With our mentioning in Time, the question always arises as to how video in the hiring process can lead to major discrimination problems. Unless you are involved with video resumes where you as a company or provider have no control over the content, distribution or anything like that associated with the video resume, you can have safeguards in place to actually improve your compliance. Video interviews, like those offered by HireVue, offer companies a way to keep control of the interview process and at the same time reap the benefits of video in your hiring process.

Over the last three years we have been vetted, screened and asked questions by our customers both very big and very small about how we work within EEOC and OFCCP compliance. When those words come into play there is always the HR shiver of worry. After going through the rounds with numerous customers, we have found that there are main things that HireVue offers in helping our clients with their compliance:

1) Standardized Interviews – A HireVue is completely standardized across your position as all candidates are asked the same questions. Clients build the interviews themselves so it is very easy for HR to have a hand in helping create the right HireVue with the right questions and eliminate the variability found with most interviewing scenarios.

2) Elimination of the sports team and fishing trip talk – Whether you are friend, a salesman or in our case a candidate, everyone has gone into someone’s office seen a picture on a wall from a vacation, a trophy, a sports team shrine, something that starts a conversation. The “Oh wow that’s quite the fish, where did you catch that” conversation is the first thing many people do when going into an interview. As a recruiter looking for feedback, after spending 30 minutes with a candidate your manager comes up to you and says “they were great, bring them in for round 2″ when you ask about their skills the manager says “oh yeah, they have them” when in reality all they talked about was the Broncos, fishing in Key West, vacationing in Mexico or their favorite animal (me when I worked at my zoo job in college).

What happens when you get audited by legal or you get a letter from the great EEOC or OFCCP notifying you of a complaint? What are you to do? What happens when a certain manager is singled out for being inappropriate or for not hiring the right people? Usually that means a lot of sifting through old records and files trying to piece together everything going on, determine who is right in the “he said, she said” war and trying to go back through time to figure everything out. What if on a regular basis, you could go into your interviews and see what the manager’s all see? What if you could compare and evaluate candidates on the same level as your managers by being able to readily compare and contrast candidates against each other? We have found that when you are able to evaluate candidates through a dashboard like the HireVue Evaluator, you can easily determine (even without specific knowledge of function) who the best candidate is for the position. Does a certain manager always advance people based on certain discriminatory characteristics? What if you could catch that quickly, easily and before there’s a problem and have discussion with your colleague? What’s that worth to your organization?

A number of legal related bloggers have weighed in on the topic -

George’s Employment Blawg

HR Tests

And always reliable ERE Discussion groups here and here (login may be required)

A company can get sued for anything. If someone blatantly discriminates, it will happen with paper resumes, video resumes, video interviews, video conferencing, in person interviews, anywhere. The key is being able to be proactive in fighting discrimination, incorporate safeguards into your process to try to limit discrimination and promote a corporate culture that is intolerant of discrimination.

HireVue helps.

To coincide with my rant about video resumes, video profiles and how they aren’t the best idea (especially for the MySpace “Oh man you were so blazed last night” quote right next their resume crowd), I came across a great article from MobileWirelessJobs.com

Mobile Recruiters Discover Passive Talent From The “Hidden” Internet And Sometimes A Whole Lot More

This is an interesting article about how sources work and what they can find. I was speaking with Rob Solerno and he talked about the amazing response he got from the article from people who were worried or asking questions.

Here’s a business idea – $1000.00 for an internet cleansing, a person contacts you to have you go out and find absolutely everything about them on the internet and then you go about “cleansing” their online profile to clean it up. Who knows, maybe it would need to cost more and the government might not be a big fan either.

Now here’s a movie idea – A dedicated, hard working, little crazy, sourcer/sanitizer guy (we’ll call him Dave Mendoza, or Shally, or Rob Solerno) is in the business of cleaning up online profiles for the yucksters who spent their early days doing all sorts of things online and they are making a great amount of money doing it. Their setup is extreme with constant flashes to meetings and hard work of sanitizing profiles and then having catchy lines like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser of “You’ve been erased” when they come across the shady gang of criminals who aren’t just trying to clean their profiles but eliminate any trace of their “enemies”. At first the sanitizers think that they just have clients who are paying a whopping amount of money for their work and are a little over zealous in what they want cleansed but the innocent sanitizer then gets wrapped in to a fight for his/her life to escape the “human erasers” before he/she gets erased themselves.

The twist? Who knows, it could be that the “innocent sanitizer” turns into the criminal by “erasing” the people that are chasing him, profiles, lives and all.

Check out the article from MobileWirelessJobs.com

–Mark Newman

We need to test the results of two possible search engines to offer to candidates before their HireVue Recorded Video Interview.
Our vision is for a candidate to have many preparation tools at their disposal for their interview process at any company. Everyone likes candidates who research the company they are interviewing with before their interview and as part of that we would like to offer candidates a way to easily research the company they are interviewing (or as we like to say HireVuing) with.

Please test each search engine by entering in some company names. The first search engine is specific in it’s scope and I would appreciate any additional resources of information that you suggest we add to it.

COMPANY INFORMATION SEARCH ENGINE

The second search engine is more broad a scope where it will search the web with an emphasis on only a number of sites.

COMPANY INFORMATION FROM THE WEB SEARCH ENGINE

These results can sometimes return a lot of useless information but is more broad better?
Please contact me at mnewman at hirevue dot com if you have any ideas on how to make it better, your feedback etc. Or you can leave comments of course.

Thanks!

– Mark Newman

I am building a company information finder/database for our candidates (the smart ones) to use as a reference and I came across a very funny thing in the age old (about 5 years) battle between search kings.

Search Engine Optimization wars always make me chuckle. I’m sure this is too egregious but if you look up the term “Company Information” on Google, look what the third link is!

YAHOO!!! – Brings you straight to their corporate information page.

I have a feeling that wasn’t naturally done but you never know.
HireVue is trying to do more SEO type of work on our websites as it is amazing the conversion we have in natural search.

Yes I find simple small things funny and this sure got me. I know, I need a life.

–Mark Newman

Video is coming to a hiring process near you. From advertising your company’s positions to interviewing candidates, video is the next wave in effectively and efficiently connecting your candidates with your hiring managers.

If you think about it – you can have all the candidates in the world but if you can’t figure out the best means to get them in front of managers quickly you 1) have a great chance at losing the candidate and 2) give your company the reputation of being slow, unresponsive and rude.

From the manager’s perspective, by making the hiring process arduous and inconvenient, you turn hiring into a chore not an opportunity.

Video does belong in the hiring process. We would not be in business if we didn’t think so.
For video to succeed in the hiring process there needs to be two things:

1) Spontaneity from the candidate – canned, recorded, edited responses are never useful

2) Company control – companies should be able to determine (to a certain extent) what is going to be in those videos i.e. they pick the questions that get responded to.

The recruiting world has been inundated recently with the idea of the video resume.

First this video resume hits Wall Street from a total tard -

Then “video resumes are great” gets on www.careerjournal.com

Then this on www.recruiting.com

Now Jobster has video resumes as a prime feature on their profiles (at least Dave Lefkow disagreed until he converted back)

Heather Hamilton at Microsoft came right out with it and said in responding to Jeremy Langhans (we love you Jeremy):

“I can’t keyword search video resumes, I find them pretty self-indulgent and when you get hundreds of resumes for a job posting, who has time to look at videos. I think that Aleksey has proven that some people find it totally comfortable to lie on a video resume. I’m not looking to fill positions with people that perform well on video, I’m looking to fill positions with people that perform well in the job. Either way, it requires an interview. Plus video resumes make it more difficult, not less, to narrow the funnel of candidates. Video resumes are flash and I’m looking for substance. A good one may get the attention of someone (and I\’ve seen one good video resume ever…that French speaking cartoon one….you know the one) due to it being clever but otherwise I’m not interested in them and I’ve got nowhere to store them and no time to watch all of them.”

Hank Stringham (hire.com, itzbig.com) once told me that in the 1980s he used to record roughnecks in the backwoods of the deep south oil fields for his clients to recruit. He believes in video and so he did video resumes back 25 years ago.

Video conferencing has helped in some cases and video tape interviews were used by Hank and Jim Dick from Candidate Quality Management. I believe though that video resumes are not the answer.

What do people go to YouTube for? Entertainment!

Are you going to go onto MySpace to watch a video resume of some person that has posted their right next to the pictures of them passed out at party and the comments section saying “Man, I can’t believe you did that the other night – you were sooo blazed, it was a great party”.

There is something about confidentiality in a job search – where candidates and companies know that their transaction is private. There is something about security in a job search where you know that your video resume won’t be written about in the Wall Street Journal or posted on You Tube with the caption – “Look at this dope”.

Most of all and what is most important to recruiters and companies, there needs to be QUALITY in filling a position.

Heather nailed it right on the head – people lie on resumes and people lie on video. Any “user generated” content, in this case candidate generated content, must be taken with a grain of salt. In Freakonomics, it is suggested that over 50% of people lie on their resume. What happens in the 50 takes when a candidate is trying to record a video resume?

Video in the hiring process is great. Video resumes aren’t.

-Mark Newman

We use Meebo as a company to keep in contact with each other and also for our support (you can always get us on our contact page!). Everytime you login to Meebo, their blog appears for you to peruse. The actual blog is here.

Meebo has been fortunate to raise a lot of money from very well known VC’s like Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson to fund their business which allows users to chat through an internet portal rather than through an application which can be easily blocked by network admins. Basically, I can login to Meebo and have our HireVue Support Chat and my personal intercompany chats (I’m not much of a IMer) all in one place without some clunky app bogging down my computer.

Well, being in Silicon Valley you need to recruit right? There is constantly heated competition for talent so how to do you attract talent when you are up against Google, EA (who gives you cheap video games!), Oracle and many others? You appeal to the inner game geek/rockstar in each one of us:

Here is a posting from Meebo -

When Elaine first saw Guitar Hero, her eyes lit up and she became an overnight addict. She got the game over the holiday and when she came back from her break, the side of her first finger was totally numb. Many of us at meebo have enjoyed hours of continuous PlayStation2 playing of the popular game “Guitar Hero” (one and two!) and we wanted to help spread the fun.

meebo’s hosting its very own Guitar Hero night (we’ll supply the guitars) at the Stanford Coffee House (CoHo) this Thursday (Feb 8th) at 7pm on Stanford Campus (Tressider). Danny and Erich (our newest intern) plastered campus with 200 fliers so we’re hoping for a decent turn-out. We’ll be providing lots of food and prizes for participants, and we’d love to see you there (with resumes in hand =p).

The whole team will be there so come on down!

cheers!
sandy

You can see a few things from this:

1) They are trying to position themselves as the cool, hip, alter-company compared to the stodgy old-timers of Silicon Valley

2) They are employing a very cost effective (~$500) way to put on a career fair in the middle of their target group of employees – (read: no recruiters, no fees etc)

3) They will succeed – they aren’t wasting their time with job ads, they are getting the founders out in the nitty gritty where candidates are disarmed, relaxed, enjoying themselves, socializing with people and I’m sure the candidates are open to discussions with the founders and maybe a value pitch or two

Talk about Great Recruiting!

I believe this will work out for Meebo. They have raised a lot of $$ and have received a lot of flack from many bloggers and writers as another Web 2.0 hype. If they play their cards right though, there is a great opportunity for future employees – think about it – I spend 8-10 hours per day on Meebo because of our support chat, the site has my eyes for 480-600 minutes per day when usually a site has my attention for 1. I wouldn’t mind ads, news, etc in that window that I would even go so far as customizing by giving them my demographics, interests etc. Would I be willing to watch ads for movies etc? Sure! I personally think Meebo is a gold mine! (Maybe they’ll send me a Meebo t-shirt)

If I wasn’t in my own company, Meebo would sure be an opportunity! I recommend them to anyone.

–Mark