Quick Pitch: Take the Interview is a job interview service that adds a video component to job candidate screening.
Genius Idea: Giving employers important information about how candidates present themselves earlier in the interview process.
Large firms wouldn't pay for representatives to bop between college job fairs if it were possible to tell everything about a job candidate from a resume. Those sheets of carefully considered qualifications don't always show what people are really like.
Yet, here's how the hiring process often works: An HR representative culls promising resumes, calls their owners for a brief screening and then sends the handful of candidates who do well on the phone for in-person interviews with the appropriate department.
In her former life as an investment banker, Take the Interview Founder Danielle Weinblatt was often a part of the last step. She usually started interviews with three simple questions at the difficulty level of, "Why would you like to work here?"
"I would get people who had been resume- and phone-screened, and it boggled my mind how many of them would come through and not be able to answer these three simple questions," she says.
She also applied what she calls "the airplane test" -- with an unfortunate rate of success. If she could imagine sitting through a flight between New York and London with the candidate, that person was a potential fit. But this quality was something neither a resume nor a phone screening did much to help assess.
What she wanted to do was to ask her most important questions to candidates up-front in a way that would allow her to quickly assess them -- without committing to a 30-minute interview.
Take the Interview, which came out of startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures last summer, attempts to do this through video screening. Candidates use their computer cameras to record answers to a series of questions from potential employers. When they're finished, an employer can easily flip through the videos to cull candidates worth meeting in person, and they don't need to waste time on the phone or in an interview with the ones who aren't.
"It’s not just about what people say, it’s about what they sound like, how they pull themselves together," Weinblatt says.
The service costs between $45 and $300 per month depending on how much a company plans to use it. Since launching in August, more than 350 customers, including Boston University - Kaplan and Living Social, have signed up.
Weinblatt says Take the Interview is contemplating a collaboration with another company that is creating a candidate screening platform -- sans video -- that crowdsources skills tests appropriate for specific positions. That would help the platform evolve from merely making interviews easy to fast-forward and pass around into a comprehensive screening platform. The startup has already made its first move toward expanding its offerings with an option to attach a portfolio or answer questions in text format.
It will also, at the public suggestion of well-known venture capitalist Fred Wilson, be adding more extensive scoring features to its current five-star rating system that will help employers keep track of their favorite candidates.
"It’s a way to cut through the crap and get to the right person," Weinblatt says.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, drewhadley
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
