InterviewMaster helps conduct automated video interviews

InterviewMaster is a Web-based tool for conducting online video interviews--without an interviewer. This concept of automated video interviews also allows recruiters to prerecord video questions, se tup interviews, and invite any number of candidates in a few minutes.

This is followed by an automated process which helps even candidates with minimum technical knowledge to attend interviews whenever they are free from the location of their choice and interviews are available in a structured inbuilt evaluation tool to the line manager at convenience.

Some of the problems it addresses are:

• Scheduling issues: Significant percentage of Recruitment Executive's time is spent in scheduling interviews; Interviews are delayed forever, good candidates are missed and business suffers due to scheduling delays.
  
• Poor conversion ratios: Line Managers spent hours in face to face interviews with candidates who were assessed as poor fit in first question itself; Can't spend quality time with good candidates.
  
• Telephonic/Written Test Frauds: Impersonation and malpractices are common in telephonic interviews and written tests. Candidate data base: Reusable database of video interviews for just in time hiring and performance tracking.
  
• Data Preservation: One of the key things it does is help preserve data even when the recruiter leaves.
  
• Internet Bandwidth Issues in video conference interviews: Candidates in India lack access to good internet connections. Their technology is bandwidth independent. 

Sanjoe Jose, co-founder of this product startup InterviewMaster, told ZDNet: "During our IIT [university] days we used to provide mock interview practice to juniors and students from other departments. We wanted to get alumni involved in mock interviews. But though very keen to be of any assistance possible for students of their alma-mater, tight schedules making it almost impossible for them to conduct mock interviews."

During their college days they came up with the idea of recording student responses and making it available online for alumni to evaluate whenever they are free but left it unimplemented. After constantly discussing the idea with people they met and soon realized that similar problems of much bigger magnitude exists in job recruitment sector. Poor conversion ratios and frequent travels leading to loss of productive employee time and lack of access to experienced candidates due to schedule conflicts and chaotic processes as a result of large number of candidates landing up in their premises. That is when InterviewMaster was launched in May 2012.

There are a few similar products in U.S. and Europe. However their product certainly stands out across Asia. Since it is being built and tested in India it is more resilient to poor infrastructure i.e Internet bandwidth, hardware quality and is also highly scalable considering the advantage of serving large volumes in domestic market. They are the first and only player to offer automated video interview in a self service model according to them. They target segments where employees are perceived more tech savvy. For example, technology companies, financial services, startups, and etc.

According to them they have more than 40 organizations using their enterprise product. They have just completed a soft launch of their self-service platform and received lot of interest from across the globe. In the near future they plan to aggressively market the platform through ads, literature, contests and the works.
 
They have received seed funding from Venture Nursery, a Mumbai-based accelerator. They plan to raise funds to fuel promotion of self service platform and also to scale business to business sales in another few months. As per Sanjoe, they also have to plans to invest significantly in technology to revolutionize the way videos are used by enterprises today.

While a lot of interviews may be conducted via GotoMeeting, Skype and other online broadband or streaming applications, this certainly is one way of tackling the issues associated with bandwidth as such. How far will this go and how much traction and acceptance this would get as a culture overall is something that would be interesting to see in the future. What do you think?