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Too Many Candidates, Too Little Time: HarQen's Voice Advantage Eliminates the Pain of Conducting Telephone Interviews

HarQen's Web-Telephony Solution Streamlines the Interview Process through Custom Automation and Social Media

Enters Private Beta November 24th

Contact
Rachel Carr / Arielle Himy
rachel_carr@dkcnews.com / arielle_himy@dkcnews.com
212-685-4300

MILWAUKEE, WI - November 24, 2008 - HarQen, a leading web-telephony company, announced today that they are expanding the private beta launch of Voice Advantage™, a human resources solution that virtually eliminates the need to conduct live phone interviews. HarQen's Voice Advantage lets HR professionals use their phone and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews.

"As a hiring manager myself, I can attest personally to the need for HR tools that make the interviewing process easier, more cost-effective, and time-efficient," said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Co-founder and CEO of HarQen. "Voice Advantage is essentially TiVo® for interviews. Through our automated voice-screening process, employers can eliminate live phone screens, allowing both candidates and hiring managers to engage in the interviewing process at a time that works best for them individually."

Given the recent flood of highly qualified candidates on the market today, Voice Advantage is arriving at just the right time for HR professionals who are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of inbound resumes. From the hiring manager's perspective, setting up Voice Advantage is as easy as setting up a voicemail box. Using a telephone, the manager simply records a greeting and a series of interview questions. Voice Advantage then allows the hiring manager to invite candidates to interview either through a link in a personalized email message or via an "Interview Now" button, which can be inserted into any online job posting. The candidates follow the link to a customized web page that has details about the company and job being offered. After answering an optional series of knock-out questions on the website, candidates enter their phone number and respond to the pre-recorded interview questions over their telephones. Once a candidate has completed an interview on Voice Advantage, the hiring manager receives an alert and can then listen to the response at a convenient time. In addition, hiring managers can invite team members to review candidate responses and rank them. Voice Advantage then automatically generates a report that lists the candidates who have completed the interview in order of team preference. The entire process is managed with a simple online dashboard without the need for IT or administrative support.

"Voice Advantage is the single most important automation tool allowing me to streamline and scale my small, fast-growing recruiting business," said Jeani Park, CEO of Park & Motevassel, a high tech staffing and consulting firm and current private beta customer. "As a Voice Advantage user, I save eight to nine hours per week. This translates into making one to three more placements a month, which translates into $40,000 to $50,000 more in gross profits."

Beginning today, private beta users can visit the Voice Advantage website and set up their own campaigns.

"Our goal is to start a conversation with savvy HR professionals and gather feedback on Voice Advantage's usability, feature set and interface," noted Fitzsimmons. "We are looking to start a dialog with the HR community and fine tune our offering."

"Recently, we used Voice Advantage to help us fill an office manager position," commented Fitzsimmons. "We had forty inbound resumes and invited all of them to interview via Voice Advantage. Within 72 hours, we had 26 interviews completed. I asked my team to listen to the responses first. Twenty-four hours later, I had a report with all the candidates ranked in order of my team's preference. I listened to the top five and ended up inviting all of those candidates to interview in person. From the first day of our job listing to her first day on the job was exactly 30 days."

Voice Advantage is expected to launch publicly in January. For more information, go to www.voiceadvantage.com.