We've been using a really nifty service to hire our next analyst. It's called TakeTheInterview. This product/company came out of this summer's DreamIt Ventures program in NYC.
We wrote a blog post outlining the position and then linked to TakeTheInterview (note – the application process ended twelve days ago and is closed). Candidates click on that link, fill out a few key data points (name, contact info, blog url, linked in profile, etc) and then they take two short video interviews (90 seconds and 120 seconds). The minute our post went live, I put myself through the candidate flow and I found it drop dead simple. Obviously looking into a webcam and speaking articulately and well about two topics for almost three minutes is not drop dead simple but that's the point of TakeTheInterview.
For the employer, TakeTheInterview has a nice interface that makes it fairly efficient to watch a ton of video. We got about 250 completed applications so that is about 10 hours of video. About half of the people in our firm watched each and every video. The other half watched the top 1/3 of the applicants as rated by the team that watched every video. So in total, our firm watched about 45 hours of video in this hiring process. And TakeTheInterview does a nice job with the video consumption flow. I watched a bunch of the video on my family room TV via a mac mini and that worked pretty well.
The main piece of feedback we've given TakeTheInterview is that they need a better scoring system in the service. We cobbled together one using Google Docs which works, but a slick candidate scoring system in the service would have saved our team a lot of time. I suspect that won't be too hard for TakeTheInterview to build.
Our hiring process in the past started with a blog post asking for a web presence (blog url, linkedin), followed by phone screens, ending in face to face interviews with the finalists. We swapped out the phone screens with TakeTheInterview and in the process we were able to see everyone in action as opposed to phone screens with a small subset.
I'm very enthusiastic about this new tool. Seeing people live and in person without having to commit to a long in person interview creates a lot of important information early in the hiring process. I'd encourage others to give TakeTheInterview a try.
