The progression of hiring options for businesses in America has followed the evolution of communication in the world.  We’ve highlighted some significant developments in this series–the Pony Express, the telegraph, the telephone, the cell phone, and the internet.  (The means of delivery has gotten smaller, but the area of delivery has gotten larger.  Crazy, huh?)

So, here’s the general progression of how to find the best employees in America:

*Hiring the best option out of whoever came in off the street.  Immediate results, but limited talent pool.

*Reaching out by Pony Express to get those adventurous, entrepreneurial types who had crossed the plains to make their fortune in California.   Offers and answers could be delivered in the lightning-fast speed of 10 days.  Sure, the horses were fast, but better hope your guy was still in the same place.

*Receiving inquiries and offering jobs to people using Morse Code and a telegraph from wherever a telegraph line reached.  Hiring with interpreters!

*Phone interviews.  At last, hiring managers can speak to an actual person to get a little more resume information.  Still, it’s difficult to “read” a prospective employee over the phone.

*Online job postings.  Unleashing the power of the internet to reach anyone with a keyboard, expanding the talent pool tremendously.  Exchanging job information through cyberspace.  Much faster, reaching a wider talent pool, but unreliable results.  Unfortunately, resulting in employer abuse through video resumes. 

*Video interviews.  The pinnacle of job-seeking and hiring technology.  Improving on the idea of video resumes by being employer-driven rather than desperate job-seeker driven.  A few companies starting up with some success, because it’s an idea whose time has come.

*Interview On Demand.  The latest, greatest technology in video interviews.  THE way to conduct video interviews–smooth, efficient, effective.  Interview On Demand’s video interview system is intuitive enough so that anyone can use it.  It saves employers time and money, and maximizes productivity.  It expands the talent pool to the whole world.  Interview On Demand is a global solution to an age-old problem.

And there you have it.  All the inventions, technological leaps and advances of the modern age growing, building on each other, and coming to perfection in….Interview On Demand.

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.

So far, we’ve talked about the Pony Express, the telegraph, the telephone, and the cell phone.  Some things come and go, and some things are so useful we keep them around forever.

Of all the things that seem to be an integral part of your life, the internet has got to be on that list.  How could you live without e-mail?  Without being able to “Google” something for fast information?  Without being able to shop online?  Without being able to research hotels or book cheap airline tickets for your vacation?   Without MapQuest, for crying out loud!  (Those of you who haven’t joined the GPS Generation, that is–are there any of you left?)

Can you believe this stuff’s only been around since the 1990’s?  

Like countless other things we take for granted today, the internet began as a military application.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s, military mainframe computers could be joined in finite networks to share information.  From there came the idea that they could be joined to get information from other networks.  (Hence, the term “web.”  It’s a really descriptive term for how informational networks are joined.  Don’t roll your eyes.  Some people haven’t made that connection.)   If you’re a computer geek, or otherwise just really interested in this, go to this article on the history of the development of the internet that’s guaranteed to warm your little tech-lovin’ heart. 

Personal computers and internet use followed the same progression.  Personal computers were introduced to the mass market via the Apple II in 1977 and then with the IBM PC in 1981.   (Again,for a more detailed history, see this History of Microprocessors.)  Still, they were more of a novelty than a way of life until the introduction of America Online in 1989 that brought e-mail and web-surfing to the masses.  Not to mention search engines.  Remember discovering Yahoo! and then Google?  (See this Evolution of the Internet.) 

This timeline is easy to read and says that currently, over 1billion people worldwide enjoy access to the internet, which includes 70% of the North American population.  That’s a lot of people online. 

Interview On Demand is poised and ready to take advantage that fact and use the tremendous capabilities we have at our disposal to assist employers and candidates to connect with each other in the fastest, most efficient and productive way possible.  Video job interviews use the best aspects of the internet to enable employers to quickly identify top candidates that will most benefit their companies.  Video interviews make job searches easier and less time-consuming for candidates–they offer more flexiblity in scheduling and the assurance that if you do get called in for an interview, the company is really interested.  That’s a confidence-booster, too.

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.

Cell phones are everywhere.  Even 9-year-olds have them.  Cell phones have, at the same time, the capability to be the greatest convenience of your life and business as well as a source of masive irritation to others if you forget your cell phone etiquette–also in life and in business. 

But where did they come from?  Cell phones have developed as a natural progression of experiments, insights, and technological advances in many different areas.  (And how do they work?  This article explains it nicely.)

Notable dates and progressions in the history of the cell phone :

 1843 - Michael Faraday experiments to see if space could conduct electricity

1865 - Mahlon Loomis (a dentist) sent up kites with copper screens connected to the ground with copper wires to transmit messages through the air using the atmosphere as a conductor

1895 - Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless message (using Morse Code)

 1921 - The Detroit Police Department installed the first land-mobile radio telephone systems for police car dispatch

1973 -  Martin Cooper from Motorola placed the first cell phone call….to his rival at AT&T.  (I love that…)

 1977 - Chicago became the first city to use cell phones, on a trial basis, with 2000 users.

1983 - Motorola introduced the “DynaTAC,” the first truly portable cell phone.  It cost $3500.00, weighed 2.5 lbs., needed 10 hours to charge for 30 minutes of talk time. 

1980s - most mobile phones in the U.S. were permanently installed as car phones

1987 - over 1 million cell phone users in the U.S.

1990s - as cell phone technology developed, phones became lighter-weight and more powerful and feature-packed

2006 - over 233 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S.

Today, cell phones have progressed to camera phones, and Bluetooth technology has revolutionized it them even more by enabling hands-free use.   In the future, cell phones are expected to use holographic displays, have credit card capabilities, have mobile television reception, and more. 

Do you see the progression?  The emergence of faster, more efficient communication, one technological leap at a time.  (In the end, I’m going to get you to video interviewing with Interview On Demand….you knew that, right?)  So far, we’ve discussed:

The Pony Express

The Telegraph

The Telephone

Cell Phones

What’s next?  The internet.   

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.

Who invented the telephone?  You would all answer “Alexander Graham Bell”, right?  Me, too… until I started researching for this lightly informative series on the history of communications in America.  Apparently there’s a whole mess of controversy I didn’t know about, and I bet you didn’t, either. 

The generally accepted story is that Alexander Graham Bell was working to improve the telegraph, which had been successfully in use for years but could only transmit one message at a time.  Bell’s background in music and sound inspired him with the idea that he could transmit multiple messages at the same time by using signals of differing pitch, or sound–he called it the “harmonic telegraph.”  This is what he had received financial backing for.  However, while working on the harmonic telegraph, he realized he could hear sound over a wire.  Working with his assistant, electrician Thomas Watson, he then perfected the idea and the means of transmitting sound (speech) using electrical signals.  “Mr. Watson, come here.  I want to see you” was the first thing he said. 

Here’s where the controversy comes in:  there’s a new book out this month called The Telephone Gambit:  Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (see exerpts from the book here) that maintains that Bell stole his ideas for the telephone from Elisha Gray.  It is true that Elisha Gray filed his patent for the telephone mere hours after Bell, in February 1876.  An extensive legal battle ensued, which Bell won. 

And, there are a large number of people who claim that Italian immigrant named Antonia Meucci invented the telephone, but that through bad luck and poverty, he failed to establish a patent on it.  There’s much more detail in this article, ” and justice for all.”  It’s significant–in 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution endorsing Meucci as the inventor of the telephone because he had demonstrated his invention as early as 1860 and had a description of it in an Italian-language newspaper in New York. 

Whoever’s going to end up with the credit for inventing the telephone, being able to speak to someone in real time and get an immediate response revolutionized life and business in America.   Sit for just a second and really think about how mind-boggling that would have been…going from sending letters across the country by Pony Express to Morse-code-clicking with a telegraph to actual speech.  Building on that, we progressed from switchboard operators (who could listen in on your call) to party lines (so your neighbors could listen in on your call) to private lines with call-waiting to cordless phones to….cell phones!  Coming up next. 

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.