A Hire Calling Alternative Interviewing Techniques Help Meet Employers’ Needs

When Brad Triplett went to apply for a job at the Hollywood Video store in Shawnee, Kan., he was directed around the counter to a small computer terminal.

There he stood for about 20 minutes, typing in his application information and answering psychological profiling questions that appeared on the screen.

A day later, the store director got Triplett’s profile results, which showed him to have a strong customer-service bent. He’s been working there now for three months.

When David Doherty was testing the waters for a better sales and marketing job, he went to the Kirdonn Group, a Kansas City recruiting agency specializing in that field.

There, Doherty sat in front of a computer terminal with a tiny video camera mounted on top. He answered four questions on camera and filmed a two-minute promotional video for himself. Then he pushed a button to make it part of his resume package.

One of Kirdonn’s client companies, freightPro.com, saw Doherty’s video and, within days, pulled him in for interviews and hired him. He’s been on the job now about a month.

Some job hunters may rail at depersonalization of the hiring process and grouse that people have been replaced by machines, but higher-tech hiring tools are gaining fans.

Both Triplett and Doherty — and the people who hired them — gave thumbs-up to their experiences and declared the processes “better than the old way.”

Along with narrowing the applicant field and speeding up the hiring steps, these computerized candidate-screening systems inject a uniformity into the hiring process.

The hiring systems put candidates on level ground for consideration, and they can help keep hiring managers from wandering onto illegal turf with inappropriate interview questions.

The market is getting more crowded for such hiring tools, but here’s a look at two candidate-screening providers and how their systems are being used.

In the past, store manager Carol Farris says she might not even have seen Brad Triplett’s application in a timely way. Walk-in applications at the Hollywood Video store, unfortunately, sometimes were stashed in check-out counter drawers by part-time workers busy with customers.

“I love this system,” Farris said of the Decision Point Systems terminal on the video store counter. “At first I was afraid people would look at it and walk away, but they don’t. They stand there and fill it out, and I get a record of every application right away.”

Within a day, she gets a job candidate’s profile faxed back to her store, scoring the applicant on customer service skills that the company seeks. Within hours, she knows whether the applicant is someone she wants to invite in for an interview.

The video chain began using the system, which it dubs CAST, nationally last year. Kristin Horak, vice president of special projects at Hollywood Video’s headquarters in Oregon, said turnover had been reduced by 40 percent in stores that were early users of the CAST screening system.

“We are hiring people that are more suited to the jobs and stay longer,” Horak said. “People who did not get hired through the CAST system are leaving at twice the rate of those hired through CAST.”

The company uses the applicant screening tool in all of its stores, warehouses and even corporate headquarters.

At a recent trade show at Bartle Hall, Adam Mertz, product marketing manager for Decision Point Systems, showed how questions on the application terminals - and even the application “kiosks” themselves - can be customized.

Hollywood Video, Blockbuster Video and Target stores are among client companies that have had Decision Point Systems create online application forms and screening questions that fit their needs, Mertz said.

“Our clients’ companies tell us that eight out of 10 paper application forms that are picked up at their locations don’t ever come back to them,” Mertz said. “With the kiosks, they report getting more applications filled out and returned. Then, the big benefit is that the screening helps knock out unqualified or unsatisfactory candidates right away.”

Mertz admitted that no computerized system could promise to pick the best candidate, but the customized questionnaires can help employers find applicants who best fit their needs.

Mertz said client companies typically pay about $200 a month per terminal, a fee that’s costeffective because of the time it saves the human resource office or hiring managers from wading through applications and trying to narrow the applicant field.

A ground-level suite of offices at 109th Street and Roe Avenue is the Overland Park headquarters for SoftVu, where founder Tim Donnelly and his small but growing staff are rolling out the video recruiting product used by job hunter David Doherty.

“I’ve been involved in hiring, and I’ve seen the need for a better way to showcase talent and abilities,” Donnelly said. “I think we’ve got something that is better, faster, cheaper all the way around.”

In addition to the Kirdonn agency, early SoftVu clients include the Spencer Reed Group, Rockhurst University and Benedictine College.

For $1,500 to $2,000 a month, recruiters, job counseling offices and hirers have access to what Donnelly alternately calls an “Internet video streaming product” and a “video resume portal.”

Clients can get the hardware and software necessary to videotape applicant presentations, as the Kirdonn Group has done, or they can send candidates to SoftVu for videotaping and then view the candidates’ presentations online.

Job applicants have the choice of letting their paper resumes speak for themselves or sitting in front of the blue fabric backdrop to record a video to add to their application.

If they do record a video, they respond to questions on the computer screen, questions that can be generic job interview questions or tailored for the client company.

Jim Panus, president of the Kirdonn Group, said his agency generally placed 25 to 30 sales and marketing candidates a month in the Kansas City area. Since March, when the agency began using the SoftVu video system, Panus said, the time frame for “previewing” candidates has sped up.

At freightPro.com, the com pany that hired Doherty, president Jim Bramlett said his inaugural experience sold him on the video screening process.

“It takes us a lot less time and effort to nail down the candidates,” Bramlett said.