With COVID19 not ending any time soon, companies that still have to hire defaulted to extending their recruitment process online.
There is not much change to the earlier part of the funnel – jobs have been posted online since the dot-com era.
But conducting in-person interviews is no longer possible when nobody can return to the office.
Even if you can, the last thing you want to happen is for your company to be the latest cluster just because of a candidate that you may not necessarily hire.
Fortunately, we are in the era of high bandwidth and webcam resolution. That makes video calls a great alternative to in-person interviews.
Every hiring managers and recruiter moved to video calling platforms to conduct virtual interviews.
But the user experience honestly isn’t the most ideal.
Since most, if not all, video calling platforms are not purpose-built for interviewing, the ability to take notes related to the evaluation process is non-existent.
As a workaround, interviewers will scribble down their notes on a piece of paper which they try to reconcile later.
That is assuming the piece of paper can still be found.
It reminded me of the earlier days of my recruitment business. This was back in the late 2000s and we were using office phones to talk to candidates.
There is no headset so we often have to pin the phone using our face and shoulder while we take notes on the keyboard.
Not the most efficient and ergonomic approach.
Seeing the friction experienced by modern interviewers, Korean HR Tech Wanted created RoundUp – a free Chrome extension to make notes taking over a video call much easier and intuitive.
How it works
To begin with, head to RoundUp or Chrome Web Store and search for RoundUp.
Add the extension to your Google Chrome or any Chromium web browser.
RoundUp currently supports Google Meet and the extension will allow interviewers (e.g. hiring managers, executives, etc) to take notes and leave candidate review within Google Meet.
Reviews are written and submitted individually and once each attendee clicks on the “Submit” button from the extension inside Google Meet, all responses are filed under each interview entry in the Dashboard:
This completely eliminates any offline data entry that adds a layer of double entries.
The app allows multiple interviewers to add their individual notes of the same candidate.
Parting shot
It is easy to use and it is free.
If I have to nitpick, it would be for the lack of platform support since it currently only supports Google Meet.
That might be an issue for companies that are forced to use Teams or Zoom.
It may also be good to have the ability to customise the fields within the form since a single star rating may not be a balanced representation of the candidate.
But it is still early days and I’m sure future upgrades will take care of them and add more functionalities to the extension.
To try the app for free, go to https://roundup.ai
