A vendor I have been tracking and got to examine at the recent HR Technology Conference has a tool to help businesses improve their talent management that I had profiled this company in my talent management guide for the event. HireVue’s Digital Interview Platform records interviews and enables hiring managers to review candidates’ responses to critical questions.

In the hiring process, organizations struggle to streamline the manual process of evaluating candidates, particularly reviewing résumés. Some applicants are great at marketing themselves via résumé; others may not be so good, but might have more potential. Also in many cases résumés are reviewed by recruiters who may not understand the dynamics and specific needs of the hiring managers. It can take months to get from initial phone screens to presenting the final three candidates to the hiring manager. Our workforce analytics benchmark research found that time to hire is the second-most important workforce metric in 67 percent of organizations.

HireVue takes advantage of the widespread adoption of webcams to conduct introductions and hiring interviews, recording and making them available to hiring managers so they can quickly ascertain the quality of the candidates. The company is already getting recognition on its advancement and wasrecognized as top HR product of 2011 by Human Resources Executive at the recent HR Technology conference.

HireVue provides its software through an on-demand cloud computing application that customers rent and can implement easily. The interview management and administration tool Interview Studio helps organizations define and set up interviews and questions. Candidates use the tool to digitally record their interviews on the Internet through a webcam. HireVue provides a starting point for recruiting and hiring managers to customize content with templates arranged by interview type. Organizations can determine whether to conduct interviews live or record them and make them available for replay and sharing across the recruiting team. Once interviews are recorded and compressed for storage, hiring managers and other involved individuals can electronically rate candidates’ responses and make overall recommendations.

The latest release of Digital Interview Platform also helps customers standardize and extend their hiring processes. It enables them to reduce the time and overhead of scheduling, travel, communications and other tasks performed by recruiting and hiring managers. By using a formally defined process for setting the questions to be asked and evaluated across the interview team, the software makes evaluation of candidates more consistent and less biased than separate, unmonitored interviews. This application fills a gap in many recruiting and talent management applications, which have not taken advantage of Internet video capabilities for digital interviews. HR software vendor Kenexa has agreed to partner with HireVue, and I expect others to integrate HireVue’s system into their applicant tracking systems and processes.

HireVue is growing rapidly, with more than 200 customers around the globe. Today it’s used most by retailers, but it can serve other industries that want to save time and money in the hiring process, along with current employees’ time. Contact centers, sales and field service operations that assess candidates in remote locations will find this a useful application for examining talent that sells or services customers. HireVue’s current customers include AT&T, Geico, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks and many others.

HireVue provides real-time ratings and workforce analytics to help assess candidates, but it needs to provide more analytics and metrics about the process and candidates. Applying analytics to improve the workforce and talent management processes is immature; our benchmark research shows that 48 percent of organizations are not satisfied with their existing processes. Making the application available via mobile technology like smartphones and tablets would also help make it more easily accessible by candidates and hiring managers alike.

If you are looking to get smart about the hiring process from interviews to selection, consider whether HireVue can help your organization ensure you are hiring the best possible talent in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. HireVue does a great job in reducing the time to hire metric but also addressing the quality of hire that are essential ingredients for a business case for investment and potentially significant financial savings. 

Regards,

Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer