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Small Businesses Can Now Identify And Recruit Top Talent Faster and More Efficiently Via High-Touch, Automated System

Hiring Managers Can Identify Top Prospects 70% Faster With HarQen's Voice Advantage™ And Effectively Manage More Candidates With Fewer Resources

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Rachel Carr / Arielle Himy
rachel_carr@dkcnews.com / arielle_himy@dkcnews.com
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MILWAUKEE, WI – MARCH 10, 2009 – HarQen, a leading web-telephony company announced today that they are offering Voice Advantage™ (www.voiceadvantage.com), an efficient, automated telephone interviewing service, to small and medium sized businesses through their new e-commerce site. Since HarQen introduced this solution in beta form last fall, Voice Advantage has been providing hiring managers at larger corporations and staffing firms a highly efficient, competitive edge by optimizing the interview process and helping them on-board quality candidates faster.

Beginning today, any HR professional or hiring manager has the ability to use their phone and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews that candidates can respond to at a time that is most convenient to their schedules. This process virtually eliminates the need to coordinate first round interviews. Additionally, Voice Advantage's unique social networking features give hiring managers the ability to more efficiently gather internal feedback on interview responses and find candidates that match both the resume requirements and cultural fit of a position up to 70 percent faster than traditional methods.

NeuWave Medical, a start-up company that develops and commercializes minimally invasive medical products, is one of the small businesses that participated in the beta trial of Voice Advantage and saw instant results by making a new hire within 10 days of posting a job opening.

NeuWave CEO and former head of GE's Healthcare's $1.2 B Interventional business, Laura King, said this of the product, "Voice Advantage enabled NeuWave Medical to quickly narrow a pool of 125 candidates to the top three, resulting in dramatic productivity and ensuring that the candidates had both the prerequisite communication and digital skills to flourish in a growing 21st century company."

For as little as $99 a month, small to mid-size businesses can sign up online and immediately begin using Voice Advantage at www.voiceadvantage.com. With Voice Advantage's introductory plan, hiring companies can interview up to 180 candidates over the course of a year. If hiring needs increase, clients can purchase additional interviews in blocks of 25, 50 or 100. For companies with higher volume hiring, there is a $199 per month plan that provides up to 420 interviews annually. HarQen designed the pricing to be simple, scalable and nimble for today's hiring needs and has custom pricing plans available for large volume hiring companies – such as enterprise, staffing and recruiting companies.

"Small businesses need to be able to quickly calculate their ROI based on the amount of time saved by the array of online recruitment tools available today," said Peter Weddle, online recruitment expert and author of the WEDDLE's Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. "Voice Advantage is not only achieving that ROI for their beta clients, but it is also managing to retain the human touch that is such an essential part of the recruiting process and has posed a challenge for online recruiting in the past."

To use Voice Advantage, a hiring manager simply records a greeting and a series of interview questions over the telephone. Voice Advantage then allows the hiring manager to invite an individual or a large group of candidates to interview through a link in a personalized email message or via an "Interview Now" button, which can be inserted into any online job posting. Candidates are directed to a web page and prompted to enter their phone number; Voice Advantage calls the candidate who will then respond to the pre-recorded interview questions via telephone, similar to leaving a voicemail. The hiring manager, through the online Voice Advantage account, can then listen to the responses at a convenient time and use the social-networking components to invite colleagues to review, rate and discuss candidates.

"This economic downturn has brought about an astonishing number of layoffs of highly qualified people and this often means up to ten times as many people are applying for any given job posting," said Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder and CEO of HarQen. "It's hard enough to identify the right candidate in a normal hiring environment, but now the game has changed significantly. Many staffing agencies are turning to Voice Advantage because it is an effective way to identify the top prospects very efficiently. That is just what small businesses need to be doing, so Voice Advantage's e-commerce solution is arriving at just the right time."

About HarQen

HarQen (pronounced HAR-ken) is a leading web telephony company that develops smart, easy-to-use business applications that solve real world problems. Voice Advantage for HR is the principal application built on HarQen's platform. Voice Advantage is a low-cost, flexible, time efficient way to interview candidates that is easily deployed and optimized for small businesses, yet scalable for large enterprises. More information is available at www.voiceadvantage.com.