Here’s another dot-com idea: pre-screening job applicants online.
InterviewNow.com, an Irvine based firm with 25 employees, allows recruiters to funnel candidates from all job-posting sources through one portal for sifting. Applicants can be knocked out in the first round and sent a “no interest” e-mail, or numerically ranked, the highest scoring applicants on the top, for further review.
The company, backed with about $1.5 million, intends to have 100 employees and 600 companies signed up, at $1,000 per month, by the end of the year.
Starbucks, Broadcom, Novell and Kingston Technologies are some of the companies that have signed on to try it.
InterviewNow, with a week left of beta testing, already has launched an aggressive marketing campaign. Its strategy is to drive customers to the site to allow the sales people to do their job, said Martin Almao, vice president of business development and marketing. It is advertising in business magazines like Forbes and Business 2.0 as well as trade magazines like HR Executive.
Online Resumes
While the hiring process typically involves a face-to-face interview, the first step of sorting through resumes that are mailed, faxed, e-mailed, Fed-Ex’d and otherwise dropped on your desk can be tackled online, says Jamie Burgess, InterviewNow’s vice president of operations.
“There’s an administrative nightmare as far as reviewing these resumes and sorting the resumes,” he said.
Through InterviewNow, the recruiter is able to custom-design an online “interview” for each job position using a template.
An interview code that the recruiter uses in all job advertising is generated for each job description. For instance, if the applicant is applying for a software engineering job she saw in a trade publication or the help wanted section of the daily newspaper, she enters the job code at the InterviewNow.com web site. The recruiter can also refer applicants to an e-mail address or a web site link,also system generated,when posting job openings on career sites like monster.com or the company’s own web site.
Once the applicant is on line, she tests for “competency,” to see if she’s a fit in the corporate culture, completes a self evaluation and supplies references, who through e-mail are guided to InterviewNow and asked to evaluate the candidate with an online form.
Cotelligent, a software-design firm based in UCI’s Research Park designed the site.
Father-Son Teams
InterviewNow was established in September by two father-son teams who merged family money. Richard Beatty, author of numerous books like “The Perfect Cover Letter,” had the idea. His son Chris (senior VP of sales), a friend of Jamie Burgess, talked Jamie into getting his dad, Bob Burgess, to invest. Bob Burgess, an OC investor who has been involved in startups including PharmaPrint and ZLand.com, thought InterviewNow was a great idea even amid the dust storm kicked up by floundering dot-coms. He pulled together $1.5 million, the Beattys brought in $100,000 and together they are working to secure an additional $4.5 million in angel funding.
PharmaPrint has hit hard times since Burgess left the firm two years ago, so he was able to scoop up many of PharmaPrint’s former key executives, including Almao, who was PharmaPrint’s vice president of development and is InterviewNow’s vice president of business development and marketing; Joel Bresser, PharmaPrint’s senior vice president of operations and currently COO of InterviewNow; Douglas Howland, PharmaPrint’s controller, now corporate controller for InterviewNow.
While the family has corporate duties at InterviewNow, Burgess said it is recruiting an experienced CEO. Eventually, the families will set the dot-com free and remain shareholders and directors, Burgess said.
