Hong Kong – 5 February 2020 – Doing their part to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Hong Kong, WiseSpot Company Limited today announced that they have begun using UC Now Communication Limited’s UC.NOW real-time communication & collaboration software as their online interview platform since after the CNY public holidays. This move aims to reduce unnecessary face-to-face interactions to reduce the risk of inter-person infection. Even where the need may arise for some of their staff to work from home, the company’s daily operations can still be maintained as much as possible through the adoption of technologies, including in this instance new staff recruitment.
Ms Andrea Poon, WiseSpot’s Head of Human Resource said, “As an IT company, we have been planning to gradually switch our interview processes online from April 2020, beginning with our annual recruitment for our Engineering Trainee Program. After reviewing several software options, we eventually decided on UC.NOW for its UC.NOW Meeting Scheduler function, a market proven, comprehensive interview scheduler tool that covers the end-to-end workflow from batch interview schedule uploads, automatic invitation email dispatch, automated candidate appointment confirmation or request for change, perpetual master schedule update, to send-out of pre-session reminder email that contains a click-to-start-interview URL link. This tool, not readily available in the other solutions we evaluated but very practical for HR use, can enable us enhance our productivity when handling the administrative chore to recruit for, say, our Trainee Program where we need schedule a sizable number of interviews in order to fill multiple vacancies.”
“This situation with the coronavirus sprung suddenly and escalated even more rapidly, which forced us to significantly move up our online interview implementation plan. Because UC.NOW’s Meeting Scheduler tool is already market ready, it took our team only one day’s preparation to get started. Supported by popular browsers including Chrome, Safari, QQ, 360, and Mozilla Firefox running on computers and mobile devices, neither party needed to pre-install anything. Our online interviews are conducted using video chat by default so that interviewers can observe candidates’ mannerisms and on-the-spot response. So, interviews taking place online is virtually the same as traditional face-to-face sessions, but in the current context minus the need for face masks. At any time during the video chat, the interviewer can use concurrent text chat to assess the candidate’s written skills, from composition, translation and even software coding” Ms Poon pointed out.
“Every online interview will be automatically recorded and the file is downloadable afterwards for review as needed. The interviewer no longer need to scribble away madly during the session, but can direct his undivided attention to listening to, observing and interacting with the candidate. While difficult to arrange for traditional face-to-face interviews, this proved to be quite useful actually, particularly for positions that require several rounds of interviews each with a different interviewer from a different department. It facilitated more concise and productive interviews by reducing inadvertent repeat questions from round to round. When the time comes to evaluate different candidates for final selection, having video records to refer back to as needed instead of simply relying on memory or notes jotted down, is fairer to candidates.” Ms Poon said. “Of course, we must clearly inform the candidate at the start of the interview that the session will be recorded, how we will be using the recording and how we will handle the recording after recruitment closes. The candidate has to give us his or her consent before we proceed.”
“Although we have just begun using UC.NOW for a short while, we are nonetheless quite satisfied with the preliminary results of this ‘HR Digital Transformation’ experience. As a leading software & application developer in Hong Kong, we need to continuously train our staff in Hong Kong, Taipei and Shenzhen to ensure they stay updated with the latest technology development worldwide. HR’s next milestone will be to explore further applications of UC.NOW on our other human resource development needs, such as e-training.”