Active Interview Blog

Fantastic study from PwC – “Have talent constraints impacted your company’s growth and profitability over the past 12 months in the following ways?”

1,258 CEOs responded with the following:

43% – Our talent-related expenses rose more than expected
31% – We weren’t able to innovate effectively
29% – We were unable to pursue a market opportunity
24% – We cancelled or delayed a key strategic initiative
24% – We couldn’t achieve growth forecasts in overseas markets
24% – We couldn’t achieve growth forecasts in the country where we are based
21% – Our production and/or service delivery quality standards fell

Read the full study here: http://humancapitalleague.com/Home/22153

Great article in the WSJ yesterday outlining the desire that hiring organizations have around identifying candidates better. At the least, in a way better than a resume would provide.

read more here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203750404577173031991814896.html

A lot of you have asked for a way to include text-only questions, and now you can! We’re now letting you mix text and video questions into one interview questionnaire. The default is still video, so you just have to specify which questions should only allow text answers. See screenshots below.

First, expand the Options link under each question and check the box to make the question only accept text answers.

When the candidate reaches this question, they will only see a text box – no video required. In the candidate management dashboard, there’s now an icon specifying the type of answer (top is text answer, bottom is video answer):

This feature is already deployed and ready for use today – give it a try! If you’re not yet a customer, get started today for free and stay tuned for more great features coming soon!

How To Fail A Job Interview – Watch more Funny Videos

We often hear our customers ask “What if my candidates don’t have a webcam”? Our standard reply used to be that since Active Interview is a video based interviewing tool, they must have a webcam to participate. Not anymore.

We’re happy to introduce a feature that many customers have asked for: automated phone interviews. Now, if a candidate doesn’t have a web-cam or are experiencing problems configuring their machine, they have the option of continuing with a phone-based interview (a text-only option is also available).

In the phone-based interview, candidates call in to our toll free number, where the questionnaire will be read to them one question at a time. The candidates’ answers are recorded and uploaded to our servers. The recruiting team can then listen to the answers right from their Active Interview management console, just like they would with video answers.

Click through to hear the results of an example phone interview:

http://cglee.activeinterview.com/share/3218caa05965512061cb3d8b85

For our existing customers, no action is necessary to activate this – it’s available immediately to all your candidates. This is just one of many features in the pipeline, so stay tuned to this blog or our Twitter for updates!

Even back then, they could have used Active Interview.

“It’s going to be a long day people.”

We’re big fans of 37signals and of Jason Fried, especially their philosophy on product development, customer service and branding. So we were naturally very pleasantly surprised to see Jason’s latest article in Inc magazine talk about hiring, and specifically, the problem with resumes.

We built Active Interview precisely because we hated dealing with resumes. The pain of sifting through stacks of similar looking resumes and then coordinating follow up phone or face to face interviews leaves much to be desired. This process takes up so much time, and in the end, we can’t even be sure whether we are interviewing the most outstanding candidates, or the ones who only looked best on paper.

Jason proposes several other factors to focus on instead of examining resumes:

• Cover letter and writing ability
• Effort put in to land the job
• Candidate asks the right questions
• Try out the candidates for a period

All the points listed are great, but I think they are all getting at an underlying issue: get a better feel for the candidate. Again, this is precisely why we built Active Interview – to allow decision makers to quickly get a solid feel about many candidates in the shortest amount of time. With recorded video screenings, hiring managers can quickly determine all the candidates’:

• General communication ability
• Body language and style
• Develop a feel for the candidate

Jason also goes on to say hire the best, regardless of geography. Again, we couldn’t agree more. Active Interview gives you the ability to quickly get a feel for candidates worldwide. Just ask our beta customer, One Laptop Per Child, who processed over 150 candidates worldwide, from Austin to Africa.

So we agree with Jason – forget about resumes!

There’s a new article over at Campus Technology which talks about how 3 universities (Tufts, Washington College, and George Mason) are using technology to enhance and transform their admissions process. We’ve built Active Interview with admissions specifically in mind, so I’ll outline below how Active Interview can help with each of these school’s goals mentioned in the article.

• Tufts University – is using video to replace one of their admission essays. Several of our customers are using Active Interview in this exact manner. Students love this since it allows them to skip yet another admissions essay, increasing the likelihood of them applying. On the other end, admissions staff get to know the students at a much deeper level over paper applications. This also alleviates some of the guessing game about cheating on the admissions essays. Lastly, video interviews are a great way to assess language proficiency for ESL and international students.
• Washington College – is using social networks to boost its online presence, adding a newsletter, and engaging with prospective students on sites like Facebook. On top of that, Washington College is also exploring the use of prospective student videos and going paperless when assessing candidates. While Active Interview can’t help with increasing an organization’s social network, AI can help with video screening and going paperless. For admissions departments, AI has an extensive candidate management system which allows admissions staff to score, comment, and rank applicants. The AI candidate management system is team-based, allowing all members of a department to help assess prospective students, thus standardizing interview results. As a final output, Active Interview lets you generate a PDF summary of all the applicants, with all of their corresponding scores, comments and rankings. Save the PDF elsewhere, or come back to Active Interview any time to view the applicant responses.
• George Mason University – is embracing all manners of technology to boost its interaction with prospective students, including social networks, online video, emails exchanges, etc. At the end of the day, however, George Mason is about trying to find a way to distinguish itself with prospective students. Active Interview allows universities to distinguish themselves in a couple of ways: 1) it simplifies the application process when used to replace one of the admissions essays, and 2) it signals to prospective students that while the admissions staff can’t interview everyone, they are sincerely concerned with getting to know the applicants as more than an application form.

Once again, we built Active Interview with admissions departments in mind, so if you are an admissions officer or department, get in touch with us today to see how Active Interview can help you! Or, if you have any suggestions or feedback for us, we’re all ears!

You can reach us at info@activeinterview.com.

After months of testing and feedback from our beta users, a couple of weeks ago we finally exited beta and at the same time finalized our pricing plans.

We built Active Interview to solve the pain we ourselves lived through when we acted as hiring managers at previous companies, so we think we’re well in tune with the time and money cost associated with recruiting and finding top talent.  Phone screening candidates, flying them in, spending a day having the team interviewing them… it all has a real cost which can easily add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Our rates start out at $5 per candidate, and goes down from there with higher usage subscription plans.  At our enterprise plan, viewing a candidate response is as little as $1. Our goal at Active Interview is to bring the time-saving benefits of video interviewing to everyone.

Here’s a breakdown of our plans:

Note: the above is an image, click here to see the pricing page.

Why are we able to charge so little while our competitors charge so much?

We’ve purposefully built a business around technology, not a sales team.  Go ahead and search on some of our competitors.  All those salespeople need salaries and that cost is passed on to you, the customers, in the form of higher prices. At Active Interview, we’re technologists and problem solvers – not sales guys. Each and every person works on the product and makes it better, saving us money and allowing us to focus on making Active Interview the best product regardless of price.

We take advantage of cloud computing. All our backend is based on the battle-tested and ultra-scalable Amazon Web Services. If you trust Amazon when you buy books, then you can trust us – we use Amazon EC2, S3, and EBS to ensure your data is delivered fast, backed up, and secured on the most robust cloud computing platform out there. Oh yea, it also lets us save money on servers by paying for only what we use, which translates to a lower price for our customers.  To read more about the benefits of Amazon Web Services in more gory detail, see:
http://aws.amazon.com/what-is-aws/

Our business philosophy:

• Ride the wave!
  As technologist, we love bringing new software products to the masses.  We believe video interviewing is at the cusp of being adopted by mainstream recruiting and admissions organizations.  With web cams becoming a more prevalent commodity, and as an entirely new generation of workers grow up with web video technology, Active Interview is well positioned to ride the coming wave of video apps that solve business problems.
• What does “enterprise ready” mean anyways?
  Our goal is not to create a product that is “enterprise ready”, whatever that means!  We create scalable products for real people to solve real world issues.  In our experience, “enterprise ready” is code for “long sales cycle”, “2 year contracts”, annoying training courses and service fees.  We serve real customers, not just the Fortune 100 or HR departments with ‘use it or lose’ it budget. Therefore, we streamlined Active Interview to be a democratic technology, available for both large and small organization.  You pay for what you use and can sign up and use the product in 60 seconds. No contracts, cancel anytime, reasonable transparent prices and free trials – for everyone.
• “Call for more info” is lame!
  Ever visit a web service and you click on “start now”, which is just an email form?  We think it’s a red flag when a company doesn’t put their product front and center, empowering the customer by letting them study screenshots, pricing, feature lists and even test drive it.

Our transparency reflects that philosophy.  If you search on our competitors, you won’t find a registration link or any mention of prices.

All our prices are openly published and anyone can register to immediately start using Active Interview. Try it now – all our plans get one month of free usage, and our free trial allows for an ongoing 2 free interview each month.  But if you need more, just drop us a line.  We want everyone to experience how much better a video interview than phone interviews and stacks of resumes.

Another hotly requested feature is getting rolled out today!  Upload your own organizations logo in the “manage this org” page and the logo will show up through-out the webapp.  This means your organizations logo shows up both internally (to the reviewers/manager) and Externally (to candidates that go through the screening process).

Below are some screenshots of “Acme Corporations” newly customized Active Interview account.

And don’t forget, you still get your own sub-domain to create a fully immersed experience for your candidates.  Candidates will see the organization’s name (in this case “Acme”) in the URL as “acme.activeinterview.com”, and the Acme logo is top-left.