Continuing the series of companies running their business on Telecom APIs, I interviewed Kevin Hegebarth, Vice President, Marketing and Product Management at HireIQ.  HireIQ’s SaaS-based on demand interviewing and assessment solutions improve hiring efficiency, lower attrition, and improve workforce performance.  When Kevin explains their proposition to me it was obvious, and that’s the power of telecom APIs it is automating so many everyday tasks as telecoms becomes programmable.  The benefits are significant financially and in making life easier for the people involved.

HireIQ focuses on recruiting for Call Centers and Customer Service, really any job where business is conducted over the phone.  It’s a constant need, and businesses continue to be ever more concerned on recruiting and retaining good agents, as in today’s competitive market, customer service is essential, there are about 2.3 million people employed in customer service in the US alone according to the Bureau of US Labor Statistics.  Poor customer experiences result in an estimated $83 Billion loss by US enterprises each year because of defections and abandoned purchases, source Parature Customer Service Blog.  Despite many companies best attempts to push their customers into self-service, call center traffic continues to grow as more and more services move online and service complexity grows.  Amazon Mayday is a great example of the importance of people talking to people to resolve technical issues.

HireIQ automates the initial interviews, so recruiters are no longer acting as outbound telemarketers, working on lists provided by the company’s recruiting page and sites like Monster.com.  Instead, the potential recruit simply clicks on a link or makes a call to answer some prerecorded standard questions whenever and wherever is convenient for them.  The answers are recorded and sent to the recruiter for review.  Rather than it taking 30 minutes for an initial selection interview the recruiter can on average take 5 minutes, a 6:1 saving on initial selection interviews.  Many potential recruits are already employed, and with family commitments its often late in the evening before they have time for an interview, when likely the recruiter is no longer available.  So the whole process is also accelerated through this automation in enabling the process to run asynchronously at peoples’ convenience.

An interesting application area is LanguageIQ.  That is the clarity of diction and ability to think in real time on sentence construction, which again is key to understanding what is said.  The LanguageIQ test is IVR-led (Interactive Voice Response), and runs through a series of questions with well-known responses.  The quality of the response in both diction and construction is automatically assessed.  Then follows sentence building and sentence rearranging, which is again evaluated on clarity and sentence construction.  If the customer service job is for technical support, language proficiency is critical, some computer companies were forced to bring technical support centers back to the US given adverse customer experiences.  HireIQ enables companies to focus on the few potential recruits that meet the company’s specific criteria and spend the time to ensure they make a good hire and are able to retain the person.

Kevin shared his experiences on using Telecom APIs, “Our CTO had worked with Tropo in the past and was confident on their ability to deliver a reliable platform with first class support.  Telecom APIs make it so easy to automate many  tasks in business.  The recruiters are happy to have their time saved, so they can focus on well qualified hires.  The potential recruits are happy to be able to work through the initial selection process when convenient to them and all their commitments.  So if they are shortlisted they know it will be worth the investment of their time during normal working hours.”

Kevin then provide some advice given his experience, “Working with Telecom APIs is easy, there really is nothing to it.  I’m surprised more businesses have not automated their processes using Telecom APIs.  We really are just scratching the surface of what is possible as we blend the web with telecoms.  The financial gains are significant, as are the personal gains in making it easier for people to do their jobs.”