Synthesia upgrades their candidate experience even as they 4x their hiring

“Use cases include L&D training videos and Customer Success resources,” says Sara Vošinek Gašpar, Head of Talent Acquisition. “Anywhere text can be turned into video, we’re both disrupting how that content is made and drastically reducing the cost of producing it.” Sara joined Synthesia in 2021 as the team’s first dedicated TA hire. After raising a $90M round, Synthesia became one of only a handful of European private tech companies to achieve a billion-dollar valuation in 2023. “We’ve scaled considerably since I’ve been here,” Sara says: “Last year we hired 240 people with a recruiting team of five.”

The candidate experience for high-volume hiring: “You have to stand out”

The majority of Synthesia’s hires come through applications—“we get around a thousand a week,” Sara says. And when it comes to active talent, “a good candidate experience is almost more important than it is for passive talent. It seems counter-intuitive,” she explains; “but active job-seekers typically apply to more than one job. So they’re in a position to compare processes in a way that passive talent—who’s generally only in conversation with a single company—isn’t. The experience you offer has to stand out.

Sara first heard about candidate.fyi on LinkedIn, and she immediately thought: “I would want this experience as an applicant.” The platform was still in beta, and the Synthesia team was astonished by “how finished the product already was. The point of beta is: you’ll have hiccups. But the user experience was so good from the beginning. Upgrades were new features rather than bug fixes. It was a well-planned, well-designed, and easy-to-use product from day one.”

The advantages of time-savings: "The minutes gained on every candidate call are precious"

Sara prefers to outsource her job to tech as much as possible—“to do more with less.” That includes the repetitive “copy-and-pasting of the same template in fifteen different emails that candidates have to go looking for when they’ve forgotten what it said.” As soon as someone on Sara’s team moves a candidate into Synthesia’s ATS, they get an invitation to candidate.fyi’s portal. “Everything a candidate needs or wants to know is right there: information about the company, the process, the team members they’ll be meeting with, and more.” Sara describes this as “empowering”: Sometimes a candidate will log in twenty times over the course of their process—whether to self-serve answers to basic questions, or to deepen their own research on the company.

The advantage is more than efficiency. The team now saves hours a week on email communications, yes; but “the minutes gained on every candidate call are even more precious,” Sara explains. Because all the information candidates need is readily-available in the portal, every conversation candidates have with the team is alive with something new. “I can skip over so many of the details that typically get covered in those calls—the tedious, repetitive stuff. I might get a full ten minutes back in a call to have a much more engaging conversation about the product, the team, or the culture—details likely to ultimately support a candidate in accepting an offer.”

Replacing a candidate feedback tool and saving budget‍

Not long after the team brought on candidate.fyi, they discontinued their existing feedback tool. “We were using another platform to track our CNPS score,” Sara recalls, “but it wasn’t seamless. Candidates had to click into an email and then click into the poll to complete it.” Now, pulse checks find candidates exactly where they are. “The moment someone enters the portal to find out what time their next interview is—and with whom—the survey pops up,” Sara explains. “There’s nothing to think about. How was the most recent experience for them? They simply pick an emoji and select a one-to-five score.” The team is getting more feedback than they did with their prior tool because it accommodates their workflow. 

And because the pulse checks occur after every stage of the process, “we get to see where we have room for improvement,” Sara adds. “I can see when certain interviewers are receiving above- or below-average scores. I can dig into what they’re doing to establish best practices across the team. That information is invaluable from a talent leadership perspective—not to mention a Recruiting Ops perspective.”

Establishing a shared library: "It's an opportunity to inspire each other"

There’s not much role overlap on Synthesia’s TA team: “I hire solely for engineering roles, someone else for R&D roles, someone else for commercial roles,” Sara explains. And she’s proud that the company’s job ads aren’t cookie-cutter versions of each other: “Every ad is tailored to the specific talent we’re addressing.” But it meant that each team member had their own set of resources that they shared through Calendly or email templates.

Thanks to candidate.fyi, the team can now leverage a shared library, where FAQs, videos, and other resources live. Recruiters still share different assets with different candidate personas, but “it’s given us an incredible opportunity to inspire each other with what we’re sharing,” Sara says. She’s even started linking to assets her colleagues have created for other departments. For example, Synthesia’s R&D recruiter shares a lot of information about research at the company to attract talent to those roles. “Those assets are a nice-to-have for my engineering roles. I never would have created them myself, but it turns out there are engineering candidates who are responsive to that additional context.” The shared library has ultimately increased candidate interest in the organization. 

Managing employer brand: "I don't want to have a paper trail for some things"
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Anytime content is updated in Synthesia’s library, it updates every active job that content is associated with. “That’s very powerful,” Sara says. “At any time, I can delete links that aren’t valid anymore. If we’ve shared a LinkedIn post by someone who doesn’t work at the company anymore, I can delete it from the template and it disappears across all open roles. If I’d shared that post in an email, on the other hand, that trail would be there permanently.”

What’s more, candidates lose access to the portal after a predetermined number of days after dropping out of process or being rejected by the company. So the hiring team can share data—annual recurring revenue, for example—that they wouldn’t otherwise give in writing. “We’re not a publicly-traded company, and that information is constantly changing,” Sara explains. “So I wouldn’t want to share it over email, but I can safely share it in the portal because once we reject a candidate, they no longer have access to it.” Sara links the portal to “a content management system in which we have the power to frame all our messaging. It’s shareable but easily changeable. So we control brand messaging in a moment-to-moment way.”

"There are no tools like this"

As far as Sara is concerned, candidate.fyi is a singular tool in recruiting teams’ tech stack. “There are no tools like this—there’s nothing that recruiters use today that enables them to do this,” she says. “Some teams try to build huge resource centers in Notion, but candidate.fyi offers automation and the ability to assess candidate experience and sentiment.” The Synthesia team has received “loads of positive feedback” on the platform—especially from Recruiting candidates. “This platform takes your candidate experience to the next level,” she says. “And I know our talent partner candidates are talking about it long after their process with us.” 

“With pulse checks, I can see when certain interviewers are receiving above- or below-average scores. I can dig into what they're doing to establish a best practice across the team. That information is invaluable from a talent leadership perspective"
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Sara Vošinek Gašpar, Head of Talent @ Synthesia