Active Interview Blog

Active Interview and one of our customer, OLPC, are featured in today’s edition of The Globe and Mail.

Read the full article here: The video job interview: When your face precedes the face-to-face.

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The virtual interview was the only way Bryan Stuart could keep his non-profit organization’s budget in check when he hired 35 people for One Laptop Per Child’s internship program. It also was much easier to get candidates to submit recorded videos, which he could review at his home office in Wilmington, Ind. whenever he had spare time.

With plans to deploy interns around the world to co-ordinate laptop distribution programs, language skills were critical. While many cited proficiency in multiple languages on their resumes, Mr. Stuart knew there was one way to test those claims: one of the interview questions required applicants to answer in a second language.

That question startled applicant Federico Volio, a student in Atlanta, Ga. who was visiting his family in Costa Rica at the time, but it also impressed him.

“It really just gives you a good impression of how much they care about who you are,” he says.

He rattled off an answer in Spanish with ease which, in part, won him the internship.

”

Hot off the internet press is the newest Amazon Web Services (AWS) case study… and it’s Active Interview!

We’re big fans of Amazon’s amazing cloud services. And like some other exceptional webapps, we use them for much of the underlying infrastructure that powers Active Interview. In our case, AWS is the building block of our video capture, storage and serving features. We were more than happy to participate in a case study for them and are really happy with the final writeup:

Read the full report here: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/active-interview/

Late last year the Aberdeen Group released a study called “Video-Enabled Talent Acquisition: Improving Cost, Quality, and Satisfaction“, which concisely quantified the benefits of video enabled interviewing/screening. Of course, this isn’t really news to us since we’ve been hearing about the benefits from our beta users for the past few months. Nevertheless, if you’re still not convinced by us, let Mollie Lombardi of Aberdeen Group summarize it:

The challenges of talent acquisition will only increase as companies continue to be geographically distributed, skill sets are increasingly specialized, hiring cycles accelerate, and operating budgets are driven down to improve efficiency. To react to this trend, effective use of video can provide a multi-pronged solution to these challenges, through the following:

• Cost reduction. By reducing travel-related costs, environmental impact, and downtime (for both candidates and hiring managers) organizations can reduce the costs of acquiring talent, while simultaneously improving the hiring experience. Reducing barriers to application will increase the number of candidates in the pool and increase the ability for recruiters to reach into new sources of top talent while maintaining or even reducing talent acquisition budgets.
• Expanded talent pools. By eliminating the geographic borders for talent searches, organizations improve their reach to tap into emerging talent pools in other parts of the country or the world. And, as more organizations move to organizational structures that include geographically dispersed teams led by remote managers, both hiring managers and new employees are immersed from the start in a remote work culture as part of the hiring process.
• Time savings. In addition to the dollar cost of reduced travel for interviews, organizations can save time both in the hiring managers schedule, and in the hiring process overall, by allowing for asynchronous interviews, and the ability for multiple people to react to the same interview at different times. It also makes the process more consistent and efficient by allowing all candidates the same process and timeframe to respond to the same questions.
• Corporate fit and employer branding. Managers gain a better sense of candidates by parsing their physical reactions during interviews and experiencing the benefits of eye contact and tone of voice. By doing so, managers are better able to screen for the always elusive “fit” among applicants. Two-way video communications can also give applicants a better sense of the organizational culture and build the employer brand in the eyes of the candidate. Both of these factors contribute to improving first- year retention rates.

Purva Patel, covering the technology beat at the Houston Chronicle, recently reviewed Active Interview in the “Tech Startups” column.

“The idea: Job recruiters and college admissions staff don’t always have the time or money to set up face-to-face interviews with all potential candidates. Active Interview lets them submit written questions that candidates then record answers to via a webcam. Recruiters can score the answers and invite others to review the responses as well.”

Read the entire article here:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/6786584.html