tools that help them to stand out in the application process. Rather than being judged on where they went to school or the format of their resume, GetHired.com allows job seekers to reframe the decision-making process and choose top candidates based on their communication skills and cultural fit for the organization.

MO: Would you recommend for potential candidates to record a professional introduction video and attach it to their paper resume?

Suki: Yes, absolutely. It is more important than ever for job seekers to seek out platforms in their job search that help them to differentiate themselves from other candidates. GetHired.com, for example, allows job seekers to create an online video introduction to their resume — and to respond to employer pre-screening questions by video or audio. This means that an employer not only sees the job seeker’s resume, but also sees who that job seeker is as a person beyond the 8.5” x 11” piece of paper. When you integrate video and audio into the hiring process, you give every applicant an equal opportunity to be seen and heard by an employer.