Videoconferencing maximizes recruiting

HR Magazine, August, 1995 by Karl O. Magnusen, K. Galen Kroeck, Elizabeth Shelley

Videoconferencing technology has come into its own in recent years. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies are now using this technology, and with costs ranging from $5,000 for a basic system to $25,000 for a system that provides broad videoconferencing capabilities, even more companies are expected to take advantage of this technology in the next few years. Eighty percent of companies with videoconferencing equipment now use it for such diverse purposes as intracompany communication, engineering design and development, project management, executive meetings and corporate training.

To date, the strongest HR focus on videoconferencing has been as a means to deliver corporate training programs. But despite the clear involvement of HR professionals with long-distance training, fewer than 5 percent of companies are using videoconferencing for recruiting and interviewing. Some companies, however, have begun testing videoconference job interviewing (VJI) for campus recruiting.

ONE UNIVERSITY'S SOLUTION

An active experiment with VJI is online at Florida International University in Miami. The university's career planning and placement (CP&P) office initiated VJI when its director faced a special problem. While students looking for jobs were making greater demands on CP&P services, employers were making fewer recruiting visits to college campuses as part of a nationwide trend. Despite the school's good academic reputation and culturally diverse student base, employers were not eager to commit to on-campus recruiting.

According to CP&P director, Olga Magnusen, "We had to do something not only to attract more employers to the campus, but also to make sure that our students were benefiting from as many opportunities as possible. In the past, recruiters estimated how many job vacancies their firms would have up to one or two years in advance. But now these estimates reflect only the next one or two months in advance." Magnusen feared the shorter estimates would require frequent campus visits and be cost-prohibitive.

Aware that the university had purchased long distance learning/teleconferencing equipment that compresses video images over telephone lines, Magnusen wondered if the equipment could be used for job interviewing and tested the idea internally between two cross-city campus locations. When test results looked promising, she contacted employers with compatible equipment to see if they would be interested in using the VJI approach.

The technology allows recruiters to interview students "live" by having employer and students speak to each other with visual contact using large-screen monitors. Both parties can talk interactively while seeing each other's movements, expressions and reactions in real time. The recruiter (but not the candidate) has access to a control pad that allows camera movement for panning and zooming. A window on the candidate's TV screen uses picture-in-picture technology to allow the candidate to view the actual image being seen by the recruiter.

EMPLOYER FEEDBACK

Employment interviewing is a relatively new application of videoconference technology and effectiveness studies are just now being done. Employers seem to like the application's potential for reducing travel costs associated with interviewing although, according to Vic La Fita from Kraft General Foods, "the approach lacks that human element." Some students who used VJI worried about being unable to shake the interviewer's hand, but others had a singularly positive opinion, like marketing major Florence Carranza, who commented that "the approach offers a great opportunity to interview with companies not visiting the campus."

Most employers contacted by CP&P have been receptive to the idea. This high tech job interviewing system has already been used by a first wave, which includes companies such as Kraft General Foods, Pfizer, AT&T, NASA-Kennedy Space Center, Underwriters Laboratories, Department of Defense, and Caterpillar. Other organizations that plan to begin using the technology include Cargill, Mobil Oil, EDS and Saturn, as well as several large school systems.

VJI offers many advantages to employers and candidates alike. Among the more readily apparent are the technology's ability to:

* Save a considerable amount in time and money. This advantage is greatest for companies that recruit or interview candidates from diverse national or international regions.

* Allow more than one person to simultaneously interview a candidate.

* Speed up recruiting processes by permitting department managers to conduct follow-up interviews with VJI before deciding to bring candidates to the firm for on-site visits.

* Extend employer recruitment pools and employee diversification efforts. Recruiters can now consider more individuals from a greater number of universities.

There may be other HR uses for the videoconferencing technology. For firms that become more team- and project-based, VJI could be used for interviewing potential team members across diverse locations. And, with more than 25 percent of Americans in the labor force employed as temporary or contract workers, building project teams may require tapping resources outside the confines of the traditional firm. In such cases, temporary help firms and independent contractors with access to VJI equipment will have an advantage. Anticipating this new use of the technology, some companies with VJI equipment are renting it on an "as available" basis, with typical rental fees running $150-$300 per hour, plus a scheduling fee of about $75. The equipment is also available on a "public room" basis at several Kinko Copy Center locations nationwide.