Virtual interviews: a futuristic approach to recruitment, assessment, screening and selection processes in IT organisations

Several reports from both sides of the Atlantic agree that shortage of IT skills is a common phenomenon nowadays and one of the main factors in losing business opportunities. Large multinational organisations such as IBM and Microsoft are forced to overcome this obstacle either by outsourcing in remote countries or by introducing virtual teams of IT professionals that are geographically dispersed. Quite a few US corporations even prefer to arrange for the immigration of successful job candidates. In all three cases the main concern is how to contact the entire recruitment process. Distance and time differences are two essential issues that need to be addressed in order to assess, screen and select the most promising candidates. According to research done by the US Employment Service and the US Office of Personnel Management, an enormous amount of personnel expense can be saved by using valid pre-employment methods. Costs for contacting traditional face-to-face interviews may include travel and accommodation expenses for all candidates and time spent by both the Human Resources interview panel. Alternatively quite a few available technologies have emerged to contact various types of tests remotely. Interviews by teleconference, customised interactive telephone qualifying services, Internet-based assessment tests, and web sites with customised questionnaires are some examples.
This paper introduces virtual interviewing as a different approach in saving time, effort and costs while recruiting remotely. The underlying concept is designing and implementing interviews in an on-line environment, such as the Internet. Main challenges include understanding the basic principles followed by face-to-face interviews, identifying the transition of traditional interviews to online environment, provide the means to IT managers to select the content and structure of the online interview, design a methodology for customising the path between the interview questions with respect to different candidates and according to the answers of each question, and finally design and implement a prototype for contacting online interviews synchronously or asynchronously using agent technology. In the various sections of the paper most of these challenges are further discussed and an initial effort for a prototype web-system is described.