How Slync is helping young people jumpstart their careers

As economic chaos ensues, many have already given up ambitions to chase their dreams. Slync is the new social hiring app trying to give the younger generation a head-start, says Martin Friel

Partners Jami and Faiza Saiful are fighting a growing wasteland of ambition (Slync)

This is a bad time for jobseekers from the millennial and Gen Z cohort. For millennials, they are about to enter their second global recession and for those making their first tentative steps into the job market, they couldn’t be doing it at a more uncertain time.

A recent survey of 2,000 16- to 25-years-olds carried out by the Prince’s Trust highlights just how bad it is out there. The first casualty is the dream job with more than two-thirds saying they had given up hope of ever achieving it.

Depressingly, nearly two-fifths felt they would never succeed in life and 36 per cent had lost all hope in the future. And there are endless reports in the news and on social media about young candidates who feel they are getting lost in a blizzard of applications for the few jobs that do exist and struggling to understand how they can stand out from the crowd.

It seems that a whole generation has given up hope. And it’s not difficult to understand why.

But it could be that among this growing wasteland of ambition, a new approach to recruitment is set to give these young entrants to the job market the platform they need to realise their ambitions.

Launched in 2019, Slync is recruitment done social media style. Described by husband and wife team Jami and Faiza Saiful as a “social hiring app created for the mindset of millennials”, Slync’s main point of differentiation is its use of video to allow both candidates and prospective employers to sell themselves.

For candidates, it is an opportunity to produce a cover letter in video form, allowing them to show prospective employers what they are like as a person beyond the skills laid out on a traditional CV.

And for employers, it as an opportunity to showcase their business culture in video form, giving a better feel for what working life is like in their organisation.

But at the heart of the app is the conviction that the traditional methods of recruitment just aren’t suited to the generation entering today’s job market.

“Video tech can identify a person’s skillsets in a way that isn’t possible on paper,” says Faiza.

“Gen Z is a very special generation. They are innovators, digital natives and social advocates and companies have really struggled to attract this generation, so we have created the software with that in mind.”

At first glance it looks like just another tweak to the well-established recruitment process but when you listen to the couple, they may be on to something.

“The problem with paper CVs is that you have the same hard skills as ten other candidates but with video you can showcase your soft skills,” says Faiza.

“Employers don’t necessarily need hard skills – almost 90 per cent of recruiters say soft skills trump hard skills.”

And she’s got a point. As long ago as 2013, Google undertook an internal study to understand what made the highest performing teams so successful and found that of the eight most important skills to have at the business, STEM expertise came last.

It was the interpersonal, or soft skills, that made the difference between successful and underperforming teams. And in 2018, a survey of 2,000 business leaders conducted by LinkedIn found that 57 per cent placed more emphasis on the importance of soft skills over hard ones.

This need to identify candidates with the right soft skills, at the outset of the recruitment process, is what Slync has been designed to satisfy.

The prospect of selling yourself might frighten the more introverted among us, but the reality is, candidates are going to have to come face to face with prospective employers eventually, so why not break the ice in an environment where the candidate has greater control?

They wanted something that’s new and innovative as they were sourcing candidates in a traditional manner,

And anyway, as Jami explains, the generation for whom this app has been designed are already very comfortable with video, and for those who are not, there is help at hand.

“Things like TikTok and [Instagram] Stories have made people much more familiar with the camera,” he says.

“It really comes down to what they say on video and we have a feature on the system that suggests three basic questions that they could answer.

“It’s like Snapchat when recording – a note pops up recommending what to mention and what not to mention,” he adds.

But the couple have set their sights beyond simply making the recruitment process more user friendly. They believe that Slync’s integrated and transparent approach could help employers tackle their diversity problem.

“We believe that diversity and inclusion is the future of the workforce,” says Faiza, adding that diversity in gender, ethnicity and social mobility is fundamental to what they are trying to achieve.

“Companies struggle with their diversity – they are just too busy to hire in the right way,” she adds.

Which Slync aims to address. But surely a video message flies in the face of the belief that using blind CVs is the best way to avoid unconscious or even conscious bias?

“When a candidate goes a through blind CV process, it’s fine to a degree, but when they walk into the interview room, they are still being interviewed by humans and not robots,” says Faiza.

Or as Jami puts it, the person in that video won’t suddenly change when they get to the interview room so whether or not a company wishes to increase their diversity, that position isn’t going to be swayed by a video.

Slync’s focus is on assisting those who get it, who see the moral and financial benefits of having a more diverse workforce. Employers like the Department for Education, one of their largest clients.

“They wanted something that’s new and innovative as they were sourcing candidates in a traditional manner,” explains Faiza.

“They have apprenticeship roles with several thousands of people applying and they were looking for a way to screen candidates via video to see their soft skills while also meeting their diversity targets.”

But Faiza and Jami are still at the early stages of Slync’s development, building up the right levels of engagement and enough case studies to give prospective investors the confidence to put up the capital to allow the couple to expand.

And that vision for expansion takes them across Europe and to America to take advantage of the 22 million graduates that roll out of college annually.

And after that, the world.

They have bold ambitions for what is essentially an evolution of a well-established process but sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.

“This is about storytelling,” says Faiza.

“You are the best version of yourself. [You are] selling yourself in that video and nobody but you can do that.”