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Business Services Industry

Hire Calling

Entrepreneur, August, 2000 by Chris Penttila

Why fill your office with job seekers based on resumes alone? Connect with prospects via the net and see what they have to offer.

Large companies have always had the edge when it comes to recruiting--their substantial budgets allow them to find new employees near and far. But the Internet is leveling that playing field, offering new ways for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to promote their businesses to job candidates. Today, even the smallest company can advertise jobs on a Web site, go to recruiting sites such as Monster.com to post job openings or use mailing lists to get the word out. "For smaller businesses, the Net has decreased the barriers [to recruiting] and put them at the starting gate with larger employers," says Steve Pollock, 38, co-founder and president of WetFeet.com, a privately held, 5-year-old online provider of company, industry and career information in San Francisco.

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Not only is the Net making it easier for small companies to promote job openings to Web-savvy job seekers, it's also speeding entrepreneurs toward the day when they can interview in real-time over the Net. The increasing power of computers, along with the growing availability of faster and cheaper highs-peed Internet connections, will let entrepreneurs use live streaming video-- digitally transmitted pictures that can be seen over a computer--to "meet" and weed out job applicants.

"In the very near future, phoning in for an interview over the computer will be commonplace," says Ken Ramberg, 35, co-founder of JOBTRACK.COM, an Internet-based service in Los Angeles that connects college graduates on campuses nationwide with potential employers through job listings. "[Online interviewing] will be a major benefit to small employers," he says, "who, in the past, have been limited by money and a local pool of employees."

NOW YOU SEE IT

For many entrepreneurs, posting jobs and sifting through the resulting resumes is only half the battle. Assuming you find promising applicants, you still have to set up interviews. But what if, thanks to the Net, you're getting resumes from Portland, Maine, and you're in Portland, Oregon? Such situations have happened to Tena Hoke, 40, president and co-founder of EASE Software, a 10-year-old software engineering company in Beaverton, Oregon, thanks to a job link on its Web site. "We've gotten resumes from everywhere--Canada, Russia, the UK and all over the U.S.," Hoke says. "At first, I was amazed, but now it's run-of-the-mill. We usually send out a canned response [to long-distance applicants] because it's too much of a problem to connect."

For budget-minded entrepreneurs, streaming video will let you interview potential employees in real time when face-to-face meetings are too challenging or expensive. With streaming video, both parties "dial in" to the same Internet connection so they can see and hear each other during the interview. Some software programs, like Microsoft's NetMeeting, even let both sides share resumes and other documents on-screen.

Another advantage: Online interviewing puts a face to a voice, and might even help determine whether it's worth the trouble to meet the candidate up close. "Streaming video would give us the opportunity to look at several candidates over the span of one hour, saving time, and, maybe in the long run, some money," says Steve Bradley, 37, CEO of RAC Solutions, a Bethesda, Maryland, company that provides customized computing services. He hasn't used streaming video for interviews yet because he still tends to recruit locally, but he's excited about its potential as his company expands. "Resumes and phone interviews alone don't do it for me," he says. "I need to see the person. Streaming video could be an added tool, a way to expedite the process."

The technology for streaming video has been around for a few years, but its market is small because most Internet connections are still too slow to support the large amount of digital information being sent and received. Today, people using slower Internet connections get grainy, slow video that lags behind the audio. This can be difficult for some people to handle. "The participants end up communicating via the audio," says Rick Pittson, product manager of Viewcast, a Dallas company that designs, manufactures and markets high-quality, standards-based video communications solutions for businesses.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill MBA student Shannon Smith, 30, got some experience with online interviewing when she was on a European exchange program to the Netherlands in the fall of 1999. While there, she applied over the Net for jobs with various U.S. companies. She ended up doing preliminary interviews with some larger employers, live and online from videoconferencing facilities at her host school. Smith found the experience disjointed because the pictures and sound were out of synch. "I couldn't even look at [the interviewer] or I wouldn't hear the question," she says. "But at the same time, it was neat to see who I was talking to. The technology is slow right now, but it will improve."

Business Services Industry

Hire Calling

Entrepreneur, August, 2000 by Chris Penttila

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