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Author: Anjana Manian

What is the hype about Slack?

What is the hype about Slack?

Over the years, email communication has gone from bad to worse.  Useful and more significant emails are buried under a pile of automated emails from email marketing, log notifications, twitter followers, monthly statements, etc.  Searching relevant information is becoming an increasingly arduous task. Companies have tried to adopt enterprise messaging systems to cut-down the number of emails and making a short exchange of information straightforward and efficient.  Different messaging services and productivity tools emerged.  Over the last two years, Slack is emerging as the winner with a soaring rate of adoption. Companies have been adopting Slack surprisingly quickly in the year or so since it was launched. One may ask what makes Slack so special when we have so many other established means of communication such as email, instant messaging, not to mention conventional phones.  What makes Slack any different?

Well, to start with, Slack is establishing itself as a business communication hub.  It is a single place where the plethora of disorganized communication converges and gets itself sorted out in its rightful place.

“Slack brings all your team communication into one place, makes it all instantly searchable and available wherever you go. Our aim is to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive” , says the Slack welcome message.

The fact is that Slack is becoming the vehicle of choice to exchange all business information. Organization leaders are adopting Slack in their teams to improve the communication amongst their team members.  Slack is now being used as the quick way to broadcast messages to the whole team about product, people, and processes.  It not only enhances communication but has become the centralized hub to get  reminders and notifications about  relevant events & activities. 

3 Reasons why Slack is gaining continuous momentum and popularity

  • Teams Communication –  Slack has become the preferred substitution for emails. Slack enables you to be in multiple teams and allows you to subscribe to multiple channels. A Slack channel offers a common place to exchange ideas and information about a particular topic.  The best part is that all the content is searchable from one search box. You don’t need to struggle with finding the information that is buried deep within a thread in one of the many emails. Slack also provides the ease of communicating privately with someone.  With Slack, you can chat online or just leave an offline message. Either way, it reduces the email clutter.
  • Third-party App Integrations – One of the reasons that people love Slack is that it is integrated with most of the popular web service tools that they use at their work place.   Slack is integrated with their code repositories (Github and BitBuckets etc.), productivity tools (Trello, Wunderlist), file sharing services (Google Drive, Dropbox), database services, conferencing services , analytic platforms and many more.  Slack has made it so easy to integrate products,  with a very well documented and intuitive API, making it easy to create custom  integrations to get  data out of or into Slack.  With Slack integration, you can see product specific reminders, notifications, system alerts, all in one place.
  • Great User Experience –  Slack is very slick, intuitive, and user -riendly. It surely makes your working life simpler, pleasant, and productive.  Slack’s mobile app offers all the key features  and functionality with a clean design and iinterface.
Integration with Slack

Integration with Slack

We’re excited to announce EasyHire.me integration with Slack. With this integration, you would be able to configure a slack channel to receive interview reminders and notifications.

Follow these 4 steps to integrate EasyHire.me to your Slack account

Step 1: Click the “Add to Slack button” in Teams->Settings page

Step 2: Confirm the Slack team you want to integrate with

Step 3: Once confirmed, configure which notifications will be sent to slack 

Step 4: Now you can see your interview details, interview schedules, reminders, and notifications in you slack channel. 

EasyHire.me partners with Greenhouse

EasyHire.me partners with Greenhouse

EasyHire.me today announced details of its partnership with Greenhouse Software. EasyHire.me delivers a robust and affordable online video interviewing solution that brings consistency, efficiency, and agility to the recruiting process.

EasyHire.me platform enables Greenhouse users to take advantage of integrated video interviews from directly within Greenhouse to easily engage with candidate and assess their knowledge, personalities, and skills.

“Finding right talent is always a challenge. You need efficient ways to screen and evaluate the large volume of candidates applying for the job and move fast with the right ones,” says Anjana Manian, Co-Founder of EasyHire.me.

“A fast hiring process is a strong competitive advantage. As companies work to scale their organizations globally, expand to new regions or simply hire at scale, video interviewing can really help to streamline this process,” says Barbra Gago, VP of Marketing at Greenhouse. “The integration of EasyHire.me into the Greenhouse platform gives mutual benefit to our customers and we are really excited about our partnership with EasyHire.me, and how the joint solution will make it even easier to find and hire the best talent, faster.”

Additional benefits of the EasyHire.me and Greenhouse integration include:

– Allowing companies to recruit top applicants regardless of where they live
– Streamlining communication between recruiters, hiring manager and interviewers
– Conducting efficient phone and video interviews using a consistent set of questions
– Collaboration amongst the hiring team around interview recording and feedback
– Saving recruiters and hiring managers significant time and resources.

EasyHire.me integration with Greenhouse enhances the customer’s ability to make better hiring decisions, enabling them to funnel the best-fit candidates through the pipeline, faster.

What type of interviewer are you?

What type of interviewer are you?

Interviewing is an art! It is a self taught skill that you need to learn and master yourself.  There is no clear-cut course that teaches you how to be a good interviewer. An effective interviewer makes their candidate feel comfortable and relaxed to bring the best out of them in order to ascertain what skills they can bring to the table. They inspire the candidate to want to be part of their initiative and engage them in introspective discussions. They make the candidate contemplate on how they can improve themselves and their peers.

You can be more successful as an interviewer by being conscious as to whom you are interviewing. Before commencing the interview, first establish the role and the job you are interviewing the candidate for. Are you interviewing for a customer facing role or a product development role? Additionally, while interviewing, be aware of the type of person you are talking to. Are you talking to a fresh graduate or an industry veteran? Would the candidate be reporting to you or would he be joining the team as your peer? These are but few of the factors that you should consider before initiating the interview. By analyzing and deciding all of these factors, you can pick a candidate who is best suitable for your work style and the job at hand, and hopefully, a long-term contributor to your company.

Here are some crucial qualities that you can pick from as the interviewer:

  • Assertive: If you are going to be their manager, establish the company’s hierarchy and accountability in a positive manner. Act like his manager and give the candidate a realistic glimpse on how you see them fitting in your company.
  • Collaborative: If you are interviewing your peer, solve problems together with the candidate. Your interview should aim in not only finding out how suitable the candidate is for the job but also how good it is to work with him.
  • Inquisitive: If you are interviewing your boss, talk about his vision and plans for the company and evaluate if he has the abilities to execute on them. Share your passion and commitment towards the job and find out if they are aligned with his.

Your evaluation on the candidate should depend on the interview session. If you were a tough interviewer, go easy on the evaluation. If you were collaborative and friendly, be tough on the evaluation. Finally, the choice is yours to pick a persona and conduct the interview accordingly.  Plan ahead – study the candidate, choose the appropriate persona, and provide a rounded, insightful evaluation on the candidate.

Phone calls from EasyHire web interface

Phone calls from EasyHire web interface

EasyHire.me is thrilled to announce a significant addition to its interview platform. The award winning cloud-enabled interview platform now incorporates a WebRTC-powered phone calling from within its web interface. Recruiters and hiring managers can now call candidates on their conventional phones from within the EasyHire.me Interview Room. Similar to video interviews, the phone interviews can be recorded and shared with the hiring team.

Hiring the right talent demands a tremendous amount of time and money. The EasyHire.me platform revolutionizes the hiring process by making interviews both structured and easy to conduct. It provides tools and workflows to conduct phone & video interviews that could be recorded and shared with team to collaborate and make evidence-based hiring decisions.

EasyHire.me is the state-of-the-art platform to schedule, interview and review candidates, all in one place! The unrivaled platform gives hiring managers, recruiters, and HR personnel the tools they need to successfully and efficiently recruit top talent in their industry. The startup is based in Silicon Valley and is founded on the basis of bringing cutting-edge technology to enable a structured and reliable process for recruiting professionals.

The art of interviewing

The art of interviewing

Yesterday, I was having a cup of coffee with a long lost friend from college who is smart, intelligent and a true engineer at heart. He was a problem solver and carved his path as an individual contributor in a reputed fortune 500 company.

Slowly sipping his coffee, he muttered “I am changing my job. I am joining this new startup next week!”.

Quite surprised, I asked, “I thought u are happy in your current job.  What happened? Why this sudden shift?”

“Oh yeah, I do love my current job. I was happily busy .  I was not at all  looking for a change.”, he said.

Looking at my confused expression he continued, “Well, I was glancing through an email that I got from a recruiter and was intrigued by the job description. It was not only interesting but sounded like fun.  So I responded to that.”

“Hmm.. So you are the typical passive candidate that they talk about in the recruiting blogs”

“Very much so. As soon as I responded, things started rolling fast. The manager talked and immediately scheduled an interview with their technical guru.  I had a long video chat with him and then everything just moved fast. I was impressed with their interviewing process and more so with their interviewer!”.

Then for about five minutes, my friend went on and on about the interesting discussion that he had with the interviewer. He continued,  “it felt like a discussion, nothing like an interview. He started with a simple question but soon interweaved it with the multiple challenges in solving it. We discussed in depth the algorithm to be used, optimizations to consider and implementation stacks to use. By the end of the hour, I decided that I want to work with this guy !”.

I started thinking,  is it that easy to get a good hire? Just have a good interview session with him?  The “interview session” was the one that made him decide to take the job, not how the company is doing or what  he is being offered. He knew that he could negotiate everything else. And he is convinced that if the company had great people like his interviewer, it has to succeed sooner or later.

So here I am,  more than ever convinced that if you want to attract great, passive talent, have a great interview session. No doubt, one frequently overlooked challenge in recruiting is finding a good interviewer!

A cutting-edge video interview platform

A cutting-edge video interview platform

EasyHire.me Proudly Announces Its Cutting-Edge Interviewing Platform

This state-of-the-art platform makes conducting interviews a simple and effective process, making it effortless to find the suitable candidate for a job. The unrivaled platform gives hiring managers, recruiters, and HR personnel the tools they need to successfully and efficiently recruit top talent in their industry.

In this day and age, hiring the right talent for a position demands a tremendous amount of time and money. EasyHire.me changes this. It revolutionizes the hiring process by making interviews both structured and easy to conduct. EasyHire.me enriches your interview experience with large video and interactive tools to conduct an effective interview, making it convenient for both parties.

The latest updates to EasyHire.me allows you to:

  • Plan and structure your interviews with appropriate questions, evaluation criteria, and rating scale.
  • Engage your candidate in a live video conversation with screen sharing capabilities. Conduct the interview using your compiled list of questions while making notes and rating candidates’ responses.
  • Quickly and easily share interview recordings, feedback, and notes, and collaborate with your team to make evidence‐based hiring decisions.

EasyHire.me is a cloud‐based interviewing platform with interactive tools, workflows, and data collection for successful recruiting in the job market. The startup is based in Silicon Valley and is founded on the basis of bringing a structured and reliable resource to recruiting professionals.

Benefits of a Structured Interview

Benefits of a Structured Interview

Has anyone in the history of hiring ever employed anyone without conducting some type of interview? Seriously doubt it! Interview is an important process when you decide whether to allow the “outsider” into the “family” or not. There have been volumes written about how the first five minutes of an interview decide whether you get the job or not. Instead of collecting objective data, the hiring decisions are influenced by gut feelings of the interviewer.

…“the first five minutes” of an interview are what really matter, describing how interviewers make initial assessments and spend the rest of the interview working to confirm those assessments. So, if they like you, they look for reasons to like you more. If they don’t like your handshake or the awkward introduction, then the interview is essentially over because they spend the rest of the meeting looking for reasons to reject you. –  Lazlo Bock, Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations

Let’s understand the goal of interview process. It is to achieve a good fit between the people and the jobs.  The interview process determines how the candidate will perform once they join the team.  So it is important that the selection process is based on a scientific approach and not on gut feelings. Scientific approach involves administering a structured interview where the knowledge, skills and abilities required for the job are assessed in a systematic manner across candidates.

“The interview structure, an interviewer’s experience and the number of people being interviewed in succession all play a role in the decision making on a job candidate,”  said Patrick Raymark, psychology department chair at Clemson University.

A good interview process involves collecting unbiased data on the candidates that enables the hiring manager to make the right hire. To make such critical decision, the interview process should aim to collect data that assures that the person is the best fit. Unfortunately, most interviews predict an applicant’s actual ability only between 1% to 4% accuracy.  This can be minimized and almost eliminated by adopting a structured interview approach.

What is a Structured Interview Process?

  • Before the interview – Plan end to end. Post the job and source the candidates. Before interviewing, define the evaluation criteria and rating scales. Put together a set of appropriate interview questions for assessing the candidates.
  • During the interview – Conduct an engaged interview session. Ask each candidate the same set of questions in the same order if possible. Take detailed interview notes for each question. Use the evaluation criteria and scale to rate the candidate’s response.
  • After the interview – Compare all the candidates interviewed by all the interviewers. Analyze the interviews and ratings and normalize the evaluation data across interviewers. Then, make a data-driven decision on who best fits the role.

On the onset, structured interviews seem tedious but in reality it is a highly effective hiring process. Adopting an end-to-end structured approach shortens the overall hiring time.

The best part of the structured interview is that it is effective, consistent and fair. All candidates go through the same process, are treated objectively and asked the same set of questions. Each interviewer is focused in asking the relevant set of questions and evaluates the candidates based on the job criteria.  Since the hiring managers have the same set of  information for every candidate, the hiring decisions are made faster and with greater confidence.

Pitfalls of an Unstructured Interview

Pitfalls of an Unstructured Interview

“Experienced interviewers do not appear to differ markedly from inexperienced interviewers in their descriptions of either the ideal or typical applicant. I would hypothesize that the lack of information characteristic of unstructured procedures leads interviewers to categorize on the basis of their prior conception and, as a consequence, lowers the validity of their decisions.”

– Dr Robert L Dipboye, Professor of Psychology at University of Central Florida

Most technical interviews are unstructured in nature. A typical unstructured interview is vulnerable to a variety of biases in information gathering, judgement and decision making.

In an unstructured interview, the interviewer does not have a clear charter on what to look for in the candidate. Their evaluation on the candidate is based on their views on what is required in the job.  Lack of systematic approach results in gathering interviewer’s personal opinion rather than knowledge, skills and abilities of the candidate to perform the job.

There is a lot of evidence supporting the “similar-to-me” effect in which the interviewer gives more favorable evaluation to the candidates who are similar to the interviewer on background, education, attitudes and other factors.

Research indicated that performance of the candidate in an interview session depends a lot on the way the interview is conducted. The interviewer’s conduct of the session can influence the quality as well as the quantity of the information gathered.

In summary, unstructured interviews:

  1. Are less likely to collect job-related data about knowledge, skills and abilities related to the job.
  2. Are not run consistent across candidates making it difficult to objectively compare and contrast candidates.
  3. Are influenced by interviewers biases that may negatively impact decisions lowering the quality of hire.

Adopting a structured interview approach would eliminate most of these issues and will improve the quality of the hiring process.

Easyhire.me is an online platform for conducting structured interviews to deliver consistent hiring results. It allows the hiring manager to:

  • Define an interview format, appropriate questions, and rating criteria.
  • Conduct an engaging interview with live video featuring shared code editor.
  • Track feedback, scores, and interview recordings.

Hire by reviewing interviews and making data driven decisions.

How do you run your job interviews – unstructured or structured?

How do you run your job interviews – unstructured or structured?

This is a four-part series that discusses structured interviews. The upcoming articles in the series are “Pitfalls of unstructured interviews,” “Benefits of structured interviews,” and “How easyhire.me can help you run a structured Interview.”

Interviews without a specific format are referred to as unstructured interviews. Unstructured interviews are unplanned. They tends to be free flowing with the interviewer asking questions spontaneously based on the candidate’s responses and proceed like a friendly conversation.  As a result they vary across candidates and are inconsistent in the way the candidates are evaluated.

At the other end, structured interviews are based on thorough analysis of the job requirements and in-depth understanding of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA’s) required to perform the job. On the basis of the analysis, interview questions and scorecards are crafted. The candidates are asked the same questions and their responses are assessed in a standardized manner against job-specific criteria using a predetermined scorecard.

Structuring the interview selection process reduces the magnitude of interviewers’ biases, enhancing the reliability and validity of the interview decisions. Overall, structured interviews help in establishing a clear link between performance as a candidate at the job interview and performance as an employee on the job.

The table below compares the two approaches. Use the table below to determine if your interviews are unstructured or structured.

Unstructured Interviews

  • Little or no planning of the interview session.
  • The evaluation criteria used by interviewers vary across applicants.
  • The interview questions are not pre-planned. They are spontaneous and free flowing.
  • Interview sessions are not consistent across applicants of the same job.
  • Little or no control over the type or amount of information collected across applicants.
  • Irrelevant information influences the direction of the interview.
  • There is no emphasis on note-taking or maintaining interview records.
  • No standardized metric is used in rating the applicant.
  • The interviewer’s personal biases influence the evaluation of the candidate.
  • No formal training is provided to the interview team.

Structured Interviews

  • There is careful planning of interview objectives and evaluation criteria.
  • The factors evaluated by the interviewers are based on a thorough job analysis and are consistent across candidates.
  • Interview questions are pre-determined and linked to job criteria (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities).
  • The applicants of a particular job are asked the same questions.
  • Questions are planned and controlled. Same sets of questions are asked across applicants.
  • Irrelevant information is disregarded.
  • Detailed notes are taken during the interview session that is shared, analyzed, and stored.
  • Applicants are rated and scored based on a standardized metric created for the job.
  • The interviewer’s personal biases have less influence than the ratings across different job related parameters.
  • The talent acquisition team is provided with the interview template and rating metric before conducting the interviews.


Research shows that structuring the interview process reduces the influence of interviewer’s personal biases in the selection process. It also increases the reliability and validity of the interviewer’s judgement. In other words, structured interview results improve the quality of hire in the organization.

easyhire.me platform provides all the elements for conducting a structured interview.  Plan your interviews ahead by choosing a series of question from easyhire.me question bank and crafting the scorecard attributes. Run an efficient interview using easyhire.me’s Interview Room – it features video, code editor, and scorecards all in one place. Record and track the interviews for a data driven decision making.