I get so few opportunities to hear from entrepreneurs meshing social software with hardware, that’s why I am excited to present you with VoiceScreener, a service designed to help interviewers get over their “fear of criticism” and give everyone involved in the hiring process better information to make their decision. Kelly Fitzsimmons, a founder of VoiceScreener was kind enough to tell me a little more about the product.

VoiceScreener

Necessity is the mother of invention. As an entrepreneur, I realized late in my career that I was terrible at hiring. I tend to see the best in people. Worse yet, I help people out in interview. I’ll complete awkward sentences, even fill space with chatter. I know I am not alone, but I find few people willing to admit just how bad they are at sitting in silence and letting a poor fitting candidate squirm. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.

What harQen’s VoiceScreener ultimately is, is a proxy interview. It allows me to become a great interviewer. The questions are pre-recorded, so silence is all that follows each question. The exact same questions are asked to all the candidates — there are no opportunities for my awkward tangents to throw a candidate. Even better, I can invite my hiring team to review candidates quickly at the top of the hiring funnel. They may well pick up on nuances that I may miss. Our system also uses social media, so my colleagues can weigh in easily on each candidate — ranking the quality of the responses.

Our main competition is the manual process of phone screening. On average, a live phone screen takes 45 minutes start to finish if you are fairly efficient. This time includes scheduling with the candidate (who only wants to talk after hours), reviewing their resume before the call, reviewing the questions, and then conducting the interview. With VoiceScreener, you winnow down the time per candidate to under 15 minutes… sometimes under 30 seconds.

Here’s a practical example: we are as a start-up without an HR department. We needed to hire an office manager. We posted a job request on a local job board and were flooded with 40 inbound resumes within 24 hours. We uploaded all the candidates’ email addresses into VoiceScreener and sent out an interview invite to all forty candidates. Within 72 hours, we had 26 interviews completed. I was still too busy to review the interviews, so my hiring team (aka the rest of the company) reviewed them during their normal business hours (5am-4.30am) and I woke up to a report with all the candidates ranked neatly by votes. I listened to the top five responses and ended up interviewing in person all five candidates. We ended up hiring a woman who is a jewelry designer. I would have never figured out that she was the perfect hire from her resume. But she’s detail oriented, entrepreneurial, and talks fast enough to keep up with me. From placing the ad to having her on board was 30 days start to finish, which included two weeks for notice.

In our case, a hectic start-up, we have no time and a unique culture. VoiceScreener helped us dramatically reduce the time to hire, avoid awkward interviews, and find the right person quickly.

Our beta clients are using it for different purposes, though. Some hiring managers are dramatically expanding the maybe pile because they can process the responses so quickly. Others are using VoiceScreener for deep-dive technical hiring where experts record the questions and listen to the responses to quickly gage others breadth of technical knowledge. And because candidates cannot re-record, technical hiring teams can get real insight instantly into the depth of a candidate’s expertise.

Lessons Along The Way

I came into social media from information security, which may be about as far as one can go within the broad spectrum of IT. The single best learning I have had is that nothing can substitute time in the learning process. I thought that social media would be a cake walk after infosec. Wrong, dead wrong. I also found out that I needed to be willing to experiment and try things that made me squirm a little before I would get it right.

Prior to VoiceScreener, we launched another application off our platform — Comic Wonder and initiated a search for the world’s greatest joke-teller. What could have possibly been more fun! Well, we learned that social media has a rather ruthless law associated with it that didn’t appear obvious from the onset: The amount of work, time, funding, and expertise required to build a thriving online community doubles every 12 months — and that’s if you have a viable business model. Gratefully, we have been able to learn and adjust quickly enough to keep Comic Wonder thriving while other communities have it the skids. That has everything to do with a novel business model (hint: it’s licensing) and a bunch of die-hard community members.

If you’re interested in testing out VoiceScreener, HTSAA readers can get invites to the BETA by going to their site and using the code: HOWTOSPLITANATOM.

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