February 26, 2001, 10:54 AM — Videoconferencing proved long ago that it can reduce travel costs and extend a company's geographic reach, but have you considered what it can do for recruitment? Conducting job interviews over a long-distance video hookup has undeniable benefits. Doing it consistently well requires mastering some logistical issues, however; recent Web-driven trends make the technology choices both more interesting and more complex.
The potential for savings is obvious. Renting a videoconferencing room -- the preferred option for companies who lack their own remote facilities -- rarely costs more than a few hundred dollars per hour. Travel and hotel costs can easily exceed $3,000.
Arguably, a more important benefit is the expanded labor pool that videoconferencing lets you reach. "It's opened up the world for job candidates," said Lois Grimshaw, provincial coordinator of videoconferencing at the British Columbia Ministry of Education in Victoria, B.C. "In the past, you wouldn't have flown someone in. It would be too expensive." Grimshaw said her agency used a video interview to hire a candidate in Cairo, Egypt, and she regularly rents out her boardroom-size videoconferencing facility for interviews.
Video interviews have been around for at least a decade, said H. Michael Boyd, program manager of human resource strategies at International Data Corp. (IDC) in Framingham, Mass. "The search firms started using it years ago when videoconferencing was in its infancy," Boyd said. "Around 10 years ago, they would send people to Kinko's, which had videoconferencing rooms." The method worked well for executive search firms because the search firm's commission could easily cover its expenses, and clients benefited by relieving senior managers of time-consuming prescreening interviews, Boyd said.
Kinko's remains a player in video interviews, said Amy Holmes, group manager of conference services for Sprint's Global Business Markets Group (Kansas City, Mo.), which provides the network connections and services. "Kinko's does a lot of business in the interviewing space, especially in the major metropolitan areas," Holmes said. "In fact, they are targeting HR people." You can schedule the joint Sprint/Kinko's service by calling (800) 669-1235. Sprint, like archrivals AT&T, MCI WorldCom, and others, also sells videoconferencing hardware and connections directly to corporations, according to Holmes.
Get a room
If you want to try video interviewing and your company lacks its own remote facilities, you'll have to book a room near the candidate. Live video interviews are more feasible if you own equipment at the recruiter's or hiring manager's location. If your company has such facilities, it might have a full- or part-time videoconferencing coordinator who can do the legwork -- Grimshaw does it for the British Columbia government. She arranged the Cairo interview by locating a facility run by the American Chamber of Commerce.
Besides Kinko's, your best bet may be a local college. The academic community maintains a large percentage of public videoconferencing facilities; dozens of overseas and US schools rent out rooms that aren't being used for remote learning. Some companies also use these academic connections to interview college graduates at their videoconferencing sites. Texaco, for example, reportedly interviewed 120 MBA students recently at 25 campus and hotel locations around the world.
To find a third-party videoconferencing site, Grimshaw suggested referring to listings of public rooms, such as the International Videoconferencing Directory. (See the Resources section below for a link.) There are also brokers who will do the legwork for you. I found two -- EyeNetwork and Vtcmeetings.com -- in a quick search of the Web.
Web technologies: Changing the picture
The Internet is helping to make video interviews cheaper, easier to distribute, and reusable, which enables radically different options for exposing job candidates to a camera, an interviewer, and a set of good questions.
The first and most obvious choice is to put a $50 camera and Web-based conferencing software on each participant's PC. Long knocked for its small, grainy images and herky-jerky movements, PC video has improved markedly in recent years, and the popularity of media players such as RealPlayer 8 from RealNetworks (Seattle) makes it easy to distribute recorded interviews. Some experts, however, caution that only more expensive, dedicated hardware from vendors such as PictureTel (Andover, Mass.) and Polycom (Milpitas, Calif.) provides a realistic simulation of in-person interviews. The last thing you want to do, they say, is distract already nervous participants with video problems and technical glitches (though in fairness, these are hardly unheard of in $20,000 room-size systems).
