SOURCE: harQen

November 24, 2008 08:30 ET

Too Many Candidates, Too Little Time: harQen's VoiceScreener Eliminates the Pain of Conducting Telephone Interviews

HarQen's Web-Telephony Solution Streamlines the Interview Process Through Custom Automation and Social Media; Enters Private Beta November 24th

MILWAUKEE, WI--(Marketwire - November 24, 2008) - HarQen, a leading web-telephony company, announced today that they are expanding the private beta launch of VoiceScreener™, a human resources solution that virtually eliminates the need to conduct live phone interviews. HarQen's VoiceScreener lets HR professionals use their phone and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews.

"As a hiring manager myself, I can attest personally to the need for HR tools that make the interviewing process easier, more cost-effective, and time-efficient," said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Co-founder and CEO of harQen. "VoiceScreener is essentially TiVo® for interviews. Through our automated voice-screening process, employers can eliminate live phone screens, allowing both candidates and hiring managers to engage in the interviewing process at a time that works best for them individually."

Given the recent flood of highly qualified candidates on the market today, VoiceScreener is arriving at just the right time for HR professionals who are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of inbound resumes. From the hiring manager's perspective, setting up VoiceScreener is as easy as setting up a voicemail box. Using a telephone, the manager simply records a greeting and a series of interview questions. VoiceScreener then allows the hiring manager to invite candidates to interview either through a link in a personalized email message or via an "Interview Now" button, which can be inserted into any online job posting. The candidates follow the link to a customized web page that has details about the company and job being offered. After answering an optional series of knock-out questions on the website, candidates enter their phone number and respond to the pre-recorded interview questions over their telephones. Once a candidate has completed an interview on VoiceScreener, the hiring manager receives an alert and can then listen to the response at a convenient time. In addition, hiring managers can invite team members to review candidate responses and rank them. VoiceScreener then automatically generates a report that lists the candidates who have completed the interview in order of team preference. The entire process is managed with a simple online dashboard without the need for IT or administrative support.

"VoiceScreener is the single most important automation tool allowing me to streamline and scale my small, fast-growing recruiting business," said Jeani Park, CEO of Park & Motevassel, a high tech staffing and consulting firm and current private beta customer. "As a VoiceScreener user, I save eight to nine hours per week. This translates into making one to three more placements a month, which translates into $40,000 to $50,000 more in gross profits."

Beginning today, private beta users can visit the VoiceScreener website and set up their own campaigns.

"Our goal is to start a conversation with savvy HR professionals and gather feedback on VoiceScreener's usability, feature set and interface," noted Fitzsimmons. "We are looking to start a dialog with the HR community and fine tune our offering."

"Recently, we used VoiceScreener to help us fill an office manager position," commented Fitzsimmons. "We had forty inbound resumes and invited all of them to interview via VoiceScreener. Within 72 hours, we had 26 interviews completed. I asked my team to listen to the responses first. Twenty-four hours later, I had a report with all the candidates ranked in order of my team's preference. I listened to the top five and ended up inviting all of those candidates to interview in person. From the first day of our job listing to her first day on the job was exactly 30 days."

VoiceScreener is expected to launch publicly in January. For more information, go to www.voicescreener.com.

About harQen

HarQen (pronounced HAR-ken) is a leading web telephony company that leverages its voice to web audio technology platform to develop smart, easy-to-use business applications that solve real world problems. HarQen's principal application, VoiceScreener for HR, is providing a low-cost and time efficient means to pre-screen candidates through its proprietary platform that is easily deployed and optimized for small businesses and scalable for large enterprises. In addition, harQen's StoryTeller toolset powers Comic Wonder (www.comicwonder.com), the first and only competitive arena for joke-telling online.