By Mark Newman, HireVue Co-Founder and CEO

The right people on the bus. Every business book, manager, CEO, recruiter – you name it – talks about constantly striving to have “the right people on the bus”, “the A-Team”, “the highest level of talent in the industry”. But what does it all mean?

From a managerial and personal perspective, I am fully convinced that the right talent on your team can make your life better. When you have the right people on your team and you are achieving your goals you can’t help but have a personal high that seems to make everything better. Stress is lower, relationships are strong, results take care of themselves. Think about the best team you have ever been on – can you agree that life in general seemed a bit more positive?

From a customer perspective though, what does the right talent mean? A few examples:

• The nurse who saves a life by averting an infection or drug interaction
• The teacher who gets your child to absolutely fall in love with reading and learning
• The mechanic who catches a life threatening defect in your brake system that someone else missed (happened to me)

The examples are endless. Notice something though; these roles are hardly ever top of mind when people talk about talent. We can all admit it. When most people think about talent (and I hear it constantly when I have conversations with managers), the discussion invariable turns to comments like “this VP is amazing” or “our Head of xyz is an all-star”. In reality though, the quality of your talent is not in the singular role of a manager or department head. The quality of your talent is in the person you think about last. The front line person, the statistic in your organization (e.g., the 5000 call-center people sitting in Duluth), the so called “cog” is actually the true indicator of your quality of talent. On a personal level, a board member recently said to me “you guys are growing fast, you need more people, life is hard and stressful because there is so much going on, but it will be worse if you settle and bring on the wrong people.” We are small compared to most of you but the requirement is the same. Every company who uses HireVue expects the best. Our people need to be the best. Your customers (students, buyers, companies, consumers, patients – you name it) need you to be the best. It pays off personally though too.

In the current economy, quality and cultural fit of talent has been the key differentiator in determining success. The companies with the right people in place at all levels are the ones who adapted, improved, managed, grew, developed, and survived. However, it’s not about the right VP or the right CEO (these help) but it’s about the right store manager, the right nurse, the right teacher, the right customer service representative. Our economy is improving (all indicators are pointing that way at least), and when times are flush standards can slip when it comes to hiring in large numbers. The key is to make no excuses and to not settle for mediocrity. The requirement to find the person that makes you better, makes the company better, and who will be so engaged that they will go to the ends of the earth to serve you and your customer should not change. One thing I’ve noticed over the last year is just how selective managers have been when it comes to interviews and hiring compared to earlier times – that’s not a bad thing and it will be important to keep it up.

I hope you are having a successful 2010 thus far. As we grow we want to ensure we have the right people on board and constantly want your feedback as to our results. For you, we will go to the ends of the earth to make sure we do everything we can to help you find the right talent. It’s not just for your company’s results (although we always want to contribute to improving those!) – I’m fully convinced that if we help you find the right people we can make your life better too. Yes I do drink our Kool-Aid, but it’s not just about delivering video interviews, it’s about changing the lives of the candidates who interview and the managers who hire.

Thank you for your constant support. As always, please tell me if there is anything that I can do for you.

Sincerely,

Mark

This article also appeared in this month’s issue of THE VUE, HireVue’s monthly newsletter. To sign up, go to the HireVue home page and scroll down to the newsletter sign up on the right.

Sarah White, HRMDirect

Without great employees even companies with the best products can struggle to be successful. But in the mix of all of those resumes and names that come through your door, how do you actually measure candidate quality? Measuring candidate quality can be broken down into three distinct parts of the hiring process:

1) Pre-Screening
2) Interviewing
3) Post Interview

The pre-screening phase is one of the most critical and where untrained recruiting teams (and poorly designed process) often miss high potential candidates.   In this phase, the actual measurement is frequently managed in a much more quantitative way through Applicant Tracking systems or other tools that do pre-employment screening, the dreaded “knock-out” questions or through a series of more open ended interview style questions.  While these pre-screening methods are effective, and relatively proven – they can leave the door open to over look high-potential candidates or those that would have highly transferable skills. That’s why whenever possible I recommend more interactive pre-screening methods including phone screens and especially the virtual type video interviews that allow hiring teams to see candidate’s thinking on their feet as their responses to those pre-defined knock-out questions are recorded and stored for review. Companies like HireVue have made this extremely simple and cost effective.

The second phase, the Interviewing phase, is where the actual candidate quality can be determined.  It is where you can see (or hear) a candidates passion for your organization and the position, see the cultural fit for yourself and determine a match.  It is where you can truly learn about the success and failures they have had – and how they learned from each of them.  It is the most important part of the process and also the most time consuming. The power of a solution like HireVue is that it actually allows you to reach a wider set of candidates with less manpower behind the process and lets the recruiting team focus on evaluating the quality of a person’s answers on a particular topic or question in an effective and efficient way.

The final phase, the post-interview phase, was traditionally thought of as the most reliable when it came to determining candidate quality.  Unfortunately, many companies have stopped the practice of speaking freely about past employees and candidates have learned to share only the very best of their references with a company.   In cases where a reference does speak negatively – other questions have to be addressed – was it a bad company/job fit, was there a personality conflict, are there other extenuating circumstances that would explain why your star candidate wasn’t a star at 1 of his last 3 companies?

Even for companies who follow this process measuring quality can be pretty subjective since it depends so much on your company culture, the needs of the job and the expectations of the hiring manager. At the end of the day, making a successful hire means depending on your people. To do this, you need to make sure to give them every opportunity to bring their knowledge and experience to bear in every stage of the hiring process without crushing them under the weight of the work. I see video playing an enormous part in that over the coming years. It allows your hiring teams to see more, evaluate quicker and at a higher level of accuracy and, if coupled with the right tools, collect feedback and gain consensus far more efficiently. Video tools can be enormously helpful, but they will never replace the highly skilled recruiter. They are the actual moving parts of the company that get things done, win the wins and manage your culture.

Sarah White is Chief Strategy Officer for HRMDirect . She is also well known for her Human Capital blog I’m So Corporate where she writes about everything from HR strategy to Employee Relations and everything in between. You can follow Sarah on Twitter @ImSoSarah.

This article also appeared in this month’s issue of THE VUE, HireVue’s monthly newsletter. To sign up, go to the HireVue home page and scroll down to the newsletter sign up on the right.

by Josh Schwede, VP Business Development, HireVue

There’s a lot of buzz of late around using video interviews in the recruiting process. Sure, talking to candidates via webcam over the Internet provides a ton of cost savings. Plus it really helps shorten time-to-hire on the right candidates. But what happens once the interview is over?  Nothing…unless you conducted the interview. What about the others on the hiring team who have input into the hire?

This is why having a platform that records your video job interviews is so valuable. It allows the hiring team to see the same thing as the interviewer and allows the hiring team to collaborate.

You know what is even cooler?  REAL candidate comparison. At HireVue, we offer our 1-way Virtual Interviews in addition to 2-way Live Interviews. Our clients typically use the Virtual product after a phone screen, but before an interactive interview (over the Internet or face to face). The Virtual Interview is done on a broader set of candidates (approx 7-10) where all of the candidates answer the same set of questions, which are configured by our clients. When the candidate completes the Virtual Interview, it is available in HireVue for the hiring team to review.

This is where the “Killer App” of Video Interviewing lies. Let’s say there are a couple of key competencies or skills that are needed for a particular job opening. Our clients use the HireVue Virtual Interview to ask those questions. Because candidate’s responses are recorded, they can be easily compared using the comparison tools within HireVue. With one click, the reviewer can stay on that same question, but listen to each candidate’s answer. This is REAL candidate comparison and is almost impossible to replicate in normal interviewing cycles. Using HireVue’s Candidate Comparison and Evaluation tools allow the hiring team to get a deep perspective on candidates and really make it easier to decide which candidate should advance in the process.

This is exactly why HireVue exists today…and why companies that use video job interviews are so passionate about our offerings.