Lags in digital transformation globally were replaced with immediate urgency when the world shifted to work from home in 2020. Both Human Resource (HR) and Information Technology (IT) departments shouldered the greatest burden of all — leading their workforce into adopting tools and technologies required to collaboratively meet critical business goals in a remote-first workplace.
Demand for skilled technical resources grew to an all time high as a result and inefficiencies around recruitment, specifically interviewing, created a backlog neither enterprise department could manage alone. Behind closed doors companies began to question their internal capacity to scale up technical interviewing and acknowledged the gains anticipated from the future of work may not be realized without a viable, trusted solution.
eTeki, Inc., founded in 2014, and its affiliated company eTeki Services Private Ltd. already had a pulse on the business drivers and satisfaction factors associated with decoupling the expensive, yet essential, human-centric step of the hiring process. Their solution provided elastic interview capacity that’s transformed how India and the rest of the world hire IT teams.
The company, led by Hans Bukow, CEO & Co-founder, offers Marketplace Interviews, Managed Service Interviews, Technical Interview Studio, and Expert Coaching for IT Hiring Teams to further the modernization of hiring for tech. Their solutions bring greater efficiency to the recruiting cycle of companies of all sizes and create a clear path for making the right hire with minimal impacts on IT project deadlines and budgets.
The Interviews-as-a-Service Concept
eTeki, the globe’s only technical interviews marketplace, connects hiring team buyers with freelance sellers of interview services (more than 7,000 today) for live, peer-to-peer conversations remotely conducted via an expert video interview.
Recruiters typically get candidates interviewed before sharing shortlists with hiring managers. This separates the pretenders from the contenders© and reduces hours spent on hiring tasks by tech leaders and panelists by 75-80% on average. Because of eTeki’s approach to expert interviews, tech teams invest their time only in people who meet core skill qualifications. The tech freelancers enjoy interviewing and earn extra money with their expertise.
Companies large and small trust eTeki to independently validate candidate authenticity earlier in the hiring process. The candidates interviewed get the courtesy and respect of a fluid conversation with a peer experienced in the role and stack they are expected to demonstrate mastery over.
A Visionary Leadership
Hans Bukow brings 25+ years of experience in founding and leading innovative venture-backed enterprise software and Web companies. He loves soccer and has been to 12 World Cup games. Hans speaks four languages, has three citizenships, and is a recognized thought leader on the work from anywhere global future-of-work – e-working.
Hans is recognized for co-creating more than $3 Billion in software-centric technology categories: Manufacturing Execution Software (MES), Professional Project Work Marketplaces-Exchanges, and Vendor Management Systems (VMS). His significant successes include FASTech (#22 Inc500), now Applied Materials Global Services, WorldPlay, which sold to AOL and became Games Channel with EA, and eWork Exchange’s cloned company eWork Group (EU-Nordics) – see (EWRK: SS).
By laying the foundation while at eWork Group of what is known today as #FutureofWork, Hans and other category creators of e-working proved remote work was more than an enterprise experiment. Today, engaging independent contractors via the Internet to work is the norm.
Hans was the last CEO and largest shareholder of Provade VMS, which sold to SmartERP in 2018. Mr Bukow invests in and advises many other innovative companies with global expansion ambitions.
An Inner Drive
At the core, digital transformation represents a paradigm shift in workplaces, workspaces, and the workforce. The pandemic accelerated adoption of virtual workplaces and cemented collaborative workspace tools in company budgets and protocols. Now, the global economy’s appetite for more technology demands hiring IT pros at a scale never seen before. Latest estimates suggest more than 2.4 billion interview hours
eTeki augments existing technical hiring processes by filling gaps in interview bandwidth and expertise with Interview Service Providers globally. This enables companies taking up digital transformation initiatives to keep pace with hiring in a competitive tech talent market.
eTeki’s got the largest interview infrastructure globally. With both a platform and curated talent pool of interview experts who evaluate candidates to understand if they have the background, competency, and experience to be effective on teams engaged in technological innovations and digital transformation.
eTeki’s Differentiating Factors
Any company can integrate a video meeting and scheduling tool to claim their place in the interviews-as-a-service industry. eTeki is the market leader globally because of:
Fluid SCOPE interviews, designed by published I/O psychologist Dr. Tom Janz, provide a stellar candidate experience, lay the foundation for technical competencies discovery, bring experience levels to the forefront, and provide the highest level of predictive validity for interview results.
Candidate satisfaction, measured by their rating of interview experience with their panelist, guides algorithms that match consumers of interview services with their interview service providers. The reviews create credibility of the expert panelists and of recruiter and other users. Likewise, ratings may be shared by the recruiter. eTeki’s peer review community leverages programmatic triggers to also rate the technical and non-technical points of the interview.
Freelance expert tech panels matched based on interview scope mirrors internal expertise    and provides confidence of foundational principles of the role and hands-on experience with the tools and technologies required to perform job duties with minimal training. This assures quality of interview (and hire) gets prioritized over arbitrary BPO like interview assignments.
Deliverables provided include the entire video of the participant and the interviewer, as well quantitative and qualitative data. This assures full transparency concerning who led the interview, what questions were asked to derive the scores, how candidates are treated, and panelist qualifications.
Advantages from the Stakeholder Perspective
Candidate Experience – faster next-round decisions let candidates know where they stand in the hiring process thus enhancing the employer brand.
Employee Experience – increase morale of internal interview panels by prioritizing interview time slots for people with actual performance potential versus waste of project resources and intrusion on interviewers’ personal time.
IT/TA Dynamics – improve relations between IT & TA departments with high quality filtering of skills and verify identity earlier in the pipeline to optimize recruiting and hiring metrics to industry norms.
IT Surety – make hires in today’s remote and hybrid world of work without question of fraudulent candidates or embellished resumes with peer to peer, recorded video interviews using trusted detection methods.
TA Confidence – submit to tech leaders and schedule panel interviews with certainty that their valuable time gets invested in qualified profiles instead of fake or embellished candidates.
Fiscal Impact – hire faster and better so tech teams include the right combination of talent to meet workforce demands, attain optimum results from the IT hiring process, and meet revenue goals.
Yesterday & Today’s Challenges
Challenges associated with transforming the internal hiring process by decoupling tech interviews decrease with time and continual education of the market. This is the norm for any new category which disrupts the status quo to deliver on a promise of a better way of doing something.
- Risk Tolerance Levels of Stakeholders – The majority of IT and recruiting professionals sit at opposite ends of innovation adoption lifecycles. Buy-in must be present from both departments and at multiple levels within those departments when it comes to full scale decoupling of the technical interview from the internal hiring process.
- Create Trust in Independent Tech Interviewers – Whether formalized or informal, internal interview panels are implicitly trusted to evaluate candidates. eTeki’s experts create trust using a marketplace profile thay demonstrates technical qualifications, communication skills, and interview history as told by user ratings and reviews.
- Conversations Over Rapid Fire Q&A – Candidates prefer a fluid conversation over being grilled on basic technical concepts. Oftentimes those questions get circulated online and provide an unfair advantage to subsequent candidates for the same role. The mark of a professional interviewer is using the candidate’s stated project experience instead of an answer key as the framework to validate skills.
- Interviewer Job Fit Still not an Exact Science – A perfect person-job match technology has yet to be attained by any recruiting tech company. While machine learning and AI make predictions about who would be the best panelist an experienced eye must supervise matches to deliver experts who match the interview scope at the role and stack level.
- Fraud Detection Technology Adoption – Industry methods for detecting candidate fraud largely ignore the greatest source of proxy interviews, the respondent’s voice, despite the emergence of deepfake tech infiltrating assessments and interviews. Risk-averse stakeholders fear backlash from candidates and settle for subpar approaches to candidate identity validation to protect candidate experience.
Embracing the Future of Work
Candidate Evaluation – While most recruiting processes were tech enabled pre-pandemic, relative newcomer to TA tech, interviews-as-a-service became the standard globally to fill gaps of limited bandwidth and internal expertise required to evaluate the potential workforce at scale. Hiring the workforce of the future includes interviews-as-a-service for skill evaluation of all knowledge-based hiring, not just IT roles.
Candidate Authenticity – Audio biometrics used today for personal security and customer service in banking, financial services, and insurance will be leveraged to assure recruiting excellence. The convergence of evaluation tools into solution stacks whereby unified screening, assessment and interview technologies facilitate the data collection required to consolidate audio and video biometrics along with device monitoring for the greatest level of certainty in hiring.
Team Building – The shift of building culture by face to face team building and employee resource group activities to create employee belonging brought about virtual happy hours and coffee connects, as well as virtual escape rooms. Virtual reality spaces will create a culture of community and belonging not previously attainable for remote team experiences.
Meeting Participation – Video meetings bridge the distance between employees to facilitate conversation on business initiatives and current projects. In a futuristic workplace, not only will workers connect through Virtual Reality to meet, but AI will initiate those meetings instead of the participant remembering to join.
Task Management – Work today requires planning, communication and coordination directly between stakeholders. Data abounds in our inbox, calendar, task list, call recordings and frequently used files. That’s a lot of rich data for ML to consume and guide the future of work as it pertains to automating project plans based on typical stakeholder tasks and timelines.
Talent Attraction – Recruiting requires significant effort because a lot of time gets spent posting jobs across many physical and digital locations. The hard to locate talent like niche tech pros requires a speciality sourcing expert. While many HR Tech solutions have attempted to automate the posting, sourcing, screening, and interviewing functions to determine eligibility and suitability, no comprehensive solution exists to entirely transform the process.
In the interim, Direct employers and staffing firms need to look to talent pools with pre-validated skills and credibility signals to fill resource gaps as part of a larger initiative to expand the talent continuum.
Guiding Words of Wisdom
“For the leaders embarking on a digital transformation, I advise you to get clarity and drive conviction. Find your mission’s North Star and make sure everyone knows how to get there. And then go ahead and keep going until you reach your goal knowing that it’s a marathon, never a sprint to success. In a world that’s increasingly regularly disrupted, today demands action, now.”
