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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