In frontline hiring, short-term turnover (new hires who leave within their first 30 days) can cost you millions. Quick quits, as we call them, don’t just cause understaffing — they make you restart the time-consuming and expensive cycle of replacing them. More job advertising costs, more of your managers’ time spent on interviews, and more resources on background checks and training. These things add up, and create a crippling feedback loop that lowers your bottom line and hurts your customer experiences.
Quick quits can happen for a number of reasons: life changes, shift schedule availability or simply an employee not liking the culture or work itself.
Realistic job previews (RJPs) are pieces of content meant to stop this last issue at its source: the job application. By showcasing to candidates what working at the job is actually like, you can level-set expectations early on and bring in applicants who would actually enjoy the work. The more good fits you have coming in, the better odds of landing someone that would stick.
But with the rising costs and expectations surrounding video production, companies are more selective than ever about spending budget on accurate job portrayals. Oftentimes, that means RJPs are only available for a few roles, and even then don’t do a great job at fulfilling their intended purpose. You can alternatively showcase roles to candidates in-person, but this either extends interview resources or cuts into evaluation time.
One in five hires still quit within 30 days, and we’ve seen some frontline industries (like retail and hospitality) reach over 100% short-term turnover. Seriously. That means an individual "seat" may need to be filled 2-3 times per year.
At Paradox, we sought to change things. We believed that by implementing AI into the education phase of the hiring process, companies could create better job previews at scale with less budget. The end result is the Immersive Job Preview (IJP), the winner of the 2025 HR Executive Top Product of the Year award.
Let’s talk about how it works and the longstanding problems it helps solve.
1. Realistic job previews have been around a long time. Why focus on this now?
We didn’t set out to improve the RJP. We set out to improve short-term turnover, and save our clients the millions of dollars it was costing them.
2. What’s different about this approach?
Immersive Job Preview turns a negative into a positive, taking the pitfalls of the RJP and turning them into a launching pad. In today’s era of mass applications and job description neglect, candidates are applying to jobs without truly understanding what the role is actually like.
RJPs were never built to tackle that level of speed-to-apply. They’re not delivered in a way frontline candidates expect, they don’t show off every role a candidate might want to apply to, and if marketing budget is borrowed, the videos often end up more idealistic than realistic.
With Immersive Job Preview, candidates can now get accurate portrayals of every role you offer in seconds — all delivered within the screening conversation. And since AI is being used to visualize the previews (hello, video), you’re able to be more transparent about the work your candidates will be doing without losing those same candidates’ attention.
3. Talk to me a bit about AI video generation. What does this solve, and are companies ready to use AI in this way?
Absolutely. The heart of our IJP is our AI Video Studio, which transforms complex job descriptions into AI-generated day-in-the-life showcases. All you need to do is upload a role’s description and our vetted LLM will generate an editable job preview video script. Revise as much as you need, and once it’s tuned to your liking, you can generate (and re-generate) video clips until you have that perfect showcase of the good and the bad of a role. An immersive preview, if you will. Basically, the AI Video Studio is a script editor, storyboard creator, voice over artist, and candidate experience showcase all in one.
The best part? It’s all done in minutes, meaning your team doesn’t have to sink in resources to create previews at scale. And since it’s all done through the same simple UI that Paradox features in all of our products, talent teams won’t have to go learn another complex program to generate dozens of previews at a time.
In other words, companies are ready for this. Because it’s easy. Because it solves their problems. And because it works.
4. The immersive Q&A is unique, but is it that much better than the conversational AI experience over text?
For a lot of candidates, we believe the answer will be yes. But if it’s not for a certain person, then they always have the option to learn about a role via chat instead. We know that everyone prefers to interact with software in different ways — the immersive Q&A is simply giving candidates another avenue to get their questions answered.
Immersive Q&A matches candidates with an AI assistant that has been trained on the specific company and job information, giving candidates the opportunity to “talk to the job.” Just ask a question and the AI will generate a response in real-time and answer on video. It’s a seamless conversational AI experience, just like the one you’re familiar with over text.
Here’s the best part though: That text functionality still isn’t going away. That means candidates can ask questions and receive feedback in the way that best suits them. We’re simply leveling up the experience for people who prefer video communication.
5. How do you expect to measure impact?
Impact will be measured by our ability to solve the original problem: Are new hires staying long enough to make an impact?
We believe they will. By giving job candidates access to an unprecedented amount of understanding before they ever apply to a role, more great fits will flow through the funnel, while poor fits can find a job that better suits them.
That makes reducing short-term turnover as easy as pressing play.
___
Read the full press release on IJP here.
