The recruiter-friendly future of talent acquisition technology: Marek Hradilek, Co-Founder, Capa CV

What is the true potential of HR and how can technology help us to achieve it?

In this installment of our Tech Founders series, Marek Hradilek, Co-Founder, Capa CV, reveals how HR technology is transforming the talent acquisition process to give applicants a better shot, and recruiters an easier job.

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What is Capa CV?

Capa CV is tool that allows candidates to create digitized CVs. They can record themselves in our application and send a digital CV to a potential recruiter or hiring manager. ‘Capa’ stands for ‘Capability’ – a digitzed CV allows candidates to pitch themselves, show their capability and make an impresion with a recruiter before an interview takes place.

Why was it necessary to create Capa CV?

Getting a job is all about making an impression.  The biggest barrier for recent graduates is that, when they are applying for for position post-university, they are expected to already have experience in order to gain the experience that they need, as so many positions require several years’ experience in a similar role. This makes it very hard for them to sell their capabilities and pitch themselves to potential employers. So, if you can’t show your experience, it’s important for you to be able to show your capability to an employer, even before a personal interview takes place.

In several sections, the candidate creates an introduction, shows their experience, education, projects, skills, and so on. There are seven sections, three of which are mandatory. In those three sections the candidates record themselves for 10 to 60 seconds, and below those videos they supply all the descriptive information they feel is necessary. This allows the recruiter to scroll through the descriptive information and look at the videos simultaneously, gaining a fully-rounded impression of the candidate. All of this is available via a link that the candidate can send to the hiring manager, so there’s no need to download the application in order to view the the candidate’s profile.

Why do you think HR technology is crucial to the success of a business?

Recruitment is a hugely time-consuming process. If you’re an HR recruiter or hiring manager working for a large company, recruiting for a position, you might go through hundreds of CVs, many of which are highly similar, in order to maybe invite 50 to 60 people from that list to interview. Then, of those candidates who come to interview, you see that many of those candidates are absolutely not appropriate for the job position within the first two minutes of the interview, but you need to spend another 30-40 minutes with each candidate, just to be polite, because you’re representing your company.

What Capa CV allows recruiters to do is get a clear idea of a candidate’s capability, whether that’s knowledge of a foreign language, communication skills, or something else, whilst simultaneously getting an emotional feel for a candidate and an idea of their personality before meeting them. When those candidates are invited to interview, far less time is wasted trying to figure out whether they’re suited to the role, because the recruiter already has a good understanding of their skills and character.

What do you think is the biggest challenge currently affecting organizations today?

Hiring managers need their recruiters to understand the business more. They understand HR, but they do not understand the business side of their companies to an effective level, which means they can hardly evaluate the business potential of the candidates they’re hiring. The heads of departments need to help HR to be more business oriented, so that the hiring side can be more in tune with business goals, ensuring that the right people are brought into the business.

Which emerging technologies do you think will transform HR in the future?

There’s nothing better than the human touch in HR, because, fundamentally, people understand people. I really don’t think that AI will transform the human approach in evaluating and interacting with candidates. If there is a technology that will help HR to be more business oriented, and to be more business-oriented in their hiring strategies and choice of candidates, that will be a game changer.