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.

1/15/2010 – By Dave Zielinski

Below is an excerpt from a recent SHRM article discussing the adoption of Video Interviewing technology. HireVue is discussed prominently.

Melissa McMahon, senior director of talent acquisition for CDW, a technology services firm in Vernon Hills, Ill., knew something had to be done to reduce the time managers were committing to first-round evaluations of candidates.

That growing responsibility was eating into their bread and butter, which was developing strategy, selling product and coaching their sales teams.

“We were flying our top four or five candidates in for interviews, and it was literally taking a full day or more of our sales managers’ time,” McMahon says. Not only that, but each interview for new sales associates was ringing up close to $1,000 in candidate travel costs.

So McMahon turned to a solution that’s gained increased favor among human resource leaders—the one-way recorded video interview. Working with vendor HireVue, McMahon created a system where job candidates can log onto a web site and answer a series of prerecorded interview questions while speaking into a webcam. CDW sales managers later log on to the site, review the video interviews and determine which of the candidates to bring in for face-to-face interviews.

… Read the full SHRM Video Interview Article. Or call us at 1.800.655.4106 for more information.

Mark Newman, HireVue Co-Founder and CEO

HireVue’s CEO was recently interviewed by FastCompany Magazine for an article on the rapidly growing use of video interviewing services. We’ve included an excerpt here and a link to the full article.

Enjoy!

Webcam Interviews: How to Survive and Thrive

By: Patrick J. Kiger

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a strong resume and sterling qualifications could have easily landed you a face-to-face meeting with a hiring manager. Today, if your electronic resume passes muster with a company’s keyword search algorithm, you may find yourself trying to make a good impression not in person, but via Webcam from your living room.

Discouraged? Don’t be. With a few tricks drawn from the videographer’s trade, you’ll be armed with the tools you need to keep your foot firmly planted in the door.

Even before the downturn, recruiters had started using online video interviews as a way to speed up and systematize the hiring process. But what was once viewed as trendy gadgetry is now increasingly seen as a tool for slashing recruiters’ expenses.

Continue Reading on FastCompany.com…

If you haven’t had the chance to hear Kevin Wheeler talk about the most recent trends shaping Recruiting and Talent Management you’re missing out. His insight on Gen Y values becoming mainstream is right on the money in my opinion. Our customers experience this every day as they hear how much Gen Y appreciates their respect for their time and communication style.  You should also hear what Kevin has to say about virtual interviewing. I understand Kevin is doing a number of webinars on the subject over the next few weeks so keep your eyes open and in the meantime, take a peek at his slide deck on Slideshare – Here’s the link – http://bit.ly/5UNIQA.

Kristin Grassaro from NAS Communication gave the following scenario:

Scenario: A HR Director told me she had a parent call and harass her about why her child did not get a specific job. The HR Director politely told the parent that she’d be more than happy to discuss with the applicant if they wanted to give her a call. The parent insisted on knowing why and that they would pass the information on to their child. How would you handle it from here?

How would I respond? No hire, No way – Frankly, I’m ashamed -

There can’t be any playing into it – what happens when the person has a bad day at work? What about when they don’t do their job well and think they are going to get fired? What about if a boss yells at them for something? Is there parent going to call? Is there going to be a parent-boss-child conference?

I’m not far removed from this age group (I was pretty fortunate to graduate when I was 20) and I wouldn’t ever expect anyone to do this. I would never hire and will never hire someone who’s parents call me to check in because obviously that is someone who must be questioned as to their effectiveness and I firmly believe that. I believe it shows zero accountability, zero independence, zero initiative and a lack of maturity.

Let me give you an example – I am a Boy Scout leader and a number of Scouts each year decide to do Eagle Projects to achieve the highest rank. We have a firm policy that the Scout needs to be the one who takes a initiative and is the one who makes the phone calls they need to make, do what they need to do and take the leadership position in getting their project signed off and completed. If a parent calls for anything (we don’t care that the Scouts are 13-16), no deal and we don’t do anything for them. People know this now and part of preparation and growing up is doing things for yourself and we hope our Scouts are learning something in that regard.

In other countries a job choice is a family decision – China, India – you spend as much time conveying information (hopefully just through the candidate) to the family about why they should work with your firm but in the U.S. it’s not a family choice or decision it’s babysitting, spoiling and what you call “special” I call ridiculous (and a few other words). I guess the safe thing to do is say “this is confidential information between us and (name) so have them call me” but I think the best thing to do is not hire the person period.

I seem to be getting flack for this – what do you think? What would you do? Am I way off base here?

Fortune had a very interesting article today in regards to the P in the A’s my generation is. (Thanks Todd Raphael)

–Mark Newman

A great article today in Dealbook discussing MBA interviews today in Silicon Valley and other places:

Answering the Unanswerable: Tips for that First Interview

To tell you the truth I know we have seen some of our clients use these types of questions in HireVue before and it’s been very effective for them and you can definitely tell which firms will ask these and which won’t. Frankly, I think that for most of these questions people want to see passion from the candidates in answering these questions. You can easily find arrogance, logic, pressure, stress, and aggressiveness when getting the response and depending on the firm it could be a good way to evaluate fit.

-Mark Newman

Dave wrote an excellent article about video in the hiring process on ERE.

Since moving on from Jobster it looks like he is doing some consulting and I would have to say that there aren’t many better people out there to help you figure out your HR/Recruiting needs.

Here is a link to the article

–Mark

Thanks for the love Raghav!

We ourselves have been trying to figure out the best way to summarize the difference between “us” and “them” (i.e. video resumes) and Raghav hits it right on the head when me talks about structured vs. unstructured.

Click to see the article

Mark

With our mentioning in Time, the question always arises as to how video in the hiring process can lead to major discrimination problems. Unless you are involved with video resumes where you as a company or provider have no control over the content, distribution or anything like that associated with the video resume, you can have safeguards in place to actually improve your compliance. Video interviews, like those offered by HireVue, offer companies a way to keep control of the interview process and at the same time reap the benefits of video in your hiring process.

Over the last three years we have been vetted, screened and asked questions by our customers both very big and very small about how we work within EEOC and OFCCP compliance. When those words come into play there is always the HR shiver of worry. After going through the rounds with numerous customers, we have found that there are main things that HireVue offers in helping our clients with their compliance:

1) Standardized Interviews – A HireVue is completely standardized across your position as all candidates are asked the same questions. Clients build the interviews themselves so it is very easy for HR to have a hand in helping create the right HireVue with the right questions and eliminate the variability found with most interviewing scenarios.

2) Elimination of the sports team and fishing trip talk – Whether you are friend, a salesman or in our case a candidate, everyone has gone into someone’s office seen a picture on a wall from a vacation, a trophy, a sports team shrine, something that starts a conversation. The “Oh wow that’s quite the fish, where did you catch that” conversation is the first thing many people do when going into an interview. As a recruiter looking for feedback, after spending 30 minutes with a candidate your manager comes up to you and says “they were great, bring them in for round 2″ when you ask about their skills the manager says “oh yeah, they have them” when in reality all they talked about was the Broncos, fishing in Key West, vacationing in Mexico or their favorite animal (me when I worked at my zoo job in college).

3) Proactivity in your compliance – What happens when you get audited by legal or you get a letter from the great EEOC or OFCCP notifying you of a complaint? What are you to do? What happens when a certain manager is singled out for being inappropriate or for not hiring the right people? Usually that means a lot of sifting through old records and files trying to piece together everything going on, determine who is right in the “he said, she said” war and trying to go back through time to figure everything out. What if on a regular basis, you could go into your interviews and see what the manager’s all see? What if you could compare and evaluate candidates on the same level as your managers by being able to readily compare and contrast candidates against each other? We have found that when you are able to evaluate candidates through a dashboard like the HireVue Evaluator, you can easily determine (even without specific knowledge of function) who the best candidate is for the position. Does a certain manager always advance people based on certain discriminatory characteristics? What if you could catch that quickly, easily and before there’s a problem and have discussion with your colleague? What’s that worth to your organization?

A number of legal related bloggers have weighed in on the topic -

George’s Employment Blawg

HR Tests

And always reliable ERE Discussion groups here and here (login may be required)

A company can get sued for anything. If someone blatantly discriminates, it will happen with paper resumes, video resumes, video interviews, video conferencing, in person interviews, anywhere. The key is being able to be proactive in fighting discrimination, incorporate safeguards into your process to try to limit discrimination and promote a corporate culture that is intolerant of discrimination.

HireVue helps.

Guess what! Time Magazine has written an article about video in the hiring process!

A number of great companies were covered in the article, notably HIREVUE, Vault.com, YouTube, Jobster, 62ndview (get it, it took me a while – funny huh, from RecuitTV) and ResumeVideo. Supposedly they are all broadly launching this Spring!
Here’s the article – “It’s a Wrap. You’re Hired!”

Jason Goldberg blogged about it too.

The article was great (of course we would love to see a feature about how we are trying to take over the video interviewing world and have been doing it for a couple of years) and we look forward to more articles about the space, especially about video interviews.

One thing though that Lisa found and wrote about in her blog which we know already about video resumes:

As research for this article I just wrote on the rise of the video résumé, I set out to create my own. When I started reporting, I had assumed there must be a whole cottage industry of videographers, makeup artists and editors making hey of this surging new trend. Sure enough, when I Googled it, I came up with dozens of companies offering their services.

But when I started calling, I found most were out of business.

One videographer who advertised video résumé-making services on his website picked up the phone. Eric Wolfram started to laugh as soon as I explained my mission. He put his website up in 2004, he says. Since then, he’s had exactly no calls–that is, except for the five in the past few months, all from journalists wanting to do stories on video résumés

Thanks Lisa Cullen at TIME!! You’re a star in our book!!

–Mark Newman