Spearheading video interviewing at Appointments Bi‐Language
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| Pages | 8-9 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390780000947 |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
| Author | Tim Venn,Kees Hoogstraate |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
8Volume 6 Issue 2 January/February 2007
HR at WORK
,
Short case studies that demonstrate best practice in rewards
Spearheading video interviewing
at Appointments Bi-Language
I
n December 2006, recruitment firm
Appointments Bi-Language partnered
with global technology company,
Sony Corporation, to host a live
videoconference to interview
candidates for real job vacancies in
Australia and the UK.
Global recruitment challenges
Two of the biggest problems facing HR
in today’s global recruitment market
are the financial cost of travelling to
interview foreign applicants (or paying
for them to travel to interviews) and
also the cost of managing our network
operations.
The first one is particularly an issue
at early stages of the recruitment
process when our priority is to filter for
the best candidate. Time costs are an
additional problem. Both candidates
and our staff often cannot afford to
take time out of busy schedules to
travel for interviews and even if parties
are willing to put up the time and
budget to meet, interviews can take a
long time to arrange, increasing the
risk of losing candidates to faster
moving employers.
A telephone interview is often used
as an alternative to travelling to meet a
candidate for first-round interviews;
however this has proven to be a poor
substitute. As various studies have
shown, 55 percent of a message in
interpersonal communications is
communicated through body language,
which would be crucially missed in a
telephone conversation. Without
meeting a candidate in person, we risk
rejecting top candidates or progressing
sub-standard candidates.
Avoiding unnecessary travel costs
The cost of managing our network
operations is also significant. Last
month, Appointments Bi-Language
paid nearly UK£5,000 to cover flights,
one week’s accommodation and
spending costs for one of our UK
recruitment team to visit our Australian
office.
We tried to address this issue by
using a web-camera for our daily and
weekly internal meetings because we
thought we couldn’t afford an
investment in videoconferencing at this
stage. Although this is a temporary
solution, which offers the benefit of
face-to-face communication, the quality
and clarity of the image captured by
the web-camera was so poor that we
wouldn’t be able to use it to remotely
interview our candidates.
Recruitment Live!
Sony worked with Appointments Bi-
Language to show how
videoconferencing can help companies
of any size expand and establish
themselves faster in today’s fiercely
competitive global marketplace.
Sony used its PCS-G50Ps group
systems (effectively, a
videoconferencing unit featuring a flat
panel screen and additional camera
that can connect multiple sites to the
link) to connect the candidates and
recruiters from the UK to Australia and
also to stream the event live to Sony
offices in France and Germany where
audiences including local media were
able to observe the experience – this
was because of the pioneering nature
of the experiment.
Tim Venn and Alex Panou, directors
of Appointments Bi-Language and Chris
Fitzgerald, senior recruitment
consultant at Appointments Bi-
Language interviewed four candidates
who wanted to come and work in
Europe and Australia for two years
starting in early 2007. They all agreed
that the clarity of the image was of
such a good quality that they could
perfectly read the candidate’s body
language.
At the end of the interview session,
the recruiters gave feedback to the
Appointments Bi-Language, established in
1991, is a UK-based recruitment agency
that caters for multilingual clients,
including Goldman Sachs, HSBC, L'Oreal
and the Penguin Group.
APPTMTS BI-LANGUAGE
Videoconferencing gives companies an advantage in the global competition for talent, say Tim Venn, director of
recruitment firm, Appointments Bi-Language, and Kees Hoogstraate, European marketing manager at Sony Europe.
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