CIOTechOutlook >> Magazine >> March - 2015 issue

ePoise Systems: Helping Organizations to Hire Better Candidates Faster

By

Hiring has always been an inefficient and costly process for companies. ePoise eVAL is a NextGen hiring product from ePoise Systems that leverages technology and better internet connectivity to solve this historic problem. It automates initial round of interviews, on video, by making it asynchronous. Simply put, it breaks the assumption that two people need to be present at the same time for an interview to happen.

Overcoming Hiring Challenges
ePoise was born out of the founders’ Bishan Singh’s and Sachin Agrawal’s personal experiences, both alumni of London Business School. As hiring managers in their significant corporate career they saw this problem first hand. Recounting about the challenges faced in those days, Sachin says, “Firstly we would have our best guys conduct interviews. As 80 percent of the interviewed candidates were rejected in the first round , this was a huge loss of valuable productive time. Secondly, scheduling was a big issue. The candidates would be available only on weekends when our colleagues would be off work. All this would translate into 3 weeks to just complete interviews for one position. Thirdly, the quality of hire becomes an issue, especially when ramping up fast. It all came down to the interviewer's preparedness on that day,” says Agrawal.
ePoise eVAL was born to address all these challenges. A company is able to set-up interview questions and assessments in ePoise and invite the candidates. Candidates take the interview at their time and convenience. Their responses - both audio and video - to interview questions are recorded and stored in the cloud. The company's panel is then able to evaluate these recorded interviews anytime based on their convenience. Even multiple evaluators can rate the same interview and their ratings get aggregated. This reduces the number of rounds of interview that a candidates needs to take.
The quality of evaluation improves because of unique features such as being able to compare the responses of different candidates for a question. The employers feel comforted about the identity of the candidate as video gets recorded and about the sanctity of the interview based on ePoise' industry best proctoring mechanism. ePoise eVAL also enables companies to perform comprehensive assessments and case simulations to test a broad range of skills.
For more than 100 ePoise customers, all this has translated into the following key benefits:
• Improved quality of hire
• 6X lower interviewing effort
• 3 weeks reduced in time to hire
• Bigger talent pipeline
• 200+% ROI

Technology Partner for NHRD
NHRD selected ePoise as their technology partner for India's biggest HR contest - "NHRDN -Professor Ram Charan Young HR Icon Awards, 2014. It identifies the next wave of pace setters in the HR industry among the professionals and the students.
More than 500 HR students and execs took their interviews and assessments on ePoise eVAL. The six national winners were facilitated in the NHRD National Conference, November 2014.
“I would like to thanks ePoise for your support in making the Ram Charan Awards a great success” – Yogi Sriram, SVP – L&T, Convener, NHRD Mumbai President and Convener, NHRD National Conference, 2014.

Not the Same as Skype
We get asked this question a lot, but in less than a minute most people understand the difference," says Sachin. Live communication tools such as Skype, Google hangouts and ooVoo eliminate the need for travel but do not address the big scheduling issue. Additionally, while Skype requires high bandwidth for live data transfer, ePoise eVAL works on only 128 kbps.

Looking Ahead
Several recognitions have come their way. ePoise was selected as the winner of Nasscom Emerge 50, 2014, India's 50 most innovative software product-centric companies. Zone Startups India, part of Toronto-based Ryerson Futures selected ePoise to join its accelerator program. NHRD identified ePoise as a potential game changer in the HR space.
ePoise continues to innovate and add new features to their product. They just recently released its mobile application that allows candidates to take interviews from their smart phones. “Candidates can use this app to record their interviews on video/ only on audio/ with or even without internet connectivity during the interview. This has significantly enhanced the usage of ePoise”, says Sachin.
The company’s client base has been doubling in number every six months. With such high growth and adoption rate of its solutions, ePoise looks poised for a bright and blooming future.

Testimonials
“We have found ePoise working very well at RIL, especially as we are scaling up our numbers. The time to hire as well as interviewing effort has came down. Quality of evaluations has also increased significantly.” Prabir Jha, President and Group Chief Human Resource Officer, Reliance Industries
“ePoise has tremendously improved our hiring productivity and streamlined our interview process. ePoise team is very professional and customer focused. It is really nice working with them”. – Sanjeev Deshpande, MD, Itelligence India, Subsidiary of NTT Data
"ePoise has been an invaluable partner in our India growth story. They continue to innovate and provide us with excellent support" Narayan Ram, Lowes India



On The Deck

CXO Insights

BI Gives a Competitive Edge to the CIOs/Head-IT

By Vijay Talele , Director - Delivery , Clover Infotech

The Fundamental Transformation from Purchase to...

By Vinod Mathur, Sr.Director- Strategic Services, JDA Software

Facebook