CHICAGO—More than most lines of business, commercial real estate requires its practitioners to have a personable demeanor that inspires confidence and trust among clients. This presents a difficulty to those responsible for hiring new employees, since a sparkling resume does not always equal a sparkling personality. And the face-to-face interviews needed to accurately judge prospective hires can consume a lot of time and money.
But an increasing number of firms have opted to utilize remote video interviews that cut down travel expenses and increase efficiency. Chris Young, chief executive officer of Async Interview, a Fort Washington, PA-based video conferencing firm, tells GlobeSt.com that although video interviewing has been around for a long time, recent technological advances have greatly improved its quality and lowered the expense.
“The video interviews are not being used to replace face-to-face meetings,” he adds. Instead, recruiters can conduct live interviews to supplement personal interactions or build up a portfolio of recorded interviews, which they can view when needed or share through the web with managers when deciding who to invite for a face-to-face meeting.
The spread of webcams and in-phone cameras has also made the method quite convenient for hopeful applicants, Young says. Prospects can receive via email a list of questions and then record their responses at home. Async clients can also require that they return the responses by a certain time. That way, “you're not getting the candidate on their 24th try,” but instead capture their actual personality.
And the convenience of video means recruiters can now invite more than 100 prospects from anywhere in the world to record interviews, and then store the results in an easy-to-access database. “You're going to have a high turnover for new real estate agents just out of college,” Young says, but a company with a big digital database, instead of a stack of resumes, will have a lot of insight into many potential replacements.
Young started Async about five years ago. It has clients from many different industries, he says, and video interviewing is used to hire everyone from housekeepers to chief executive officers. But the technology is particularly suited for anyone in sales. “That's obviously where real estate professionals come in, since a good portion of their role is to interact with people and make them comfortable with their decisions.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
