Funding will accelerate international growth and product innovation

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – (Business Wire) September 28, 2009 – HireVue, the leading provider of video interviewing solutions, announced today that it has secured a Series A round of funding led by Peterson Ventures. Peterson Ventures is joined by The Garber Fund of Penn State University and a number of strategic investors to help fund HireVue’s continuing growth.

In the past 12 months, HireVue has experienced greater than 500% growth in interviews and expanded their customer base to include a number of the Fortune 500 including Dish Network, CDW, and Murphy Oil. HireVue also recently announced a key strategic partnership that makes their video interviewing solutions available to thousands of employers through talent management software giant Taleo. HireVue was also named HR Product of the Year for 2009 by Human Resource Executive ® magazine just two weeks ago.

“This is a great time to invest in HireVue,” said Brandon Cope of Peterson Ventures. “It’s exciting to partner with a company in this stage of explosive growth. They provide an offering that is quite compelling for employers given the advancement in technology, the globalization of business, and the downturn of the economy.  We believe HireVue will create value for the world’s leading organizations by helping them acquire their most important asset—their people—in the shortest amount of time and at the lowest cost.”

Employers use HireVue to screen candidates with Virtual Video Interviews where the employer defines a set of questions that are answered by the candidate over the Internet via webcam. Clients also use HireVue’s Live Video Interviews to interview candidates via online videoconference. Both types of interviews are recorded and stored in HireVue’s proprietary and secure system for review. Interviews can be taken from any location with an Internet connection and many employers set up on-site video kiosks for high volume hiring. Webcams and technical support are included with every video interview. The HireVue solution can be used directly from www.hirevue.com or through the newly announced integration with Taleo Enterprise.

HireVue will use the new funds to add to its world-class management team, strengthen market awareness, and make product enhancements that will greatly increase the value of the HireVue system to the market.

“We are fortunate to have Peterson Ventures and the Garber Fund as partners,” says HireVue CEO Mark Newman. “All of our investment partners offer much more than capital. In the few short months of partnership, their entrepreneurial know-how, expertise in the human capital space, and experience in building great companies, has already proven crucial to our recent growth and will continue be a catalyst to our future growth.”

About Peterson Ventures

Based in Salt Lake City, UT, Peterson Ventures is an investment firm that seeks to partner with outstanding entrepreneurs and founders of great companies.  Founded by JetBlue Chairman and current faculty member at Stanford’s Graduate school of Business Joel Peterson, Peterson Ventures make investments across all stages of a company’s growth.  Specifically, they invest in search funds, seed- and early-stage companies, and small, later-stage companies that have revenues less than $10 million and positive EBITDA.  They have invested in some of the world’s leading companies like Asurion and JetBlue.  www.petersonventures.com

About The Garber Fund

The Garber Fund was established in 1999 with a $5 million commitment from Penn State alumnus John Garber and his wife Bette to bring reality to the teaching of entrepreneurship and venture capital. The fund is part of the Nittany Lion Venture Capital Association (NLVC), an MBA student-run management group that works with small companies and other investment groups in early stage business planning, execution, and due-diligence assignments. NLVC forms part of Smeal’s highly acclaimed entrepreneurship program, in which students are immersed in real-life situations throughout their studies.

About HireVue

Founded in 2004, HireVue is the world’s leading online video-interviewing solution that brings talent into focus right from the start – cutting down on the time and money it takes to make important hiring decisions.  Today, HireVue is used in over 90 countries around the globe. HireVue’s full service video interviews eliminate travel costs, reduce recruitment time and provide greater candidate insight earlier in the hiring process than ever before. HireVue is used by the world’s most innovative leaders in talent acquisition like the African Development Bank, Google, Dish Network, Rio Tinto, ITT and many others. Led by a veteran team of Human Capital Management experts, HireVue combines superior service with superior solutions to power any video used in the hiring process anywhere in the world.

For more information please visit: www.hirevue.com. For up to the minute news about HireVue, follow HireVue on Twitter here.

Press Contact: Chris Higbee

801.415.9485 | chigbee@hirevue.com

This week, Human Resources Executive Magazine names us a HR Product of the Year. Here’s what they said about why they picked us. I love that they realize the value is in far more than the video alone, but in what you can do with the recordings after the fact.

FROM HUMAN RESOURCES EXECUTIVE MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2009

What It Is: HireVue is an online video interviewing solution that enables businesses to screen job candidates remotely using the Internet and Webcams. There are three versions of the product: HireVue Recorded, which lets companies record answers to written questions defined by the company; HireVue Live, which allows companies to perform and record live video interviews; and HireVue On-Site, which provides fixed locations where candidates and hiring managers can come to perform live interviews that can be viewed by others in remote locations (these can be recorded, too).

HireVue integrates with talent management, applicant tracking and HR systems.

Why We Like It: Virtual interviewing is hardly new, but the latest generation of products in this arena, especially HireVue’s, has taken these solutions to the next level. Today, video quality is no longer being held back by Internet connection speeds, whereas that wasn’t the case just 18 months ago. But what earns HireVue a spot among this year’s winners are some of the features it now delivers to the hiring process.

In particular, we like the way the product allows users to not only record videos — so they can be easily reviewed again — but also do a side-by-side comparison of how candidates responded to the same interview questions. We also like its collaborative features, including the way it permits hiring stakeholders to comment on and rate candidates as they review the interview.

Also see what HRE’s editor, David Shadovitz had to say about HireVue in our official press release.

While at Taleo World (we are their first and only fully integrated video interviewing partner) last week we came across a number of fantastic articles about companies using video interviews. The articles always try to be balanced and so other competitors are included in them.

Inevitably we find quotes that read something like this:

”Unlike HireVue, we do not record video interviews. We want to steer clear of that — we don’t want anything leaked on YouTube.”

This is a classic sales technique, spreading FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – that is used by companies when their offering doesn’t stack up to the competition. The unfortunate result is that companies who could really benefit from video interviewing end up making decisions based on misinformation or spend unnecessary time and money cutting through the FUD. It’s no wonder video interviewing has taken so long to come into the mainstream – if I were championing the idea inside a company and had this to contend with, I might drop it too. Not worth the effort. I’d like to set the record straight so you can avoid all of that.

The fact is video interviewing without a candidate record (i.e., a recording of the interview) is nothing new – it’s called videoconferencing. If that’s all you need use Skype, it’s free. But you also lose the value of a record that can be used to make a smarter, faster hiring decision that’s EEOC and OFCCP compliant if done within a secure, proprietary environment. A recorded video interview can be reviewed, shared, socialized and most importantly it personalizes the hiring process in a way no other HR tool can today.

So why do some video interview providers pour on this particular brand of FUD? In sports, it’s called misdirection. By getting you to bite on the fake play, the hope is you won’t pay attention to the real one. For example, some of our competitors don’t own their own technology and therefore cannot offer secure recording from within the tool even if they wanted to. Others don’t have the collaboration tools needed to bring value to recording and therefore must play it down. Many take a risky tack by saying on the one hand video interviewing without recording is risk-free but then implying that recording video interviews is not EEOC or OFCCP compliant. Still others prey on companies’ fears that recording the interview will only expose them to undue liability.

To better understand the FUD let’s break each of these objections down.

1. The provider can’t record the interview or they say it’s not secure. Technically, it is possible to record a video interview using external software  if you want to download a 400mb – or larger recording to your desktop.  But that’s not very conducive to sharing and who knows where that file could end up – no wonder they’re concerned about it showing up on YouTube. Oh, and try getting IT or Security to authorize that – if they really understood the security holes inherent in such a solution, no IT or security team would give it a second thought.

With HireVue – none of this is an issue. Our system records automatically to our own servers, streams in, streams out, and has extremely low bandwidth requirements. And as for the security of the recorded HireVue interview:

• It’s encrypted using SSL as well as a few other tricks (proprietary).
• It only plays inside of HireVue and is only accessible to viewers with the proper permissions.
• Standard video ripping services like RealPlayer can’t rip HireVue. Guess what though? They can rip the others without any indication that they’re being recorded. So it’s a very real possibility any candidate with a little tech savvy could record some of our competitor’s interviews while in progress and post the recording before anyone inside the hiring company knows what happened.

2. The provider doesn’t have the tools to bring value to recording. Even if a provider can securely record and play back the interview, forcing HR professionals to jump through hoops to use it in a hiring decision means it probably won’t get used. It’s not the recording that brings value to the hiring process, it’s what you can do with it on the back-end to make better hiring decisions that makes the difference. I would downplay recording too if that were all I had to offer.

3. The provider says it’s not EEOC or OFCCP Compliant. This has nothing to do with recording but everything to do with your processes. Both the EEOC and OFCCP have already debunked this objection saying a recording is just like any other candidate record. You can see the EEOC’s opinion on the subject here. The truth of the matter is that seeing someone’s ethnicity via unrecorded video interview is no different than seeing it on a recording. Just as with any other candidate record, if you improperly use video interviewing in either form during the hiring process, you can get stung. To put it simply, follow the rules and treat the recording like a resume, assessment or any other record you might use to make a hiring decision and it won’t be a problem. In fact, by having recordings of every candidate available to compare against your hiring records, it’s easier to prove that you’re following the rules.

4. The provider says it opens companies up to liability. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at this. Basically what they’re saying is “You know you haven’t trained your managers well enough to do the right thing, and even if you have, there’s always that one that just keeps breaking the rules. You don’t want a recording of that.” Let’s assume they’re right and you do have some rogue managers that aren’t following the rules. Don’t record the interview and they’re still going to break the rules. Recording the interview doesn’t stop that, in fact it might help to deter it if managers know they’re being recorded. Furthermore, if their indiscretion leads to litigation, by recording the interview you’ve got a record that shows what actually happened. It can either be the evidence you need to show the situation was blown out of proportion or be used in conjunction with other internal records and processes to show that your company conducted the proper training and followed the rules. That way if a manager doesn’t follow the rules then the recording might actually be the silver bullet you need to show where the blame should truly rest. HireVue is designed to offer a standardized and consistent approach to video interviewing as the EEOC recommends (see “Video Recordings: Just Another Employment Record”). We can even consult with you to design and implement the internal processes needed to take full advantage of these checks and balances.

The bottom line is this: We wouldn’t be in business for 5+ years now if we did not protect our customers; period. That’s why companies like Taleo are willing to put their reputation on the line by partnering with us and it’s unlikely a reputable publication like Human Resources Executive Magazine ® would have named us HR Product of the Year for our category if they thought HireVue put customers at risk. Here’s more information to compare video job interview providers.

Recorded interviews are an important part of the HireVue offering by design. They’re secure, they can’t be ripped and they’re compliant. But more importantly, paired with the right workflow and collaboration tools they can make the whole interview management and hiring process easier, less costly and in the end far more productive.

Mark Newman, HireVue CEO

mnewman@hirevue.com

In October 2004, Carol Miaskoff, Assistant Legal Counsel for the EEOC published a discussion letter on “Recordkeeping Responsibilities for Electronic Resumes with Video Clips / Employer Knowledge of Ethnicity, Gender, and Disability Prior to Interview.” Below are some of the key elements of this letter.

“… This is in response to your recent correspondence sent through the Department of Labor requesting that the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) provide guidance on the recordkeeping responsibilities of an employer considering electronic resumes with video clips.

… There are two EEOC rules that involve recordkeeping: the Title VII and ADA recordkeeping rule (29 C.F.R. Part 1602); and the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) (29 C.F.R. Part 1607). …

… Under Title VII, it is not illegal for an employer to learn the race, gender or ethnicity of an individual prior to an interview. Of course, Title VII requires that all individuals be provided equal, nondiscriminatory treatment throughout the hiring process. If an employer representative observes a job seeker in a video clip, and either learns or surmises the person’s gender, race, or ethnicity, such knowledge could increase the risk of discrimination or the appearance of discrimination. Employers need to take care in training hiring officials and human resources staff about the appropriate responses when gender, race, or ethnicity are disclosed during recruitment. Video clips might be analogized to information on a resume that clearly tells an individual’s race, such as, “President, Black Law Students Association.” In this situation, as with the video clip, the employer needs to focus on the person’s qualifications for the job.

… If you learn or suspect that an individual has a disability after seeing his/her video clip, you have not violated the inquiry prohibition of the ADA, but you must not use that information to discriminate in hiring…

… an individual would not be an “applicant” simply because a potential employer viewed his video, listened to his audio, or reviewed his resume on the Internet. The individual only would become an “applicant” after he appropriately expressed an interest in a particular position that the employer had acted to fill….”

Read the full letter: EEOC www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2004/titlevii_ada_recordkeeping_video.html

In a recent blog post on ERE’s website the U.S. EEOC’s Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff says to listen up to some basic rules on discrimination and new media. Speaking specifically about video recordings she says, “In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with them. So have feedback from various, diverse sources on your team… Put checks in there so you don’t have one person discriminating.”

Keeping the video recording can make some people squirm because people are concerned about keeping a picture of someone who has been screened out of their company’s hiring process, there is sometimes an added fear of litigation.

“Still, that’s not a good-enough reason,” says Miaskoff. “If you have good documentation in place as to what your process was, you will be able to show you gave everyone fair and equal consideration.”

To read the full post, go here.

HireVue Named HR Product of the Year

Human Resource Executive ® Magazine Names HireVue’s Newest Offering 2009 HR Product of the Year

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – (Business Wire) September 21, 2009 – HireVue, the leading provider of video interviewing solutions, today announced that HireVue 3.0, a video interview management solution, has been named one of the 2009 Top HR Products of the Year by Human Resource Executive ® magazine. Selected from a record number of entries, HireVue was chosen after thorough evaluation by the Human Resource Executive ® editorial staff.

“This is a tremendous honor,” said Mark Newman, CEO and co-founder of HireVue. “HireVue 3.0 is designed to help employers re-think the entire hiring cycle and save time and money while making a better quality hire. This new offering was designed in close collaboration with our customers to give their hiring teams greater flexibility and power to drive results. We’re very proud to accept this award.”

Employers use HireVue to screen candidates with Virtual Video Interviews where the employer defines a set of questions that are answered by the candidate over the Internet via webcam. Clients also use HireVue’s Live Video Interviews to interview candidates via online videoconference. Both types of interviews are recorded and stored in HireVue’s proprietary and secure system for review. Interviews can be taken from any location with an Internet connection and many employers set up on-site video kiosks for high volume hiring. Webcams and technical support are included with every video interview. The HireVue solution can be used directly from www.hirevue.com or through the newly announced integration with Taleo Enterprise.

“Human Resource Executive has been evaluating HR products and conducting this competition for more than 20 years. Our goal has always been to identify products and services that clearly offer value to the HR community while demonstrating innovation, and HireVue does just that,” explained David Shadovitz, editor-in-chief of Human Resource Executive ®. “It takes the hiring process to the next level and greatly simplifies interview management, communication and collaboration while reducing time-to-hire and costs. We’re pleased to honor HireVue as a Top HR Product of the Year for its innovation and the resulting value it provides to today’s human resources professionals.”

HireVue will be presented with the 2009 Top HR Product Award at a special luncheon held on September 30, at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago. HireVue will also be demonstrating its video interviewing platform at the conference, September 30 – October 1 at McCormick Place in Chicago. To schedule a meeting or private demonstration please contact Chris Higbee at 801.415.9485 or e-mail chigbee@hirevue.com. 

About HireVue

Founded in 2004, HireVue is the world’s leading online video-interviewing solution that brings talent in to focus right from the start – cutting down on the time and money it takes to make important hiring decisions.  Today, HireVue is used in over 90 countries around the globe. HireVue’s full service video interviews eliminate travel costs, reduce recruitment time and provide greater candidate insight earlier in the hiring process than ever before. HireVue is used by the world’s most innovative leaders in talent acquisition like the African Development Bank, Google, Dish Network, Rio Tinto, ITT and many others. Led by a veteran team of Human Capital Management experts, HireVue combines superior service with superior solutions to power any video used in the hiring process anywhere in the world.

For more information please visit: www.hirevue.com. For up to the minute news about HireVue, follow HireVue on Twitter here.

September is going to be a huge month for HireVue. It started earlier this week with the announcement that Fortune 500 company DISH Network has selected HireVue as it’s Video Interviewing provider of choice.

HireVue is also now a Taleo Partner and is pre-integrated with Taleo so it’s very easy to activate and this morning we announced that HireVue is available through Taleo’s brand new Solution Exchange – so it’s now super easy for Taleo customers to review the solution before they decide to activate it. We’re the only video interviewing provider available through Taleo Solution Exchange.

I’ve been spearheading this integration pretty much since I joined the company. Taleo has been awesome to work with and I think all the hard work will pay off for our customers. It’s a phenomenal solution and will be enormously valuable to Taleo customers. One of the best things about designing software is when you have the chance to step back from your work and take a look at it from a different perspective to find that it “just works” really well. For those of you who aren’t aware of Solution Exchange, you need to check it out. This is the future of integrated SaaS HR software delivery.

Taleo Talent Grid & Solution Exchange -http://www.taleo.com/LP/The-Talent-Grid/

PRESS RELEASE – HireVue Plugs into Taleo Talent Grid

PRESS RELEASE – Taleo and HireVue Release the Industry’s First …

PRESS RELEASE – DISH Network Selects HireVue to Help Streamline…

Contact us if you are interested in partnering with HireVue. As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions or thoughts.

Chris

chigbee@hirevue.com