Active Interview Blog

To our customers,

We’re happy to announce that two weeks ago we deployed Active Interview’s first official non-beta release, and are now officially open for business!  We’d like to thank all our beta customers who tested the technology, provided us with performance info from all corners of the globe, and helped us improve scalability, usability and stability.

Here are some fun facts about Active Interview to date:

AI has helped evaluate candidates for: software sales, marketing positions, school admissions, non-profit advocacy, language assessment, software development and scholarships (to name just a few).
• AI has conducted virtual interviews in 52 countries!
AI is localized in 4 languages, with more to come soon (drop us a line if you are really itching for a particular language).
• Our application availability during beta was 99.8% (stats from New Relic)

Graduating from beta stage won’t mean any rest for us, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Stay tuned for more features, constant upgrades, improvements, etc.

As a token of appreciation to our early adopters, we’ve converted beta accounts to accounts with complimentary (free) interview credits.  If you have feedback or feature requests, please email us at info@activeinterview.com !

Chris & Sandeep
- Active Interview

Recent article from TIME magazine on the trend towards video interviewing / screening:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1930838,00.html

Many prep tips for prospective candidates who may find themselves participating in an Active Interview.

We recently heard an interesting comment from Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, on the hiring process (courtesy of bigthink.com):

“One of the things that is really, really hard to do is to hire people… to go through that process.

So if we put a job ad up… we say ‘looking for a new designer’… we’ll literally get hundreds and hundreds of résumés.  At that point you’re screwed.  I don’t know how to go though hundreds of résumés.  I can’t collaborate on these résumés with other people in my company.  I can’t have my designers look at these résumés and leave their feedback on them.

There are a few tools out there that help you through that process… but I think that’s kind of a mess too.  So that’s an area I think can be better.”

Check out minute 17:

Active Interview are big fans of the entire 37signals product suite, and take their design and product creation philosophies to heart.  For any product creators out there, “Getting Real” is a must read.

So we were pretty stoked to hear Jason identify the exact problem we ourselves have encountered and want to solve.  Hundreds of resumes do suck… and the lack of collaboration during hiring / recruiting is frustrating.

Jason:  take Active Interview for a spin next time you are looking to hire at 37signals!

Active Interview launched into beta in December of 2009, and since that date we’ve seen enormous usage, interest and future potential in the platform. Most everyone we pitch the web based video interviewing idea to responds with a “wow… I could use that.”

Anecdotes aside, the real proof is in the pudding… or in this case the analytics.  In roughly three months, AI has helped conduct candidate screenings in ~22 countries/terrorities across the world.  Needless to say, this has us incredibly motivated to keep innovating and scaling our product.

Our analytics - Filtered by Candidates - Feb 7th, 2010

What makes us most excited is having customers use Active Interview for scenarios we never originally anticipated.  One of our larger customers is using AI to evaluate language skills as part of their hiring process.  What better way to make sure you are getting someone with appropriate language skills than to view them on video, responding in the language needed?

We just captured this snapshot of usage (5:57pm CST):

Thanks to Chartbeat for the real-time analytics!

Hello world!   more info coming soon….