1. BUSINESS LIFE
REBECCA GREENFIELD
The future of job interviews might
horrify you. It horrified Jake Rosen.
A recent graduate of UCLA, Rosen
was applying to be a page at NBC (yes,
yes, just like Kenneth) when he
learned he wouldn’t be going to an
office to talk to a human being about
his skills. Instead, he interviewed by
webcam, on a laptop.
So Skype, right? Nope, nothing as
personal as that. He recorded his
answers and sent them back to a
hiring manager at NBC for review at
the company’s convenience.
It’s the robo-interview, and it goes
something like this. In the more
humane experience, a hiring
manager, who also isn’t all that
practised in the art of digital video,
delivers taped questions. Or, if it’s
truly Mr Roboto, a question pops up
on the screen. You have a limited
amount of time to answer. You talk to
your computer, record the responses,
and send them back to the company.
Sometimes there’s a practice question
to get prospective employees used to
talking to a camera. Sometimes there
isn’t. Often, at the end, you have the
chance to re-record your answers.
For shy people, it may be a dream
come true. No firm handshake
needed, and sure, you smell fine. And
wouldn’t we all love the redo option
after making up an answer and
mumbling it, too?
For everyone else, it’s awkward at
best. It’s a pretty slick encounter, a
little like FaceTime, except you’re
forced to stare at your big, nervous
face as you wax on about why you
want to work at the company. It feels
more like performing for an invisible
audience than having a conversation,
because that’s essentially what it is.
Not used to being on camera, Rosen
felt flustered from the first question,
which coloured the rest of his
interview, he said.
“I’m not a YouTube star,
obviously,” he said. “It’s such a weird
experience talking to a camera. It
honestly was pretty horrible.” Jamie
Black, who suffered through the
video interview experience for a job at
a school, said it felt “more like a game
show than an interview”.
For many of us, the experience
will soon be unavoidable. The
human-free video job interview is on
the rise. HireVue, one of a handful of
companies making video interview
software, works with 600 large
organisations, including Deloitte, J P
Morgan Chase, Under Armour, and
most of the major US airlines. This
year, the company will do 2.5 million
interviews, up from 13,000 five years
ago. Nearly 90 per cent of those are
“on demand” interviews, with
nobody live at the other end.
For a hiring manager, the
draw of the video interview is
mainly efficiency.
“Companies want to get to know
way more people,” said Mark
Newman, the founder of HireVue. A
recruiter can only get through so
many 30-minute conversations in a
day. And that doesn’t take into
account time lost to scheduling or on
bad candidates.
With a video interview, human
resources staff members only have to
review the answers, and can do so on
their own schedule, without having to
travel for on-campus recruiting.
Using HireVue, Hilton got its hiring
cycle down to 4.5 days, almost 20
days shorter than the average
interview process. All of this saves
companies money.
©Bloomberg
Yournextjob interviewmay be taken by a robot
Candidatesinterviewedbywebcamsendtheirresponsetothefirmforreview
The webcam interview feels more like performing for an invisible audience
than having a conversation PHOTO: iSTOCK