Problem: BrightHire needed to record interviews to gain insights for their users, but running an internal integration was expensive and stressful.
Solution: Recall.ai relieved BrightHire of the burden of video recordings with a reliable, cost-effective API.
BrightHire is an AI copilot that streamlines every part of the interview process. Use AI to write job descriptions and interview plans, take interview notes, provide interview highlights, and empower better, faster hiring decisions.
Challenge: Find a cost-efficient way to capture video recordings
BrightHire revolutionizes the interview process by taking notes and providing insight. To do that, they needed access to video interviews.
Initially, BrightHire built their own video infrastructure to capture the data the tool needed from video interviews. Internally, they built a Zoom recorder, later adding Google Meet and Microsoft Teams recorders.
Each integration took 2-3 months to build and required specific infrastructure to run them. To build the recorders, their engineers had to use web scraping technologies to enter meetings. From maneuvering platform quirks to planning for edge cases, the BrightHire team didn’t feel like maintaining their recording infrastructure was worth it.
There were three key reasons the BrightHire team needed a new solution:
- Time: After they built all three integrations, they realized they had 2 full-time senior developers and a devops engineer maintaining them.
- Cost: From labor costs to cost to compute, maintaining their own integrations was a pricey option.
- Cognitive load: The BrightHire engineers were spending a lot of time concerned about video integration issues. Every integration issue was urgent because of BrightHire’s core offering, so the team felt like they were constantly putting out fires.
When BrightHire decided to seek out a new solution, they were looking for an API that could deliver a cost-effective, reliable, and fully functional integration to support their video integrations and relieve their stress.
That’s when they discovered Recall.ai.
Solution: Recall.ai’s stress-free API
Recall.ai turned out to be the right solution for BrightHire, with an API that is:
Reliable
BrightHire’s internal solution caused a lot of stress. Will Decker, the VP of Engineering at BrightHire, shed some light on the impact of Recall.ai’s reliability:
“When we were managing our internal solution, we probably had at least one or two issues per week — maybe a few more on bad weeks. With Recall, we have substantially fewer issues than we had before,” Will shared.
Easy to use
Will shared that APIs aren’t always friendly to integrate and manage. Recall.ai, on the other hand, has been extremely easy to use — compared to other alternatives and their own internally designed tool.
“The Recall API was easier to consume from a developer perspective than our internal tools were,” Will said.
Well-supported
Collaboration with Recall.ai is extremely simple.
“We’ve got a wonderful Slack channel with Recall,” Will said, “and it’s so nice to have an extra engineering team behind us supporting the video integrations that are wildly complicated.”
Agile
Online meeting platforms are notorious for their quirks, so BrightHire needed a tool that could adapt and navigate changes. In fact, right as the company switched to Recall.ai, Zoom released a new recording disclaimer flow that required some major infrastructure adjustments.
Will shared that, “Recall.ai made the process extremely easy. What I think would have been 3-4 weeks of work for an engineer ended up getting done in a week. Recall took the burden off us and managed the complications with Zoom’s API themselves.”
Cost effective
Recall.ai saved BrightHire money across both resource-draining variables: labor and infrastructure.
Will explained, “Recall could give us a better price simply on cost to compute, because at our scale, we couldn’t yet run the GCP instances at a high enough utilization to decrease cost.”
“When we considered the maintenance of two full-time developers to run our tool — which didn’t even include adding new features — the decision to switch made a lot of sense financially.”
Result: Better outcomes for BrightHire’s team and customers
Since bringing on Recall.ai as their video interview recorder, the BrightHire team has felt three major outcomes:
Relief
One of the major drawbacks of an internal recording tool was the stress that came along with it. Will shared the impact Recall.ai had on his workflow personally.
“Recall.ai has been extremely helpful for me personally, because I was involved in every single one of those tickets. Now, if an issue gets escalated, I give it over to Recall.ai to take care of.”
New features
BrightHire’s internal integration offered some features for Zoom users that they weren’t able to extend to customers using Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. With Recall.ai, they could offer all features across all platforms.
Value to customers
With the time saved on building, maintaining, and putting out fires for their interview recorder, the BrightHire team could focus on projects that bring more value for their customers.
As Recall.ai and BrightHire hit their one-year anniversary, both companies are looking forward to continued collaboration.
Will shared some final thoughts about using Recall.ai, saying, “Offloading our recorder to Recall has been a huge sigh of relief. It’s been extremely helpful for our team and for me personally. It’s freed up time, made us more productive, and helped us provide more value for our customers.”
