Hi! My name is Peggy McKee! I represent the sales and marketing function of Interview on Demand, LLC. I have been recruiting in laboratory sales industry for almost 9 years. At PHC Consulting, we are known for the high caliber candidates that we provide for our clients (small startups to $1B + Fortune 50 companies). I have always embraced technology whenever I felt that it could give me an edge over my competition. Late 2006, I was perusing the web at about midnight (this is a common pastime when I can’t sleep), I found some web discussions in a recruiting blog about video interviews and how they could be used in recruiting and hiring. I was so excited about the possibilities of using this type of tool to differentiate me and PHC Consulting that I could not sleep the entire night! For me (as a recruiter) a tool that would move my candidates through the hiring process faster was very exciting. Imagine, if I could get my candidates in front of the hiring manager (visually - and no a picture is not the same) faster than other recruiters (even faster than the hiring company’s direct recruits)! That is what a video interview would do!!!

In the words of Steve Finkel - time kills all deals! Today is always better than tomorrow! If a manager could see my Seattle candidate from the comfort of his laptop, he might get excited enough to fly the candidate into to HQ or at least to fly up to Seattle and see the candidate in person. Managers have so much going on that sometimes they need a taste of what is available in order to get interested enough to take the next step. And then sometimes a candidate’s resume doesn’t adequately communicate the candidate’s ability to communicate and persuade - the video interview does that! I have to admit that my motivation to move forward with using video interviewing in my firm was money driven. Give managers the ability to "see and hear" my qualified candidates faster  - make more placements - make more money.

Carl Chapman designed my website for PHC Consulting and gave me a lot of great advice on recruiting, managing recruiting and general business operations! And then one day he asked me what I thought of video interviewing. Of course, I went on and on about what I thought it could do for my business and for managers. He asked me if I had tried it…..and I explained that the companies that I had tried to use weren’t quite there ….meaning the video was poor quality, no way to pay online for the video, choppy user interface….just not quite there. A month or so later, he told me that he had been investing heavily in development for a video interviewing application. Would I be interested in working with him to bring this technology to market and to drive the business from a sales and marketing perspective? You don’t get too many opportunities in life to work with people you admire and respect on a product that you think is as revolutionary to hiring as the telephone interview has been….So, the answer was YES!!! Thank you, Carl!

So that is my story. Here is my advice:

Managers: embrace video interviewing for the time and energy you can save in the hiring process while speeding the time to hire! Your managers will think you are innovative and forward thinking! Your accountants will love you! A manager told me the other day that he flew a candidate from San Fran to NYC ($650 ticket) and knew within 10 minutes that the fit was not there. He wished he had ordered a video interview.

Candidates: embrace the opportunity to get yourself in front of the manager - it is not about beauty - it is about the ability to communicate, connect, speak extemporaneously, clarify, and demonstrate skill sets. Just like a real interview - but not. I offer all of my candidates the ability to take the video interview. If you would like to take one, email me.  I am the VP of Sales and Marketing for Interview on Demand, LLC. I will send you an invitation to take a video interview. You will get to see your completed interview. It is a fabulous tool for improving your interviewing skills!

Human Resources: this tool will help you achieve your short term goals of hiring and long term goals of talent management. Remember what it was like before you had an applicant tracking system? In the future, you will look back and wonder how you did it before video interviews.

Recruiters: this is a goldmine. It differentiates you from your competition. It speeds the hiring cycle. It allows you to "see and hear" your candidates so that you can really represent them to your client companies!

In 1994, I was the first sales rep at Bio-Rad Laboratories to have a cell phone. I think the company was worried about the risk of a young female representative walking around Washington DC’s hospitals (some pretty rough environments). That phone weighed at least 10 pounds and the heat from the receiver burned your ear lobes! But it was fantastic.

Now I have a blackberry that beeps when I have an email message. It has improved my ability to respond to my clients and candidates and saved several placements! Technology is fantastic.

With video and high speed internet, hiring will change! I think the video interview will replace the phone screen. What do you think?

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

Video interviews are beginning to be used much like phone interviews as an important part of the applicant screening process.  Performing well on these interviews is critical to your job-hunting success.  According to Successful Job Interview Tips, interviews are your chance to

make your resume come alive and make a good impression.  

A couple of especially good tips: 

Don’t let “tell me about yourself” trip you up.  Have a one- to two-minute story that highlights your top three selling points that are pertinent for the job for which you are applying with specific, short examples for each point.  Practice telling it so that it becomes smooth.  Your comfort with telling the story will counteract the nerves you will feel sitting in front of the camera. 

Also, do your research.  Knowing what the company needs will help you choose which of your selling points to highlight. 

Meanwhile, Bob Rosner and Sherrie Campbell have some great tips for what not to do: 

• Don’t bad-mouth anyone.  Bad enough in a normal interview–in a video interview it’ll be recorded and played back.
• Don’t ramble.  You only have two minutes–plan ahead and use them wisely.
• Avoid inappropriate language or slang.  Yes, you know that.  But if you get nervous, you might let some things slip.

Remember, if you wow them in the video interview with your smoothness, conciseness, and confidence, your chances of getting the job have just gotten a lot better.  To help you, Interview On Demand has a tutorial available with more tips, and every interview includes a practice section so that you can work out any issues you may have.  Happy interviewing!

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

Blogs are about a lot of things and they can help accomplish a lot of things.  As a startup company, Interview on Demand has decided to use our blog for three really important tasks.

1) One of our blog’s purposes is to trumpet the arrival of a technology, video interviewing, that will literally change the way that all businesses hire people for the better. 

2) Another purpose is to help connect people who are involved in the hiring process in a meaningful way, to give them a platform where they can connect and to enable that connection to benefit them personally and professionally.

3) Thirdly, a major purpose is to help introduce the team behind the product and company, so that people will have an easier time understanding who they are talking to when they communicate with us.

I’ll talk about all of these purposes in detail as I begin to post here on a regular basis.  But today, I wanted to talk about number two, helping people connect and gain benefit from that connection.

Not many people know a whole lot about blogs and the software behind them.  Our blog is published using WordPress, which is one of the largest and most well known of the blogging platforms.  It has a ton of helpful features and it is fairly easy to set up and get running a lot of technical expertise.  However, being that my job here at Interview on Demand is to run the operations, build the software, and make sure that all systems are firing on all cylinders, I have to look under the covers a bit more than most people.

I’m sure that there are a lot of folks out there with WordPress installed and running their blog and I’ll bet that they didn’t know that a very simple ‘feature’ that gets installed by default is making their blog a much less effective medium that it could and should be.  Most everyone that has WordPress installed would love to have people make comments on their blog and to have people link to their blog from their articles.  This little known setting called ‘ rel=”nofollow” ‘ makes the links that people include in their comments and trackbacks actually not get indexed by search engines.  If you site doesn’t allow peoples comments to be indexed by search engines, then their motivation for commenting in the first place is going to be lessened.

There is a very simple fix for this — a plug-in for WordPress called DoFollow by Kimmo Suominen.  What it does is remove the default ‘nofollow’ condition so that people who post comments can now receive the benefit of having those links indexed to their sites.  It means that in your comments you can choose your anchor text, keywords, and hyperlinks that link back to your site.

We have installed DoFollow on our blog, because we want the people who take the time to make intelligent comments, to provide hyperlinks to informative articles and information to receive the benefit of sharing with others.  As they share with our audience, it helps make our site better an more valuable.  It will also encourage others to share and visit.  We anticipate building a readership that consists of jobseekers, third party recruiters, hiring managers, human resources professionals, as well as career coaches, resumes writers, and other vendors who work in some part of the hiring process.  All of those people should be able to contribute and connect better through blogging and commenting.  We just want to help do our part.

-author Carl Chapman is the founder and chief operating officer of Interview on Demand, LLC. Carl is also the founder of CEC Search - Executive Restaurant Recruiters. He has 20+ years of restaurant industry experience, spent 5 awarding winning years as an executive recruiter with a top 25 MRI franchise office. Carl graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1980.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

If there’s any group of people in the world who are good at job interviews, it’s salespeople. After all, good people skills, persuasion, figuring out what you want to hear–that’s what they do. All of this can make it difficult to find the one who is really going to be the right fit for your company. Tribute Media says that the most important step a company can take in finding the right salespeople is to develop a sales talent screening program, to give the whole hiring process focus and ensure success.

Why Can’t I Hire the Right Salespeople? lists 7 key components of a successful sales talent screening program:

1. Create a profile of your ideal salesperson, so you have an idea of what you’re looking for.
2. Always be recruiting, so that you have some leads in mind when a position becomes open.
3. Practice reverse interviewing — have the candidate’s would-be peers perform an interview.
4. Have standard interview questions, so that you can easily compare candidate answers.
5. Set up a mock sales call for the candidate.
6. Provide online assessment testing to determine personality and skill.
7. Have the candidate write a one-page mini-business plan – can the candidate follow directions and communicate clearly?

Video interviewing is an ideal arrangement for #4. Interview On Demand provides an inexpensive, cutting-edge, amazingly simple process for hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates:

• Hiring managers and recruiters can customize a set of interview questions, which means that even behavioral interview questions can easily be included.
• Candidates are contacted by e-mail.
• Every candidate has the same questions, and the same amount of time to answer them.
• Answers are stored online, so that interviews can easily be retrieved and reviewed.

Video interviewing needs to be a part of any company’s candidate screening program.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

For candidates, phone interviews are comparable to video interviews…so tips for Acing Your Phone Interview can apply here, too. As author Justin Driscoll points out, phone interviews are really a method of weeding out candidates–so are video interviews. He says that you can increase your chances of making it past this first obstacle by “doing as much research as possible on the company and position you are applying for.” A smart candidate uses this knowledge to flavor his or her answers to the standard interview questions found in an online video interview and get to that face-to-face opportunity.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

Video interviews can be just as useful in internal interviews as in hiring from outside. Using Interview On Demand takes very little time or money investment from the company to allow as many people who are interested in the position to participate in a 10-minute video job interview. I found a great article called Seven Tips for Excelling at Internal Interviews that can easily be applied to video interviews. A couple of good ones:

• use your insider knowledge to inform your answers, but don’t assume you know the interviewer
• use the interview opportunity to emphasize your creativity and fresh ideas you can bring to the job even though you might have been there a while

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

If your company does any significant college campus recruiting, you absolutely need to consider using video. Video interviewing has tremendous potential to improve college campus interviews, and the You-Tube generation is likely to be very comfortable with the process. By setting up a video station to conduct initial interviews, your company:

• minimizes travel expenses for the interviewer
• maximizes productivity by decreasing the amount of time away from the office that can be used more effectively later in second-round interviews
• can increase the number of interviews done in a day with no recruiter fatigue

Video interviews through Interview On Demand offer the opportunity to ask consistent, job-specific questions with a built-in time limit and the advantage of being able to play them again at your convenience. Video interview use is on the rise–use this technology to your advantage to win the talent war.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

What is video interviewing?

In a video interview, candidates answer interview questions using a webcam so that the employer can see and hear the answers.  Video interviews can replace phone interviews as a candidate screening process, giving hiring managers more information than from a resume or phone interview only.  Video interviews allow a hiring manager the chance to see a candidate’s energy, enthusiasm, personality, and presentation skills, giving the hiring manager information which could previously be found only in personal interviews.  Through video, hiring managers can interview candidates regardless of geographic location, enlarging the pool of talent from which a company can draw.  Using video interviews can speed up the hiring process, saving the company time and money. 

Companies can tailor questions for each specific job, and every candidate receives the same questions and the same amount of time to answer them.  Interviews can be saved and reviewed by the hiring team at their convenience.

The Video Interview Process

• Companies select and then invite candidates via e-mail to take a video interview.
• Candidates arrange to take the interview using a webcam, either on their personal computers or at a designated site.
• Tutorials on using the webcam and interviewing are available for candidates.
• Candidates typically receive 10-15 questions, each with 2 minutes allowed to answer them.

Tips for Taking a Video Interview

A video interview is as important as a face to face interview. It is one more way that the prospective employer can get to know you. So, plan your interview as you would any other job interview.
Plan ahead

• Have a glass of water nearby
• Make sure that you won’t have any distractions
• Try to have a solid background – maybe use a sheet as a backdrop if there is a lot of clutter in your office.
• Turn off the telephone, the alarm clock, your email alert….anything that could be distracting during your interview.
• Reduce or eliminate any background noise.

What to Wear

• Dress professionally. Wear the same interview attire you would for a face to face interview.
• Don’t make the same mistake one candidate did! He wore a suit jacket, dress shirt, and tie, presuming that only the top half would show. However, when he stood up the interviewer saw a full-length view, including the jeans he was wearing.

During the Video Interview

• Make sure the table is clean and neat. You don’t want to distract the interviewer.
• Be aware that the microphone picks up all the noise in the room. Don’t tap your pen or shuffle papers.
• Place your head and upper torso in the frame. Try to keep yourself in the framed area for the entire interview. When speaking, keep an eye contact with the webcam and speak directly to the webcam.
• Make eye contact. If you don’t the camera will be focused on the top of your head.
• Be personable.  Pretend there is another person the other side of the camera and look directly at and speak directly to the webcam to make your interview as personable as possible.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

I found an article that highlights how important it is to prepare for a video interview. It’s referring to a video conference, but still…the prep work is what you need to take away from this. The candidate videotaped himself answering typical interview questions and then reviewed it to catch all the “ums” and other nervous habits that show unfavorably on camera. He fixed those issues, sailed through the interview with “quick, concise answers that wowed the hiring manager”, and got the job.

Video interviews are more stressful than normal interviews. Even if you’re outgoing with fabulous people skills and have lots of experience answering interview questions, you’d be suprised at how many nervous habits you have on camera. You can minimize those by doing a few run-throughs, having your notes in front of you, and implementing the tips available on the Interview On Demand website. It will increase your confidence, improve your delivery, and increase your chances of getting the job you want.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.

What about video conferencing as an alternative to video interviews? No, no, no. While they might seem like a viable alternative, video conferences require a lot of steps that can hinder the interview and hiring process.

Video conferencing can require even more scheduling than a face-to-face interview to get all interested parties to one room at the same time–in a high-tech-equipped facility, no less. The expense and lack of convenience can introduce a time lag that might be disastrous to a timely hiring process.

Video interviewing can be done at the convenience of everyone involved with the simplicity of a web cam and e-mail. If the hiring manager thinks the candidate is a possibility, the video interview can be replayed as many times as necessary at the convenience of everyone on the hiring team. That ease makes it possible to interview more candidates than before to ensure the right one is found.

INTERVIEW on DEMAND - removing the barriers between TOP CANDIDATES and the COMPANIES that seek them.
Hiring managers - make faster, better hires while reducing costs.
Recruiters - make more placements with more companies, faster.