If you’re looking for a job, you know how tough it is to get the interview and to get some kind of communication back from a company where you’ve applied.
Imagine you were a hiring manager or HR person in a company in need of one or more people for key jobs. Companies that post jobs today are absolutely inundated with resumes. Finding qualified candidates, vs. those just desperate for a job, is harder than ever.
Consider the recent announcement by McDonalds that they would be filling roughly 50,000 positions. They ended up with nearly 1 million people applying for those jobs! While that is an extreme case, it is indicative of the hiring challenges companies face trying to fill positions that require people actually matched to the job requirements.
Enter a new Minnesota startup, still in beta, called Hyier (pronounced “Hire”). This online web application is perfectly suited toward organizations needing to qualify their candidate pool in a fast, easy, and cost-effective way.
The way it works is like this: The companies create questions each candidate will be asked and the applicants will have a set time to answer. The twist is that these candidates respond to job specific questions by recording online videos using a webcam.
Wondering how Hyier differentiated itself from a company just using YouTube or some other video platform for candidate interviews, I talked with founder Derek Buschow (LinkedIn; Twitter) about how and why he started his company, what their competitive differentiators are and where they’re headed.
The key value proposition of Hyier is that it provides:
- A secure environment for both companies and respondent data to be held in confidence
- An ability for organizations to have a consistency in evaluations. Since each candidate is asked the same set of questions and has the same amount of time to respond, a hiring manager or HR evaluator can quickly size up a candidate and compare them with consistency
- Since organizations typically have multiple people involved in cutting down a volume of applicants to a manageable few, Hyier enables evaluators to rate, tag and forward candidate videos to approved others within their company.
When asked how the idea behind Hyier became an actual company, Derek responded by telling me the story. He’d graduated from University of St. Thomas’ entrepreneurship program and, like so many college graduates today, couldn’t get any interviews AND those he did get wouldn’t get back to him. Since he’d created the idea behind Hyier for his senior project (and won the class competition) he decided to take it out in to the marketplace and make the idea a reality.
There is no question that in today’s environment—high unemployment; few companies yet to begin hiring in earnest; an accelerating virtual workforce; coupled with a technological infrastructure where a Hyier could succeed—the timing is very good and as we all know in the tech game…timing is everything!
Whether Hyier will be able to convince enough companies to leverage their application remains to be seen. But it’s the right idea at the right time and Derek has the vision to make it succeed.