Beyond the CV: How Vizzy Is Reimagining the Future of Hiring from White City
Vizzy founders (L-R) Chris Woodward-Jones, Joe Woodward and Jess Woodward-Jones. Photo credit: Elspeth Vincent
HR technology startup Vizzy is on a mission to shake up hiring and recruitment – challenging employers to look beyond the traditional CV. Growing its business from fresh, modern workspace at Scale Space White City, Vizzy believes that people are far more than just a list of qualifications and job titles. The ambitious team has built a powerful platform that helps early-career talent showcase their personality, potential and individuality, and helps businesses to make better hiring decisions. Trusted by global brands including Tiffany & Co., Virgin, Louis Vuitton, Pizza Express, Burger King and Burberry – to name but a few – today Vizzy is transforming how businesses discover and engage emerging talent.
Last month, the team successfully collaborated with Scale Space on its annual Scale Space Careers Fair – hosted on Imperial College London’s White City Campus and connecting Imperial students and graduates with innovative businesses based on campus. The event was a compelling illustration of the connections and opportunities that White City Innovation District was created to foster – bringing together innovative businesses, aspiring professionals and a thriving community with a shared ambition to shape the future. We sat down with Vizzy CEO Chris Woodward-Jones to find out more about the company’s journey, the future of recruitment in an AI-driven world – and why it’s never been more important to be human.
Setting the ball rolling: from frustration to inspiration
Vizzy’s company story has its origins in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Co-founder Joe Woodward had recently moved to Mumbai in India to take up an exciting new role as Chief Marketing Officer for the Rajastan Royals, a professional Twenty20 cricket team based in Jaipur. However, Joe’s plans were unexpectedly disrupted when global lockdowns brought professional sport to a virtual standstill. Looking for new opportunities and directions, he turned to popular online portfolio-building platforms to showcase his experience and achievements, but the process left him frustrated.
What particularly struck Joe was that, despite advances in technology, the tools available to jobseekers still relied heavily on the same old formats. Creating a CV had become easier than ever, but telling the personal story behind the page remaining challenging. Current HR technology was behind the curve and out of step with how hirers and talent needed to connect. That key insight became the foundation for Vizzy.
CEO Chris Woodward-Jones explains: “Writing a CV has become frictionless, but that doesn’t mean it tells you anything meaningful about a person. AI tools like ChatGPT can help people create CV content, but they can only work with what already exists. We started Vizzy because people’s stories, experiences and potential are far richer than a stark list of qualifications and job titles. We wanted to create a way for candidates to capture and showcase those defining moments and strengths that make them unique.”
Recognising that hiring was becoming increasingly opaque, while the tools available to candidates were failing to evolve, the founders set out to build a platform to help people express who they really are. By enabling employers to access richer, more relevant insights aligned to their hiring objectives, Vizzy is now helping to bridge the gap between talented individuals and organisations keen to look beyond the CV.
The quickest route to quality talent
At its heart, Vizzy is designed to bring real-life behaviour and connectivity into the hiring process. While candidates routinely share ideas, opinions and experiences through videos, voice notes and social platforms in their everyday lives, recruitment has remained largely tied to the traditional CV.
The platform allows businesses to ask tailored questions at the very start of the recruitment journey, surfacing the insights that matter most to them. Employers can explore how candidates think, communicate and engage with topics relevant to their organisation. A sustainability-focused business, for example, might ask applicants to discuss an environmental initiative that inspires them, while a consumer brand could seek views on a recent marketing campaign. In essence, questions that might once have been reserved for a final interview can be brought to the very beginning of the process.
“The real value comes from the freedom candidates have in how they respond,” notes Chris. “Someone might choose to submit a video, a voice note, images, a presentation or a written piece. People communicate in different ways and have different strengths, so why should every application look exactly the same?”
That flexibility is central to Vizzy’s approach. Available in 64 languages and supported by a range of accessibility tools, the platform has been designed to help candidates present themselves in the format that suits them best. The result, says Chris, is a richer set of “hiring signals” for employers at a time when AI-generated CVs and standardised, model application responses are making it harder to differentiate between candidates. According to research released last year by graphic design platform Canva, more than half (52%) of UK job seekers have used AI technology to enhance and refine their CVs – a figure that rises to around two-thirds (65%) among the key Gen Z demographic.
For organisations, the benefits of Vizzy’s technology can be significant. By helping recruiters identify quality candidates earlier in the process, Vizzy reports that it can dramatically reduce screening volumes – up to 75%, with the potential to whittle 40K stand-out applications down to 14K – while improving the quality of talent progressing through the pipeline. Major brands including Virgin have adopted the platform to support their early-career programmes, using it not only as a hiring tool but also as a way to create a “brand moment” and drive more engaging and meaningful interactions with prospective employees.
But, for Chris, the platform’s ambitions extend beyond recruitment alone. “Talent isn’t just about hiring,” he says. “It’s about connectivity. People are looking for opportunities to learn, build networks and discover communities where they belong, based on everything from shared psychometric traits to similar taste in books or music.”
Exploring the art of the possible in a frontier ecosystem
For Vizzy, scaling within White City Innovation District offers clear advantages for the company’s evolution. Foremost is the proximity to Imperial College London, providing access to Imperial’s famous Business School and a constant flow of emerging talent, bringing with it opportunities to test ideas, collaborate on projects and engage directly with the next generation of innovators. The company is currently working with Imperial MSc students on an innovative Machine Learning project, while the wider Scale Space community provides regular opportunities to connect with fellow founders and business leaders.
As Chris Woodward-Jones puts it: “One of the best things about being in White City is the founder ecosystem. You can share battle stories, learn from people tackling completely different challenges and explore what’s possible together. Whether it’s breakfast events, leadership sessions or simply being close to incredible student talent, there’s a really collegiate atmosphere. We’re all doing frontier activities and we’re all here to explore the art of the possible.”
That spirit of collaboration is evident in Vizzy’s recent partnership with Scale Space on the Imperial White City Careers Fair – an example of how White City Innovation District is bringing together businesses, talent and ideas in ways that create value for the entire community.
Collaborating to drive impact: Scale Space x Vizzy
Scale Space’s innovative startups and scaleups meets the next generation of talent – Imperial’s exceptional student and graduate community
For Vizzy, the opportunity to collaborate with Scale Space last month on the Imperial White City Careers Fair was a natural extension of its mission: helping talented individuals connect with their ideal opportunity. Delivered annually by Imperial College London and Scale Space and now in its fifth year, the event brought together nearly 400 students and graduates with startups and scaleups from across White City Innovation District, creating a unique opportunity for meaningful face-to-face conversations between ambitious young talent and innovative employers.
This year’s collaboration between Scale Space and Vizzy added another dimension to the event. While the Careers Fair provided a physical space for introductions, networking and recruitment, Vizzy’s platform enabled those connections to continue beyond the day itself, helping companies build long-term talent pipelines and ensuring promising candidates remain visible long after the exhibition stands have been packed away.
For Chris Woodward-Jones, the value of the event lay in its ability to create authentic interactions. “The best thing about the Careers Fair was bringing graduates and businesses together in one room and seeing those conversations happen in real life,” he says. “In a world that’s becoming increasingly digital, there’s still enormous value in taking the time to meet people face-to-face. You get a far better sense of who someone is, what motivates them and where they could add value.”
The event also highlighted one of White City Innovation District’s hallmark strengths: its concentration of high-growth companies operating at the cutting edge of sectors including AI, life sciences, climate and energy.
“Having so many startups and scaleups together in one space was incredibly powerful,” adds Chris. “You don’t often get that kind of concentration of innovative businesses in such a focused environment. It gave students exposure to a huge range of opportunities, while companies were able to connect with talented people they might not otherwise have met.”
At its heart, the collaboration demonstrated the power of the White City ecosystem. Scale Space created the platform for businesses and talent to come together, while Vizzy helped ensure those relationships could continue to develop after the event ended. It’s exactly the kind of partnership White City Innovation District was designed to encourage – one that brings together people, ideas and organisations to create opportunities that extend far beyond a single afternoon.
“We signed up on Vizzy as our first official recruitment platform right before the Scale Space Careers Fair and it made keeping track of every candidate we met so much easier! The dashboard for every candidate, including super cool features like the Psychometrics, made our recruitment a much easier experience as opposed to looking over individual CVs. The standardised introduction Q&A highlighted immediately which candidates did their research and were more invested in their application. Would highly recommend.”
– Felix Bilodeau-Boisvert, Business Development Executive, Arborea
“It was a wonderful experience making the application, well designed, and I loved being able to add images and illustrations to my statements.”
– Graduate attendee at the Scale Space Careers Fair
Looking ahead: keeping the human at the heart of hiring
As AI continues to transform recruitment, Vizzy believes the future belongs to organisations that find better ways to understand the people behind the application. While AI can help candidates write CVs and employers process applications at scale, Chris argues that meaningful hiring decisions will still depend on identifying the qualities that technology alone cannot capture: curiosity, motivation, ambition and potential.
“In the age of AI, it’s never been more important to be human,” he says. “The purpose of hiring is to bring great people into your business who can make an impact and help prepare it for the future. If applications are written by AI, screened by AI and rejected by AI, you’re starting the relationship in the wrong way. We use AI, but it can’t be truly human. Our role is to create those moments where people can demonstrate who they really are.”
As competition for talent intensifies, Chris believes employers will increasingly focus on identifying the marginal differences between outstanding candidates – looking beyond qualifications to understand desire, capability and cultural add. The challenge, he says, is to meet candidates where they are, communicate in their language and create opportunities for genuine connection.
From its base at Scale Space, Vizzy is well placed to help shape that future. Surrounded by world-leading researchers, ambitious founders and a diverse pipeline of emerging talent, the company is embedded within an ecosystem built to support innovation and growth. As it expands its reach across sectors and markets, White City Innovation District provides the ideal launchpad for a business with global ambitions. If the future of hiring is about combining technology with deeper human insight, Vizzy is positioning itself at the forefront of that shift – blazing a trail for a more inclusive, effective and human-centred approach to recruitment.
Discover more: to explore Vizzy’s platform for yourself and create your own free profile, head to vizzy.com