Vette

Still, it was non-existent in the hiring process–a process that has seen little to no innovation in decades. She began to focus on how to utilize excess capacity in the hiring funnel, specifically during the interview process, to increase applicant engagement for companies and, ultimately, get more people hired.

Amber founded Vette in May 2020 as an “Instant Human Engagement” platform that would connect companies with human “Vetters” to conduct screenings of their candidate pools. This solution, driven by SMS and phone communication, would allow companies to engage with applicants instantly after submitting an application and would allow applicants to interview with an actual human (“Vetter”) at any hour of any day.

She raised capital, then built out the proof of concept, working with a beta customer and proving out the need for Vette. While initially focused on the highly skilled workforce, she switched gears when she saw a more pressing need in the market of high-volume, hourly, service-focused positions. With this in mind, in 2021, Amber needed a technology partner to build out the entire Vette platform with a delightful user experience and the ability to scale. Additionally, she needed a product team to implement processes, techniques, and frameworks to make it all happen.

She approached OAK’S LAB.

The Challenge

To build a functional, user-friendly “Instant Human Engagement” platform that enterprise clients could use to screen and hire for high-volume positions.

In order for the platform to become a pioneer for “Instant Human Engagement,” Amber needed to ensure that the solution was functional. After building out a proof of concept that tested the core functionality of how Vette could operate, we now had to find a way to build a product that could scale to handle thousands of interviews and enterprise clients.

The goal was to make it instant, but also user-friendly. We needed to focus on building an automated messaging functionality, allowing us to engage applicants in a seamless and appealing way immediately upon application. We also needed to create a user experience that delighted both Vetters and enterprise customers. And finally, we needed to build product development processes that could allow us to understand the problems users face and that would allow us to effectively prioritize and manage a growing backlog of feature requests.

The Solution

We leveraged our dual-track agile methodology to turn Amber’s MVP into an “Instant Human Engagement” platform capable of handling thousands of interviews and pleasing users.

To initiate the project, we hosted Amber in Prague so that she could meet the dedicated product team that would build and redesign her product. We set up a foundation phase during which we went through a discovery process to understand what features we needed to build and why. Together with Amber we aligned on our shared goals and defined our ideal customer profile.

In order to address and define the core functionality of the platform, we leveraged Amber’s existing proof of concept alongside our business process analysis to find the solution. Once we knew we could build a functional platform, we then leveraged our goals to prioritize additional features using the MOSCOW prioritization method. Our main focus at this stage was to get a product to the market as quickly as possible in order to begin collecting valuable feedback from all users.

We wanted to design a platform that handles thousands of SMS and phone conversations on a daily basis and supports the whole process of an applicant getting vetted. So, it needed to be scalable and stable. For this reason, choosing the right infrastructure, architecture, and 3rd party tools was vital.

First, we chose Twilio to handle all the SMS and phone calls. We hosted the platform on a cloud environment that had an auto-scaling feature, so when a large load of conversations came in, the infrastructure would scale itself. For stability, we needed to design a system that implemented master nodes, which were responsible for orchestrating the whole interview process, reacting to status changes and handling the concurrent processing in the platform. We used Firebase Realtime Database on the backend and on the frontend where it was able to reflect what was happening in the interview process in real-time in the application.

The Outcome

After her introduction to StageDotO, Amber received $2M in funding.

Today, Vette works with enterprise clients across the manufacturing, fast food, automotive, retail, and hospitality industries.

OAK’S LAB successfully built Amber’s “Instant Human Engagement” MVP. Applicants apply to a company job posting, and within seconds, they receive a text message inviting them to interview by phone whenever it is convenient. The applicant initiates their interview with the press of a button, and within 30 seconds, a human interviewer calls and conducts an interview with them. The product is functional. It’s user-friendly. And it’s instant.

By utilizing the gig economy to conduct phone interviews, applicants are able to interview as soon as they express interest in a job, and in return, companies are able to secure the applicants faster than their competitors resulting in higher interview-to-hire conversions.