There are so many reasons that employers should be making use of video interviewing in 2013. But, the most important reason is that we are dealing with a highly mobile and time pressurized candidate marketplace and to effectively engage with it, employers need to be offering more flexible interviewing options such as out of hours interviewing and 1^st round video interviewing.

Gone are the days when you just had one well known video interviewing option to choose from; now there are a range of sophisticated video interviewing options in the market-place, which seem to fall into two categories. These are the live video interviewing tools which you are all probably aware of and the recorded video interviewing services which have now cornered their own section of the market.

Recorded video interviewing  is an exciting new service and an evolution on traditional live video interviewing where candidates video record responses to interview questions and send them to you for perusal at a later time. We thought it would be a good time to review taketheinterview.com, one of the most prominent recorded interview tools on the market.

taketheinterview.com in a nutshell

While they offer a ‘live video interview offering’, taketheinterview.com is primarily in the market for recorded video interviewing. In a nutshell, this systems allows employers to send out  interview questions to multiples candidates, who can record/video their answers. Once the candidate has finished answering, their video response is automatically uploaded to the system and indexed so they can be easily rated and shared between the hiring team. The whole process is of course facilitated by the software making it highly automated.

How easy it to use from the employer side?

The good news is that taketheinterview.com has a clean, well thought out and well designed interface. After uploading or entering candidates into the system, recruiters are presented with a simple interface. They can create a position within the system and then they can quickly  create interview questions for the role using their bank of 5,000 cross industry questions or they can custom build their own questions. Questions can be made to require  text or video based responses and there are several other neat settings for responses such as how long they have to answer, deadlines for responses and reminders etc…

Having prepared your interview questions, its very easy to then send out invites to your shortlisted candidates. And before you know it, you have a whole database  full of video recorded interview responses. This is recruiting made easy. The system makes it easy to watch, compare, comment on and rate the video responses and they can be quickly shared with hiring managers and other recruiters, using the ‘share button’. The whole system is brought together in a digital dashboard where you can review the status of each video recording and control your entire marketing campaign and responses.

But, is it easy for candidates to use? The other part of the equation has to be the candidate experience. The good news is that taketheinterview.com is user friendly from the candidate side. After receiving the video interview invite link, candidates arrive at taketheinterview.com and are greeted by a short employer branding video of your choice which you have prepared and uploaded. You can also include a custom text greeting/introduction. After this the system steers the candidate through the video interview. A really nice touch is that there is practice component which takes the candidate through a process of setting up the webcam and making sure that the audio visual presentation is of the highest standard. Candidates can record their video responses, play them back and redo them until they are happy. Its a very usable video interview tool that enables candidates to get the best out of themselves and present themselves in the best manner possible.

And what’s the price? TaketheInterview.com has a flexible pricing model based on the number of video interviews you use a month. Prices start at around $200 a month and go up to about $5,000 a month for enterprises This may be a little hard to swallow for some of the smaller businesses, but I would urge employers to consider the potential efficiency savings that can be made from using video interviewing in place of more traditional 1^st round screening practices when considering the price of any video interviews system.

All in all, taketheinterview.com is an excellent tool for adding a flexible, costing saving, and time saving video interview process to your talent attraction process.

Have experiences?  Share them with us!

Kazim Ladimeji is a featured writer for RecruitingTools and a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and has been a practicing HR professional for 14 years. Kazim is the Director of thecareercafe.co.uk: a resource for start-ups, small business and job seekers. You can visit Kazim’s website: thecareercafe.co.uk here.

Although social media generates a lot of great hiring activity, it also generates a lot of noise and for many employers it is bordering on information overload, meaning employers and recruiters are swamped with activity and potentially missing out on key updates and activity.

In order to help employers and recruiters (and anyone using social media for intensive brand marketing), a range of social media management tools have come on to the market – and we have highlighted five of the best of breed tools below.

1. SproutSocial  is a powerful social media management tool which centralizes your social media activity into one powerful control panel. From this control panel, you can easily post and schedule your messages on Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In, and you can view all your Twitter, Facebook and  Linked-In messages and updates through a centralized single stream in-box.

You can also monitor what people are saying about your employer brand and jobs using the keyword monitoring tool and it also has powerful analytics capabilities which measures the success, reach and impact of your various campaigns across social media, all from one platform.

If you have a hiring team then Sprout Social has collaboration features which enable you to easily allocate work to team members, who can also collaborate with each other in the system. Sprout is a powerful social media management tool and a great addition to any busy recruitment team. It comes with a 30 day free trial with pricing ranges from $39 per user per month up to $99 per user per month – and so quite affordable.  Check it out

2.Hootsuite.   This is one of the most well known and popular social media management tools which enables you to centralize your incoming and outgoing social media information and message stream all through one platform. Hootsuite allows you to incorporate and manage 8 social media systems: Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Linked-In, Foursquare, WordPress, Myspace, and Mixi. This means it is as close as you can get to a one stop shop for social media management. It has all the usual features like message scheduling, analytics and collaborative tools, but it also integrates with Google Analytics and Facebook insights and enables Geo Targeting of your social media campaigns. Hootsuite is free for up to 1 user and $8.99 for an additional users and there is a enterprise package which is priced upon request.  Free Trial

3.Sendible.  This is another powerful social media management platform which allows you to centralize social media activity from the main players of Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, Google +, Foursquare, YouTube, WordPress along with many other social media systems you may be using.  Sendible is another powerful one stop shop which start at $9.99 a month going up to $499 a month. This product may be more geared towards the enterprise end of the market, however.

4.Crowdbooster. The strength of the three tools above is undoubtedly that they allow you tap into the big three of Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter. Crowdbooster is also a powerful social media management tool, but it only supports Twitter and Facebook. So, why are we recommending it? The beauty of this tool is the analytics component, which not only allows you to measure real time tweets, retweets, replies, impressions, likes etc…it also provides recommendations to help the less data minded to make sense of and act on the data. It is a good soft landing for those to enter the social media management sphere. It comes with a 30 day trial and very affordable pricing plan starting from $9 a month, going up to $99 a month.

5.Social Flow. This is another social media management tool which has as much emphasis on the analysis (predictive analytics) as much as the social media management. Social flow has developed its own predictive analytics algorithmn which can determine the best time for you to publish or advertise in order to maximize customer engagement. It can automatically send the tweets out at these optimal times. It is priced at $99 a month which may mean it is not that affordable for small business.

Social media remains the buzz and managing it is becoming not just a learning curve, but part of everyday business.  If you have not tried one of these tools yet, what are you waiting for?

With sector specific talent shortages showing no sign of relenting, and with the candidate market becoming more social media and mobile integrated, it could not be a better time for hiring functions to focus their budgets in the direction of a shiny new ATS to help streamline their hiring processes and to help bring their hiring practices seamlessly into the modern era.

To help any of you who may be in the market for your first ATS or maybe a replacement ATS, we have provided a list of 10 of the best ATS on the market today, in no specific order.

1.Bull Horn ATS and CRM; This is a market leading web based ATS which allows you to post jobs to your social network and jobs boards at the click of a button and which can also generate candidate shortlists from your social media connections. It helps you spot passive job seekers too and has  inbuilt employee referrals functionality.

2.SuccessFactors. This is a fully functional web based ATS. It contains powerful search and shortlisting functionality, along with the ability to automatically post to job boards. It also contains an interview question library and easily integrates with SuccessFactors workforce analytics software.

3.Kenexa 2X Brassring. This is a highly sophisticated ATS geared towards multinational organizations of over 5,000 staff. As you can imagine, it is a powerhouse of functionality which supports recruiters throughout the entire talent acquisition process.

4.ZohoRecruit. this is a great ATS for start-up organizations as it is free for 1 recruiter and has all the basic functionality of an ATS. After that it is $19 per recruiter per month. It is a powerful and extremely economical ATS for the start-up and small business.

5.iCims. this another best of breed ATS covering the full talent acquisition process and it enables you to not only post on jobs boards but to also search social media to identify candidates and incorporate them into the system. This product is aimed at mid market and up.

6.Resumator. This is another excellent full cycle ATS which is well suited to the small to medium size business market and is suitable for companies with less then 1,000 staff. It has flexible monthly pricing, meaning it can be used by start-ups and small businesses. It has good social media integration and comes with an inbuilt employee referral program tool.

7.Taleo.This is an enterprise ATS that is geared towards large organizations. They have a Business Edition product for firms with up to 5,000 staff, an Enterprise Edition for firms with 5,000 to 13,000 staff and a Large Enterprise Edition for firms with over 13,000 staff. Has all the bells and whistles. Includes social sharing functionality and mobile access integration.

8.Compass. This is an entirely web based, full cycle ATS built by recruiters for recruiters, although there is a staffing agency edition and a corporate edition and suits companies of all sizes but possibly more geared toward to the small to medium sized market.

9.Smart Search. This is a ATS and staffing management solution suitable for agency and in-house corporate use and is once again aimed at the small to medium sized company

10.Ascentis This is a fully featured and highly flexible applicant tracking system which has a careers portal, social sharing, candidate data analysis and even on-boarding. It is simple and easy to use and its a great tool for small and medium sized businesses.

And finally, if your business is not quite ready to invest direct budget into a new ATS, do not worry,  as there are plenty of good quality, free ATS that you can deploy in place of the paid ones – and which will still do a good job. Three such ATS that spring to mind are: Smartrecruiter, ikrut, and OpenCats .

Its a new year, which brings new challenges, new resource plans, increased expectations and
thankfully, in light of all these pressures, new budgets. There’s no hiding place for HR in 2013, as
research from SHL.com tells us 90% of CEOS see HR’s main value as ensuring the right people
are in the right role. Talent attraction is currently HR’s reason for being, and in 2013, CEOs will
be judging HR and Recruiters obviously on their ability to hire the right staff.

With talent shortages expected to be as intense as ever, recruiters will need to be more innovative
than they have ever been to win the war for talent and ensure there is a constant stream of star
candidates entering their business throughout 2013.

And one area where recruiters need to get smart is in technology as, if used well, it can make your
hiring process faster and more effective, which will help to you improve all your key recruiting
metrics. In fact, I have identified six killer technologies that hiring teams should be using in 2013
which will speed up hiring and I have outlined these below.

1.Video Interviewing Technology

If you are not conducting or at least giving the option of first round video interviewing for
candidates then your hiring process is seriously behind the times and of course the pace of modern
recruitment, as 63% of companies now use video interviews. By using video hiring, you can
minimize scheduling delays arising a result of busy time pressurized candidates and interviewers
struggling to synchronize diaries for a time consuming face-to-face meet.

So, make sure you offer more flexible video interviewing options for first interview to speed up
your time to hire. There are many technologies on the market that can help you with this such as:
HireVue, Sparkhire, Montage etc…

2.Employer Branding Video Presentations

There is nothing new about corporate videos, but it is vastly under-utilized by employers as part
of their employer brand marketing mix. And probably for a while this didn’t matter as employer
branding video presentations were the minority, but now they have become the norm (thanks
to broadband, smart-phones and 3G/4G. And the modern job candidate expects to see videos in
order to learn all about employer brand and culture. As well as this, video will speed up hiring by
increasing your ratio of applicants to postings. Yes, research from CareerBuilder tells us that job
postings with video icons are viewed 12% more than postings without video and receive a 34%
greater application rate.

3.Employee Referral and Crowdsourcing technologies

Employee referrals were shown to be the most influential form of hire in 2012, and research from

Jobvite showed that referred employers were hired 26% faster than those hired from jobs boards.
An effective employee referral strategy must therefore leverage the power of social networks and
the best way to crowdsource talent through your employee’s referral network is to use employer
referrals/crowdsourcing tools like: meshhire, jobvite and bullhorn reach.

4.Mobile Interviewing Technology

Using mobile interview technology will help to give you a more flexible hiring process. Because
this means that candidates and interviewees can attend interviews on the go, which means they may
be able to interview sooner than if they were doing it face to face. As well as this, best of breed
mobile interviewing technologies allow a recorded interview, meaning the candidate can record
video responses to your questions at their own convenience and email them back to you.

5. Mobile Friendly ATS

The truth is many top candidates will be dynamic professionals on the move and if you want to
reach them you must make it easy for them to apply for jobs in their quiet time, such as in a hotel
room, in a coffee bar, or on an airplane (Boeing is introducing wi-fi access to its planes in 2013).
You can do this by using a tool called Jibe which is a mobile web solutions that allows smart-
phone users to upload their resume from the cloud or automatically build a resume and apply for a
job using data from their Linked-In profile. Giving candidates extra flexibility in the way they can
apply for a job will no doubt increase the number of applicants and reduce time to hire.

6. Applicant Tracking Systems

The best of breed applicant tracking systems yield many benefits, but if you are company that is
used to receiving high numbers of applicants per position then an ATS can help to speed up your
hiring as it can automatically read resumes and automatically generate short-lists saving your HR
team time and effort, and speeding up your short-listing times and speeding up overall hiring.

Product Review: GooodJob

A new wave of recruiting apps have been hitting the market in recent years; they go by the name of ‘ Employee Referral’ apps. They allow forward thinking employers to leverage the full power of their  employee’s social  networks, by making it easy for employees to refer their social connections to potential jobs within the business and receive reward and recognition for their efforts.

These tools allow firms to unleash the power of their work-force and turn them into talent scouts. This is a hot area for recruiting apps right now, with many players having entered the market in the last few years and one of the latest teams to throw their hat in the ring is GooodJob, yes, I mean’t ‘gooodjob’; its intentional. Read on to see how this exciting new app can enhance your hiring initiatives.

Employee opt in

You need to have employees opt into the scheme before you can share jobs with them. GooodJob makes this easy by giving you QR Codes, which you can post around the office, or you can  send email invites for employees to opt in.

Employee Participation

The beauty of the system is that, after having opted in, the employees can be as passive as they like really, which removes a key barrier to entry. Yes, as a minimum, employees can simply opt in and give the system/recruiter permission to post a set amount jobs per week to their social media updates stream.

If employees want to put in more effort, they can share jobs with their network, email jobs and they can enter ‘leads’ and send them to the recruiter for follow up. The recruiter can determine which jobs they allow ‘lead submission’ to.

Incentive and Reward

Its all well and good having an opt in process, but you need employees to ‘want in’ and the system comes with an easily configurable reward system based on gamification principles. The system enables the recruiter to assign points for a ‘resume submission’, ‘interview’ and ‘successful hire’ which means you can reward the employee for effort as well as success which should encourage greater participation.

It also has Leaderboards, so employees can see how well they are doing against their peers, which is a sound gamification tactic believed to encourage greater participation.

The system also allows you to set referral points thresholds at which employees win certain prizes. GooodJob are supportive of prizes over cash  awards, as prizes are more visible, more talked about and generally create more buzz.

Posting jobs

Recruiters can take comfort in the fact that this part of the process is very easy. You can manually enter jobs or import them directly from your ATS, which a powerful time saving feature.

Once the jobs have been imported, you can then take full advantage of the power of the system. From the desktop platform you can configure the system with the login and username of your social network account and then share the jobs with your own and your employee’s Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter networks at the click of a button, provided the employee has granted you access to their social stream. You can also send the job out to your email contacts.

A nice feature here is that when you share jobs with employees you can target this according to location, group or department, which is another powerful feature.

Tracking

Of course the system comes with automated tracking, so every employee action and referral is carefully tracked so employees can be recognized and rewarded for their referral activity.

Mobile App

When employees opt-in through the desktop, they will also have access to the mobile app. However, in practice, GooodJob are finding that desk based employees tend to use the PC platform whereas more mobile employees who don’t use a PC can take advantage of the mobile app. This is not meant to replace the PC platform but meant to enable mobile employees who are not  desk based to participate in a referral program so, this is a powerful enabling function.

On the mobile referral app, employees can view jobs, submit leads and share jobs with their social network in the same way, but they don’t have the same access to view the leader-board, and track their scores etc.. as they would in the desk-top. The app is available in iOS and Android.

In addition to the mobile app which comes as part of the desktop product subscription, GooodJob offers a customized, stand-alone mobile app. It is a separate product called GooodJob Mobile that doesn’t require clients to also have the desktop platform.

Pricing

GooodJob works on a monthly subscription based pricing model based on users and is a fairly standard pricing model. Contact them for a product demo and quotation.

Screen shots

All in all GooodJob  seems to be an important addition to the social recruiting via employee referrals software market and is the first to offer some kind of mobile based referrals and is definitely worth a close look.

 

Digital Interview Leader Reports Triple-Digit Sales Growth, 400 Percent User Growth, 140 New Enterprise Customers, 3 New Products and Team Expansion

SALT LAKE CITY (Feb. 13, 2013) – HireVue, the leading on-demand digital interviewing platform provider, today announces a record fiscal 2012. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2013, HireVue saw revenues grow by approximately 170 percent, added 140 new customers (an increase of more than 100 percent over 2011) and recorded more than 150 renewal and add-on transactions from existing customers.

HireVue also announces updates to its leadership team, aimed at setting the company up for further growth and success in 2013. Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Mark Newman, has assumed the role of CEO and David Bradford has been named Executive Chairman. As Chairman, Bradford will continue to oversee HireVue’s financing, board of directors and shareholder relations. As CEO, Newman will continue to oversee corporate strategy and product innovation as well as day-to-day operations of the company.

HireVue’s fiscal 2012 highlights:

• Record revenue, up nearly 170 percent year-over-year.
• New customers included: eBay, Elance, Express Scripts, KIPP LA Schools, Living Social, New York Stock Exchange, Panda Restaurant Group, Random House, Salesforce.com, University of Nevada and Vodafone. Customers report powerful results, reducing interview time by 90% and total hiring time by 50% while reducing travel costs by up to $1500 per candidate.
• Record adoption, with users and interview volume up more than 400 percent over 2011.
• Launch of HireVue Mobile, the world’s first mobile interview application. Released earlier this year, HireVue’s mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android have experienced rapid adoption, with nearly 20 percent of all digital interviews now being completed via mobile devices.
• Launch of HireVue OpenVue, the world’s first social interview application enabling candidates and companies to connect and share digital introductions, interviews, and get hired using social networks, QR codes and geolocation.
• Launch of HireVue CodeVue, the world’s first technical interview application for sourcing and screening technical talent. CodeVue removes the guesswork from technical recruiting with coding questions, challenges and contests that allow candidates to demonstrate their ability to work.
• Recognized as 2012 HR Product of the Year by HR Executive Magazine^TM.
• $22 million in new funding led by Investor Growth Capital with previous investors Granite Ventures and Peterson Ventures, as well as newcomers Rose Park Advisors and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati.
• Strengthened board of directors with addition of Phil Dur, Managing Director at Investor Growth Capital, and Doug Dennerline, former President of SuccessFactors.
• Added more than 50 new team members.

“2012 was an incredible year for HireVue. We grew the team, broadened the product suite, strengthened our financial position and helped customers realize remarkable results,” said Mark Newman, CEO of HireVue. “We look forward to an even better 2013 as we transform the way people interact, enabling them to connect, tell their story and be heard – while helping organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions.”

“Serving as CEO of HireVue has been a great honor,” said David Bradford, Executive Chairman of HireVue. “Mark has unmatched passion and entrepreneurial spirit for the business he has created and helped build. As HireVue continues into its next phase of growth and expansion, I’m thrilled to see Mark transition to take on the role of CEO. I’m equally excited to continue to lead the board of directors and shareholders as we capitalize on this incredible market opportunity.”

For more information on HireVue, please visit www.HireVue.com.

For more information on career opportunities at HireVue, visithttp://hirevue.com/company/careers-2/.

About HireVue

HireVue^TM, the global leader in on-demand, digital interviewing, is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their cloud based platform enables users to simply browse, watch, rate and share the interviews they want, on their own time – just like streaming their favorite movies – even from a smart phone or tablet. Recognized by HR Executive Magazine as a Top HR Product of 2012, HireVue’s Digital Interview Platform^TM also helps improve interviews of all types, including in person, phone and video interviews. HireVue’s CodeVue^TM platform also powers technical hiring by combining the traditional HireVue platform with coding challenges that allow companies to more easily identify and recruit top technical talent. Digital questions, feedback and collaboration tools remove hassles and make interviewing up to ten times faster and nine times cheaper. Join HireVue customers like Starbucks, Nike and Wal-Mart who are making interviewing awesome. http://www.hirevue.com

As a result, many talent professionals are wondering what all the ‘Big data’ fuss is about, because –
and they would be right to suggest this – data has been around for many years in HR and recruiting.
Yes, most HR professionals are comfortable with stats such as: turnover, cost to hire and time to
hire etc..

However, there is a fundamental different in the new HR Big Data wave that is sweeping the HR
profession. Yes, old school HR data analytics (or which it will soon become) was confined very
much to looking at data in the here and now, or even the past, such as turnover, cost to hire and
time to hire which are all based on retrospective data.

But new HR Big data is not just focused on the present, it makes predictions into the future and is
known as HR Predictive Analytics and it seeks to answer question like:

1. What will our cost to hire be like in three years time if we do nothing or if we change factor
X?

2. What will our time to hire be like in one year’s time if we continue with this strategy or if we
change factor Y?

3. Which areas of ours or our competitor’s business are at high risk of turnover in the future?

4. Is their a certain profile of employee or candidate who is at high risk of premature
departure or under performance?

5. Is their a profile of new employees that is synonymous with high potential?

HR Predictive Analytics seeks to look into the future and provide calculated data based scenarios
to help HR and senior managers make more effective decisions around the business. The questions
that can be answered are only limited by the data available, analytical grasp of the data and HR
imagination.

Its important for HR to understand that senior managers, marketing and sales are already conversing
in the language of Big data and it is time for HR to get on board if it wants to have a substantial
role in the corporate decision making process and command a seat in the boardroom going
forwards.

So, why now, why is HR Predictive Analytics and HR Big Data taking hold right now? Well, its
largely down to three important converging trends which are:

1. Increasing computer power,
2. increases in cloud based HR data,
3. and a global talent war which is raising the stakes in the talent attraction and retention arena.

There is no doubt that 2013 is the time for HR and talent management professionals to start
familiarizing themselves with HR big-data and to start to begin truly understanding the value that
HR predictive analytics can bring to their business and also how it can enhance the credibility of the
profession overall.

Kazim Ladimeji is a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and has been a practicing HR professional for 14 years. Kazim is the Director of thecareercafe.co.uk: a resource for start-ups, small business and job seekers. You can visit Kazim’s website: thecareercafe.co.uk here.

Related posts:

1. Video Interview: Top HR Product of 2012: HireVue At HRTech

or the video interview but a robust amount of screening and communication features. We sat down with Scott Sessions for a very fun interview…below is video of his roll out of HireVue OpenVue a further refinement of an already “Awesome Product”. HireVue OpenVue is taking the whole platform Mobile engaging potential candidates earlier and more deeply than before. This makes for improved hires and onboarding and allows recruiters to focus on what they do best! cheap Leukeran