Roster’s Bold Bet on Creative Recruitment Is Cutting Hiring Time in Half

Why top creators and brands are ditching portfolios and resumes—and choosing Roster’s challenge-based hiring instead.

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, July 29, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Traditional hiring is fundamentally broken. It's slow, expensive, and often wildly unreliable.

In the creative industry, these flaws become even harder to ignore. Portfolios can be carefully curated, resumes are frequently exaggerated, and interviews often rely more on intuition than evidence. Still, companies continue to invest months of effort and significant resources into a process that offers no real guarantee that the person they hire can get the job done.

So here's a radical idea: What if we simply tested the one thing that actually matters?
Can this person create something exceptional under pressure, on brand, and on time? That is the real question. And it is one that traditional hiring never really answers.

Enter Roster, a hiring platform built for creators and brands scaling their content production, now turning the recruiting world upside down with its latest feature: the Hiring Challenge.

Roster's Hiring Challenge is quickly gaining momentum as the only hiring format that truly tests what matters: performance.

The premise is deceptively simple.

Instead of reading resumes or portfolios, employers post a real brief, such as "Design a killer thumbnail" or "Cut a 30-second short that feels cinematic," and invite applicants to solve it within a set time limit. A prize pool encourages participation, and job offers go to the top performers.

But it's not just a cool idea. It's working, and it's working fast.

When YouTube sensation Jenny Hoyos, with more than 9 million subscribers and more than 3 billion views, needed to scale her editing team, she skipped recruiters and traditional job boards entirely. She turned to Roster.

Within 72 hours, two editors had joined her team, handpicked through a Hiring Challenge that tested real creative instincts and the ability to deliver on time. "It's the only way I hire now," Hoyos said. "I don't want to read about your skills. I want to see them."

She is not alone. One of the biggest YouTubers in the world, Airrack, ran a Roster Hiring Challenge with a $100,000 job on the line—using the format to source top talent.

Other influential names like Yes Theory, Chloe Ting, ColdFusion, and Jesser have also embraced Roster's Hiring Challenge to hire editors, writers, designers, and growth marketers.

"Roster is filling a real gap in the creator economy," says Daniel Lambert, Head of Team at Jesser. "I've hired dozens of people in the last few years, and the Roster Hiring Challenge is by far the fastest way we've been able to identify great talent for Team Jesser. Working with Roster has given me more confidence that the creator economy is maturing and moving in the right direction.”

Part of what makes these challenges so effective is that Roster's Founder, Sherry Wong, understands the problem firsthand. Before founding Roster, she worked at a $50 million fund that invested in the creator economy, working with top digital talent on joint ventures and intellectual property franchising. All the while, Wong also had her own YouTube channel, Sherrybyw, with over 100,000 subscribers and more than 9 million views. Her own frustrating experience hiring creatives is what ultimately inspired her to build Roster.

The secret weapon of Hiring Challenges isn't just better hiring—it's the built-in viral effect. Each challenge becomes a piece of content in its own right. When popular creators host them, they generate buzz, attract thousands of participants, and boost visibility for both the project and the creator's brand.

It is recruitment, marketing, and audience engagement all at once.

Roster isn't just an improvement on traditional hiring; it's making the old way look completely absurd. We're approaching that moment when hiring through resumes will feel as outdated as sending messages via fax or renting DVDs.

Use the code AUGHIRING2025 to get 20% off your first Roster subscription and discover what performance-based hiring can do for your team.


Visit Roster:
https://www.joinroster.co

Sherry Wong
Roster
sherrywong@joinroster.co
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