St. Louis Business Journal
Technology quotient in hiring increases after September 11

By Anna Navarro

April 2002 - September 11 has significantly raised the technology quotient in hiring, especially if you are contemplating the possibility of employment outside your immediate geographic area.

Videoconferencing, phone, and e-mail are increasingly taking the place of face-to-face interviews in all but the final stages of candidate selection. If you present yourself well in these media, you may have an advantage over candidates who struggle with these technologies.

The cost effectiveness of these techniques has always been appealing to employers, but the hassle factor in adopting them held many back. However, the combination of fear of travel after the September 11 attacks, and the need to contain costs during an economic slowdown has propelled more employers over the threshold.

In an excellent article in USA Today (January 22, 2002) Stephanie Armor details increases of 10-25% in utilization of videoconferencing, especially in the first round of candidate selection. She writes "the use of alternative interviewing formats, which once had been derided as over-hyped, is finding a receptive audience . . ."

So what does this mean for you if you come across a job opportunity that includes videoconferencing as a screening tool? If you are very interested in the job and haven't had any videoconferencing experience it might be worth the time and money to practice before the event.

You'd be well advised to start with an ordinary video camera, a smart friend and a set of tough questions that you answer on tape and then play back and self-critique.

After you've got that one down, then consider the possibility of going to a video- conference center and renting their facilities. Take the same smart friend and list of questions and tape the results so you can see how you deal with the added challenge of being interviewed by a virtual interviewer instead of a live person. I recommend this as a second step after ordinary videotaping because renting these facilities is expensive. For example, Kinko's charges $150 an hour apiece for interviewer and interviewee.

The same approach applies to phone interviewing skills, but it's easier and less expensive. Ask your helpful friend to pose some questions on the phone, audio tape yourself, and play back the results. Simply listening to yourself can really help you get better. If you lack the equipment for audiotaping off a phone, a simpler way of doing it is to do the interview on a speakerphone and put an audio tape recorder close by to capture the results.

It's also important to think about how your written communication comes across the high tech barrier. You can put a lot of work into writing a fancy looking resume with different size type, bold face, elegant spacing, etc. But send it through e-mail and you run the risk of it coming out mangled at the other end.

The best thing you can do to deal with this is to inquire before you send the resume whether the prospective employer's word processor can read Microsoft's.doc format (almost everyone will say yes), then send your resume as an ATTACHMENT to an e-mail cover letter. And because so many viruses come in the form of attachments, it's also a good idea to let them know in advance that this attachment is legitimate.

There are also a lot of "do's" and "don't" in the creation of an electronic resume. For example, there are tricks to help your resume get noticed when it's being scanned by using certain key words, etc.

Fortunately, there is an excellent website that can provide some very useful advice on how to handle the hurdles. Among the many helpful articles on the site is one called "Hard Copy versus Electronic Resumes" that contains a number of great suggestions.

September 11 and the related economic slowdown changed the world in many ways. One of them is the impetus it has given employers to integrate technology into their hiring practices, especially in the early stages of candidate selection. Once instituted, I think the time and money savings these innovations offer over sending candidates plane tickets and doing face-to-face interviews means employers are unlikely to go back to the old methods. So if you are hot on the track of finding a job, getting savvy about how to sell yourself via technology can be a worthwhile effort.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.