Automated Interview: Can this save your candidate filtering blues?

VoiceTree is not a hiring or headhunting agency, but like any other normal company we do need to hire people to join our team. And for what it’s worth, we decided to come up with a solution using our own technology skills to help us in the hiring process. Being a startup, we want to cut as much cost as possible like paying a headhunting agency to send us shortlisted sum of candidates.

Here is what we did:

1. For our job postings of “Marketing & Sales Manager” we decided to include a line mentioning “To apply for this job post you also need to take an automated interview at 011-66020228” using your mobile phone which can be attempted only once from a number.
2. On LinkedIN Jobs, we received around 122 application interests. We call this “interests” because, not 122 of those candidates read the instruction that they need to call on a number as a part of the hiring process.
   
3. We were surprised at the numbers. We only got 6 candidates out of 122 (that’s ~5%) who actually read the complete job advertisement and follow the instructions to dial and participate in the Automated Voice Interview. They call a number, a set of 5 questions were played to them one by one and they were supposed to respond to each question, which was recorded by the system and upon completion emailed to us as a single audio file.
   

Let’s hold here for a moment and notice that so far this has potentially saved us from going through all the 122 applications for a simple reason that they didn’t bother to read the complete instructions and follow. Would you want to hire someone like that? We’d like to think, not so.

We’d like to pose this question to the HR people and headhunting agencies who do this kind of filtering and compare with the time and effort spent on the same. Can this process reduce your workload and save a lot of your time, and in return increase your team’s efficiency? Do let us know, we’d like to hear from you!

Now that we sorted the applications we got and only got 6 of them the next task was to listen to each one of the audio file and assess the candidate and make a final list of them to issue a “Call for Interview”. Listen to the audio interview sample below:

One of our senior persons would go through the set of audio files received per candidate and do a screening of potential candidates. Listening to this audio interview would give a good idea to any senior HR professional to identify if the candidate should be called for an in person interview or not.

We felt that it was drastically reduced a lot of overhead when it comes to filtering candidates and the senior HR person did not need to go through the sum initially. After listening to the audio interview, the person can then look at the resume and issue a call.

We think the product is of great use and potential for any agency or company to support them in their hiring process. We’d be willing to let people test it out for free and gather feedback.

Another application is: What if you are into mass data gathering and surveys? Does this product sound useful? Do let us know 🙂