Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast.I’m Max your host and today I am delighted to welcome on the show, Elena Valentine from Skill Scouts. 

Elena: Yes. 

Max: Hi, Elena. Welcome. 

Elena: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 3:30 PM my time and 5:30 AM. Hong Kong time. 

Max: Oh, don't embarrass me, come off as this person with social skills.Now, everybody knows  I work before everybody wakes up. It's sad, but it's true. So Elena thanks for coming and for taking time off your working hours to share your story with us. I connected with you after hearing your voice on LinkedIn, which by the way, is getting increasingly populated with crazy content.I don't know if that's part of the strategy that you support for your customers. But we've got a lot to cover for today's interview. I'm going to ask Elena how she ended up in the wonderful space of employer branding and production of content for employers.  And how to give a talent acquisition team, an edge through content and maybe if we're lucky and then I will sing a little bit for us.  I don't know. 

Elena: Depends how close we hit to the 20 minute mark. 

Max: Perfect. So yeah, Elena, tell us how did you end up in employer branding? Did you grow up dreaming to be in recruitment? 

Elena: Not at all. Didn't even realize this.Yeah I didn't grow up as a five-year old wishing I could recruit people to a company. I didn't think that existed, but where my story, you know, does start is I'm a former design researcher that used to work, you know, for design thinking kind of an ideal like environment. And how this really came to be was because of a project that I worked on there as a design researcher that inevitably would change my life and that of my co-founder. And in particularly it was a national kind of challenge here in the U S around, how do we connect 6 million young people to employment? And primarily young people who may not look good on resumes, Maybe they don't have a lot of job experience. Maybe, you know they've had to go through the juvenile justice system. So how do we connect those who are not in school, in the workforce to more meaningful pathways to employment. And that's where, you know, we saw our lives change and what our purpose would be, which was, we were talking to hundreds and hundreds of incredibly talented, young people of workforce development leaders and employers and what we saw loud and clear is that there was a hiring process that was shutting out non-traditional talent. And out of many of the challenges that were there. One of the things that we saw in particular was that you cannot be what you cannot see. And for young people who have never left their neighborhoods, they lack access and exposure to jobs, so at the essence of what we started to do, even prior to founding, skill scout was just a film jobs. Realistic in a visual way so that young people could kind of see what these jobs were actually like. And it started to work, they started to put their phones down. They started to ask questions, they started to get excited.And that's when we realized that we had something that we could hack for candidates, this opportunity for them to really understand what jobs were like. But inevitably for half companies to hack what it could be to really differentiate themselves to provide more realistic previews for candidates so that they have an opportunity to self screen in our self screen out.And that was really the origin for why we started what we do. 

Max: Yeah. Well thank you for reconnecting all of us and me to why we're in this industry. Yes. It's great to help people get to work and find employment and find a place in society and  I think whether you went to, you got the best education in the world, or you never graduated from high school it's a real mystery. What goes on in most people's jobs when you're at that age, when you're 20 something when you're starting out, you just don't know what you're getting into job descriptions. They don't tell you anything really. They don't feel real. 

Elena: Yeah the whole thing was, that we saw, look, job descriptions don't show what a job is like and resumes don't depict a candidate's skills. And so, you know, look at what we're seeing over the past several years. Of, types of via technologies or approaches like ours, like yours that are really coming into this market to, really helped to de-mystify and provide a bit more transparency, provide a bit more humanity into, you know, how we really care for in our case candidates.

Max: And Elena, how does your business work? Do you typically work with a recruitment marketing team that says we want to run a big, national campaign for our graduate hiring program? Can you make us look good?  Is this kind of  what kind of agency type of arrangement, or is it more a pay as you go? How does it work?

 Elena: It's really any, and all of the above. So inevitably we exist to capture the humanity of work primarily through the power of film. And so we work on behalf of agencies. We work on behalf of companies and employer branding, recruitment marketing leaders, themselves who are looking to infuse content to support via the employee experience and, you know, for our conversation,  the candidate experience. And so what that might look like might be. Us, you know, working to produce a job video or a cultural video, or, as we're thinking about the pandemic, we have so many processes that are changing. We have so many approaches to how we might be interviewing and what the candidate needs to expect that, you know, right now we're actually creating a lot of content, new content that needs to be created.So that, hiring managers can ensure that candidates are still having as much of a seamless experience as they can during this time. 

Max: Right. And even though. The buzz is remote work, work from home and all that the majority of jobs still require physical presence still require for people to come in and some time put on a uniform and do the things they do.

Elena: So yeah. Yeah, I mean, so especially, so for example,we recently worked with Kohl's. You know they're hiring warehouse, logistics, distribution jobs, like crazy, but even more importantly, they have to show the realities of today because candidates are paying attention to, in addition to everything else. How is that employer going to keep me safe, going to keep me healthy? And so we've certainly been working with, you know, several companies that are having to not just rethink well. Yeah, the world is trying to rethink workplace safety right now as it comes to the pandemic, but even more so, when it comes to the questions that we know that candidates need addressed, how are we ensuring that we're telling the story of safety? and that's a really big one right now that we're seeing within kind of the candidate story cycle. 

Max: Do you have a big theme like this for every year you've been in business like this year was masks and gloves and your videos and two years ago it was maybe something else. I don't know. 

Elena: No, I like this, you know, it's hard to actually define the trends as close as they are.Now I will say when we started ou...