The future of job interviews is here and it looks influenced by on-demand ride service Uber.

The model, created by startup Monjin Interviews, is built around a video database and a platform where candidates meet interviewers purely on the basis of their skills.

This is how it works: A candidate joins Monjin. Intelligent scheduling allows the candidate to get scheduled with the right interviewer on the network on basis of their skills. The interview happens virtually, and is video-recorded, indexed, tagged and rated.

The video is streamed across devices and is immediately available for subscribing employers. Employers can rate the candidate and interviewer just like on Uber, or Airbnb where users can rate a property.

An employer looking to hire can see for himself how a candidate performed during the interview. The company gets its revenue from employers subscribing to the service. Monjin is founded by Abhijit Kashyape, former lead-talent at Accenture, and entrepreneur Ashutosh Kulkarni. It received a $1.8 million (`12 crore) funding from angel investors and promoters.

The Pune-based startup, which has 40 employees, is looking to raise $5 million for growth. “The platform is self-aggregating and self-curating; hence every day and every hour interviews keep happening and they get consumed by the growing community of Monjin clients,” said Kashyape.

“The entire process flow of creation to consumption takes place in the auto mode.” Monjin claims to be the first ever video database of active and passive, as well as deeply assessed, candidates who have been given a rating. Anirudhha Thakur of Monjin says he has completed a dozen interviews.

“The profile I have interviewed for is a developer’s. I get complete freedom to interview the candidate as long as I stick to a broad structure.” Technical questions that are practical in nature are asked. Candidates are also given case studies.

“Duration of the interviews can be between 35-40 minutes and an hour,” Thakur said. He works for the technology centre of a multinational bank. Parag Satpute, country manager at engineering company Sandvik Asia,He previously hired through executive search firms and professional networking sites like LinkedIn.

“This is a more cost-effective and reliable way of hiring because candidates are vetted. One round of filtration has taken place and this is more than the CV; you are actually looking at video interviews of candidates,” Satpute said.

The model is seen to be useful for operative roles, sales and IT services. “IT companies interview and hire significant numbers and they need to be cost-effective. The real opportunity for employers is having an externally validated database of candidates,” said Milan Seth, partner at EY.

Monjin is banking on a factor that is critical in candidate selection but may not be readily available at companies — domain knowledge of the interviewer. “This (lack of domain knowledge by the person who asks questions) leads to candidate dissatisfaction, credibility loss, positions remaining open, etc. Monjin plans to fill in the gap,” Kashyape said.

Pune-based Anshu (named changed on request) had a video interview on Monjin eight months ago, which led to a couple of calls from potential employers. The questions on Monjin were about SharePoint and .NET (dotnet), areas of his expertise.

While Anshu has decided to stay in his current job, the Monjin interview helped him benchmark himself in the job market. “It’s like somebody doing the first round of interview for you which gets played to people who are actively searching,” he said.

Source: The Economic Times