Do you have people using it yet? Do you have paying customers? If not, why not?
Asking people here might get you useful info, but getting the target audience to use it would yield better results. To some extent there's probably overlap between HN readers and your audience, but I bet there's a lot of non-overlap (underlap?)
It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to solicit users. Finding potential customers is as easy as opening Craigslist. Granted, getting one of them to bite may be tough, but if none of them do, that's probably the feedback you need. This concept should work well as a bootstrapped, iterative start-up. All you need is one business who will use your product to get responses from their Craigslist ad.
I am still working on the back-end to the system but in the meantime I really want to get some feedback from you guys. I have been building the system in my spare time and have now got to the point where I need some extra motivation to see it through to completion. Honest comments appreciated!
The automated video interview idea is really cool. This would have been useful to us earlier this year when we were filtering through many candidates for a junior role, where you don't necessarily want to disqualify people with a lack of experience, but want to get a good feel for their personality and their ability to talk about what they're interested in.
I think the biggest comment I'd have with your project is that the name of the product doesn't communicate to me what it does nor does it hint at the video idea -- I had to dig in and find it myself.
Well, from a candidate's point of view, I think it might be slightly annoying to be told "Hi, we're interested in your CV, but not quite interested enough to actually talk to you. Why don't you take the time to record a video of yourself, and then maybe we'll watch some of it!"
From an employer's point of view, it's hard to see what I'm going to get out of this that I can't get more quickly by picking up the phone and talking to the person for ten minutes.
But maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective. For filling, say, software engineering jobs it may not be all that useful, but for retail jobs in particular it could save a lot of time. Is this person clean and presentable and well-spoken and generally capable of holding a conversation? Well then, this person is 80% of the way to being a good retail employee!
So this is where I'd target it. Besides, if you can land just one medium-sized retail chain you'll already be making a shirtload of money.
Oh, one other thing: I don't like the name. If you were a potential employee and were told to make a video on "replybutton" then the name might confuse you.
One advantage I can see is that you'd have a video you could show to the rest of your team at their leisure, without everyone having to sit in on the phone call. Maybe you send the team a link to the list of applicants, where they can rate each one 1-5, and at the end of the day you have a consensus who you should talk to.
A lot of companies ask you to fill in mindless forms about how you show "client-focused abilities" or "initiative awareness". I challenge you to apply to IBM without being irritated by it.
I think a lot of people would prefer short video questions and answers over form-filling, even if the questions were the same.
In fact, I think this could even reduce the pressure on candidates. Instead of worrying about how you phrase your answers on paper, you get one shot (do you?) at a video response. This may be better for the employer as well. Who cares how well you can answer a question after a couple of hours of research? (I realise the answer "I don't know but I can find out" is actually quite a good one to many questions.)
I think it makes more sense to focus it on industries where looks or verbal communication skills matter a lot, such as teaching, modeling, selling, etc.
My only question is... I got my first webcam earlier this year. I know a lot of people who don't have one. Do you think this could be a potential block in the road adoption?
might be worth chatting with a lawyer on this - I know that pictures on CVs in the US are frowned upon due the the discrimination they may cause (age, gender, race, etc); how do you ensure you mitigate this risk when passing a video of someone around the office?
completely agree that interviewing is vital, just worth noting that images of applicants being circulated in a hiring process can lead to discrimination claims - something your clients need to be aware of...
a quick google, so maybe not the best source, but certainly captures the idea
What a trial lawyer sees: Dear Employee, before we even talk to you, please spend time revealing to us your race, sex, age and differently-abled status. Thanks.
It's almost certainly a non-starter at any big company for that reason.
"One of the presenters was Carol Miaskoff, Assistant Legal Counsel for Coordination at the EEOC. Her guidance was less than equivocal but predictable: 'As with any recruiting technology . . . it all depends how you use it as to whether or not it would violate the federal EEO laws."
Honest question: How is this different from the actual interview process? All it does is potentially reveal these things earlier, but still prior to a hire. By this logic, couldn't you argue that big companies wouldn't participate in face to face interviews?
I don't like the light grey text. Against the white background, I find the lack of contrast to draw my eye to the picture, which takes away the impact of your message. I have the same difficulty on 90% of the ASK HN posts where the grey text above is of such low contrast, I have to wonder if it has already been downvoted.
Your 5 step button process needs to be more prominent. Some of your descriptions seem like you felt you had to type something there. I'm not sure the steps need to be numbered, perhaps stress the time it would take to perform the steps, I can clearly see that there are 5 boxes. Sometimes less information is better. I would suspect making the button text more descriptive would work better than a quick title and a rehash. I think I can figure out what 'Review Resumes' means.
Start Now - AB Test this. Something about that box's color, the text, the white on grey text seems oddly out of character. Orange, green, grey and black? Perhaps too low contrast.
As for the business model, I'm curious. Don't you need a separate Job Seeker and Job Creator section. Where are the resumes coming from? Is there a sister site that is collecting resumes from candidates? Am I likely to see hundreds/dozens of resumes for particular fields? I would think I would get to review resumes, you double-blind correspondence or block correspondence, I find a candidate I like, send them a questionnaire. What sort of metrics do I get from this? How many times did they record the answer to each question? Are they able to sit and answer them, or can they pause the process? I might want to ask questions that determine if someone is fast on their feet or can solve a problem without having to google it. Is each question answered a separate video or is it indexed so I can skip to the answers when reviewing it?
Pricing. As someone that hires a few people a year, and knowing I would interview more than 1 person, I would suspect your $10 option would never get used. I would probably suggest you raise that to $20, maybe include 3. Your discount rate for purchasing additional videos seems shallow almost like you've decided $8/interview is your fixed selling price. I wouldn't mind spending more money to get more than 1 interview, but, that depends on where your resumes are coming from.
I'm not wild on the domain name as others have mentioned.
Technically the project looks interesting. I don't do enough interviews where I would buy something like this as I think the interview process affords me the ability to read body language, check reaction times to questions, see visual and hear verbal cues that wouldn't be present in the video interview. Basically, this is a video resume that someone could potentially rehearse and research the answers to the question which wouldn't give me some of the touchy-feely stuff that is important when building a team.
I can see where larger organizations could use this as a first step to deciding whether to fly a candidate in for further interviews. I would think it would work very well when you had a candidate you knew would be good for the organization, but, didn't know which group would be a good fit. Someone like google could pass it around to the actual project managers to find a fit for intriguing candidates rather than hiring than finding a fit.
The idea has a lot of promise, looks well executed.
Asking people here might get you useful info, but getting the target audience to use it would yield better results. To some extent there's probably overlap between HN readers and your audience, but I bet there's a lot of non-overlap (underlap?)
Have you tried getting feedback from people via something like http://fivesecondtest.com/ ?
Conceptually as an idea it's got some merit (this was one of the project areas I was looking at for February). But I'm not your target audience :)