Customer Spotlight: How Crush Empire Decreased Time Spent on Interviews by 10X

Around Spark Hire HQ, we pride ourselves on our inclusive and unique culture. As the team grows, one of the contributing factors to sustaining that culture is using video interviews to identify candidates with culture fit early in the process.

And we are not the only ones. Crush Empire sees an incredible return on their video interviewing investment with the time they’ve saved and the higher quality of hires they’ve made. Their CEO, Bryce Welker, is so proud of his hiring process, he volunteered to share it on our blog.

Meet Crush Empire

Crush Empire is an online education company looking to revolutionize the test prep industry. Some of their flagship products include Crush The CPA Exam, Crush The LSAT Exam, and Crush The PM Exam. Crush Empire’s portfolio includes over 20 test prep products similar to these, and they use Spark Hire to build their ever-growing team.

Chief Executive Officer of Crush Empire, Bryce Welker, talked with us about how Spark Hire saves them hours of time and money every month.

Before Using Spark Hire

Before using Spark Hire, both Bryce and Crush Empire COO, James Edge, were performing upwards of 20 in-person interviews each week and hiring only the smallest percent. As a quickly growing company, it was imperative that Crush Empire kept hiring new talented employees, but the interviewing process cost them a combined 40 hours of work time per week.

This forced Bryce and James to forgo other important tasks like bringing in sales, publishing fresh content, and otherwise growing the business. It also created bottlenecks for their current employees; they were left waiting for approval on certain projects when, if Bryce and James hadn’t been busy interviewing potential employees, they could have given them the green light right away and not hindered their team’s workflow.

Making The Switch

Realizing how much time they were wasting with interviews, and how much potential revenue they were losing in the process, Bryce and James decided they needed a hiring alternative. After doing some research, they decided that Spark Hire offered a simple, cheap, and effective way to streamline the interview process and quickly filter out any subpar applicants. “After two years using Spark Hire, we couldn’t be happier with our decision,” says Bryce.

How Crush Empire Uses Spark Hire

At Crush Empire, they place a lot of value in creating a strong team connection, and to do that, they need to know what type of person they’re hiring. 

When developing interview questions for a specific job on Spark Hire, they make sure to ask applicants about their prior training and employment but emphasize getting to know these people on a core level – their likes and dislikes, communicative abilities, favorite animals, etc.

By using Spark Hire, Crush Empire was able to gauge both an applicant’s professional background and his or her personality, which vastly facilitates their search for potential employees. From there, they tend to pick their favorites and set up a time for an “official” in-person interview.

Bryce and James found that those who make it through their Spark Hire filter usually get the job.

Crunching The Numbers

Since first adopting Spark Hire in 2016, Crush Empire has increased its workforce nearly tenfold.

Bryce says that “through that growth, we’ve been able to nearly triple our gross annual revenue. Internally speaking, we can now vet potential employees up 10x faster than before. Where it would have previously cost us 40 work-hours to interview a week’s worth of candidates, it now takes only four.”

Using that more efficient interview system, Crush Empires’ hiring conversion rate has doubled. Spark Hire has also allowed them to significantly decrease certain interview-related costs, such as travel expenses, food, drinks, etc. This equates to thousands of dollars in savings per year.

Looking Forward

Spark Hire has been an invaluable asset for Crush Empire in acquiring new, talented employees. Or perhaps invaluable isn’t the best term, as the financial benefits Spark Hire has provided Crush Empire are readily apparent.

“When it comes to hiring new members to our team, we’ll always use Spark Hire as our first line of defense.” – Bryce Welker