Recruiting for jobs can be expensive: around $1,000, say, to fly someone in, put him up in a hotel room, provide meals and rent a car.
And if the headhunter is ecologically minded, there’s an additional sting. A flight from New York to the West Coast spews as much carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere as burning 155 gallons of gas in a passenger car.
Greg Rokos, who used to be in the executive search business, spent plenty of time pondering the matter. His answer: virtual interviews via Web cam.
“I’ve really lived this whole recruiting thing,” he said. “That’s where the idea was born out of. I would fly into Denver or Chicago, sit in an airport lounge, interview 10 people back to back.”
Rokos is the president and founder of Green Job Interview, a company in Newport Beach, Calif., that arranges interviews with job candidates online.
The company handles everything for the recruiters: hosting the interviews, placing their logos on the screen if desired, and providing other services, such as 24-7 customer support.
They also send Web cams to job candidates who don’t have them, and give them pointers on being interviewed (don’t wear your pajamas).
The service costs companies $49.99 for 30 minutes.
“There are lots of bells and whistles,” he said. “The essence of it is, you can meet with anyone in the world in real time without leaving your desk, and we take care of the whole process. There’s no software to buy; you simply click on the link. Everything is hosted through our servers.”
Rokos says he has client companies around the world; UCLA has used his service, and Allergan and Broadcom recently signed on.
The company’s been in business for nearly a year, and Rokos said he knows of no other companies doing the same thing yet — although other companies, such as Fed Ex, he said, have hosted such interviews if the participants can drive to one of their locations.
He figures he’ll see other competitors soon enough.
“We were first to market,” he said. “We had a nice little head start. The feedback has been tremendous.”
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