Just a quick note about a cool new product that hit the scene. Check out HarQen (rhymes with “Darth Vader’s Colleague the Gran Moff Tarkin) product called VoiceScreener at VoiceScreener.com. I demoed it last week and was nicely impressed.

The tool isn’t necessarily groundbreaking in it’s scope, but the execution is quite impressive. In a sentence, they allow you to do automated, recorded, standardized telephone interviews. Essentially you email a link out to a candidate and when they click it, they are instructed to enter their phone number and the system calls them, and records their short answers (3 minutes or less) to several standardized questions.  The system then allows you to replay the recorded answers at will and rank (1-5 stars) the quality of the answer to quickly determine which candidates are worth a more detailed call from a recruiter.

I can imagine a number of uses of this system.  I think it would be great for pre-screening for positions where communication skills and phone presence are very important, and it could also be great for any position where the answer to a single question can make or break a candidate (including technical positions where you could ask something very open like “please describe your experience working in a Ruby on Rails environment).

This candidate-rich environment is perfect for testing out new products and tools to improve the recruitment efficiency of your business.  Pinstripe has been vocal about how well the system is working for them, so it’s definitely worth checking out.  The price starts at $7 per competed screen, but goes down by 2/3 or more with volume.

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I saw an interesting article on the “Infection Greed” blog (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/has_the_us_layo.html) showing a graph that may appear to show that the growing layoff trend is actually trailing off.  The graph shows layoffs peaking in January and dropping in February.

I’m not quite as rosy as they are in looking at these numbers for two main reasons:

1) The spike in January layoffs from December may be caused by company’s who simply didn’t want to bad Karma (or bad press, or bad feelings) of laying off staff right before the Christmas holiday, and put off the inevitable until January.  This pushed some December layoffs into January, under reporting the December numbers and over reporting the January numbers.  This makes February approximately flat from December and January.  Given that layoffs cost company’s cash in the short term (PTO payouts, termination expenses etc.) I also wonder if the January spike was also an attempt to massage FY08 numbers by pushing those expenses into FY09.

2) Large, public companies (who account for a lot of this layoff activity) tend to be swayed by their stock price and public perception of their performance.  I think everyone got a bit of a free pass for the last few months as investors blamed “the economy” for everything but largely didn’t point the fingers at individual companies.  I think investors are done with that view and are now watching individual companies like hawks and seeing how management is handling the recession.  Management doesn’t have much more time to start acting aggressively to make cuts and return to early 2008 profitability levels.  I expect we are going to see a lot more layoffs in the months to come as management make the tough decisions required to thrive in this economy.

What do you think?  Is the worst over, or are there darker days yet to come?

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