Save time screening potential candidates with interviewME’s one-way video interviewing software platform.
Software company interviewME has helped a large number of South Africa's biggest and small companies make recruitment easy with their one-way video interviewing platform.
The platform, according to founder Jesse Bosch, interviews candidates on behalf of the hiring company. You create questions to ask candidates. You can either record yourself asking questions as an interviewer, or create text-based questions.
The system, Jesse says, builds a branded interview for the company. “When you build this interview, our system generates a branded advert, and candidates view the advert and get redirected to our platform. Alternatively, our clients can invite candidates to do the interviews via our platform. Our software actually interviews the candidate upfront for our clients.”
Once the hiring companies have viewed the completed one-way interviews, in-person interviews can then be scheduled with the candidates by making use of interviewME’s scheduling tool. This removes the need to co-ordinate candidates’ and interviewers’ diaries.
Jesse says when he was the sales and managing director of various companies, he had a consistent frustration around the interviewing process. “All the companies made use of various HR tools like the applicant tracking systems, payroll tools, etc, but none of those tools catered to the actual interviewing headache. Often we’d put up job posts and we’d get hundreds – if not thousands – of CVs from candidates. All of these CVs almost looked identical.
“I could never get a feel from a CV as to whether the candidate could actually do the job. In order for you to get to know the candidate, you would have to do the first interview or a screening call. Often, two minutes into the call with the candidate, you realise that they are not a fit for various reasons. Most managers do not have the capacity to interview every single candidate. The problem when you don’t interview everyone is you miss a lot of good candidates because you purely judged the candidate based on their CV,” Jesse says.
He says their software does the interviews for the hiring company. He emphasises,however, that the purpose of their platform is not to replace in-person interviews, but rather help companies identify who they actually want to interview in person.
“When I started this business I thought, there has got to be another way to get to know the candidate behind the CV without having to interview them, so I did a bit of research and I found this thing called one-way interviews, which is huge in the US and Europe.”
There was no one in South Africa providing a one-way video interviewing solution, which is what made Jesse decide to develop the software in the country. He had to take into consideration that South Africa has high data costs and a loadshedding problem.
“We’ve been very careful in how we design the platform. We officially launched in October last year with just myself, but we now have 27 staff members, just under 100 paying clients and around 8,000 candidates on our platform,” says Jesse.
The company has now partnered with one of the top three insurance companies in the country, which uses them for recruiting graduates and C-level roles. In addition to using the platform for recruiting, the insurance company will be making use of interviewME to help some of their youth members who are job seekers, by getting them to do mock one-way interviews and give feedback to the job seekers on how to do interviews better and make themselves more marketable.
“One of South Africa's largest NGOs, ForAfrika, is helping the youth by creating various different one-way interviews for job seekers to do and giving feedback to interviewees on how they should answer questions and help them prepare in the best possible way to enter the working world and nail the first interview,” says Jesse.
“We also work with the largest pharmaceutical retailer in SA, who uses us for C-level roles, tellers, truck drivers and security guards even, so our tool works for everyone – candidates are able to do interviews from their mobile phones and it’s very affordable from a data usage perspective.”
The software platform allows hiring companies to even decide how much time candidates have to answer the questions put forward to them, to avoid lengthy candidate answers.
“The candidate has the ability to not be judged purely on a piece of paper, which is their CV. The clients are able to very quickly identify whether this is a candidate they actually want to invite for an interview,” Jesse says.
“We are a proudly South African business. We are a level 2 BEE company that’s 51 percent black female owned. We believe in the brand and we are constantly evolving. We are a lot more affordable than any of these international tools and equally, if not more, feature rich.”
The platform, he says,will save companies between 60 to 70 percent of their time in the initial screening process.
