Taleo Interview Evaluations, Part 1

Time to share a new concept demo, built earlier this Spring by Raymond and Anthony (@anthonyslai), both of whom are ex-Taleo.

Back in April, I got my first exposure to Taleo during a sales call. I was there with the AUX contingent, talking about Oracle HCM Cloud Release 8, featuring Simplified UI, our overall design philosophies and approaches, i.e. simplicity-mobility-extensibility, glance-scan-commit, and our emerging technologies work and future cool stuff.

I left that meeting with an idea for a concept demo, streamlining the interview evaluation process with a Google Glass app.

The basic pain point here is that recruiters have trouble urging the hiring managers they support through the hiring process because these managers have other job responsibilities.

It’s the classic Catch-22 of hiring; you need more people to help do work, but you’re so busy doing the actual work, you don’t have time to do the hiring.

Anyway, Taleo Recruiting has the standard controls, approvals and gating tasks that any hiring process does. One of these gating tasks is completing the interview evaluation; after interviewing a candidate, the interviewer, typically the hiring manager and possibly others, completes an evaluation of the candidate that determines her/his future path in the process.

Good evaluation, the candidate moves on in the process. Poor evaluation, the candidate does not.

Both Taleo’s web app and mobile app provide the ability to complete these evaluations, and I thought it would be cool to build a Glass app just for interview evaluations.

Having a hands-free way to complete an evaluation would be useful for a hiring manager walking between meetings on a large corporate campus or driving to a meeting. The goal here is to bring the interview evaluation closer to the actual end of the interview, while the chat is still fresh in the manager’s mind.

Imagine you’re the hiring manager. Rather than delaying the evaluation until later in the day (or week), walk out of an interview, command Glass to start the evaluation, have the questions read directly into your ear, dictate your responses and submit.

Since the Glass GDK dropped last Winter, Anthony has been looking for a new Glass project, and I figured he and Raymond would run with a Taleo project. They did.

The resulting concept demo is a Glass app and an accompanying Android app that can also be used as a dedicated interview evaluation app. Raymond and Anthony created a clever way to transfer data using the Bluetooth connection between Glass and its parent device.

Here’s the flow, starting with the Glass app. The user can either say “OK Glass” and then say “Start Taleo Glass,” or tap the home card, swipe through the cards and choose the Start Taleo Glass card.

The Glass app will then wait for its companion Android app to send the evaluation details.

Next, the user opens the Android app to see all the evaluations s/he needs to complete, and then selects the appropriate one.

Tapping Talk to Google Glass sends the first question to the Glass over the Bluetooth connection. The user sees the question in a card, and Glass also dictates the question through its speaker.

Tapping Glass’ touchpad turns on the microphone so the user can dictate a response, either choosing an option for a multiple choice question or dictating an answer for an open-ended question. As each answer is received by the Android app, the evaluation updates, which is pretty cool to watch.

The Glass app goes through each question, and once the evaluation is complete, the user can review her/his answers on the Android app and submit the evaluation.

The guys built this for me to show at a Taleo and HCM Cloud customer expo, similar to the one AMIS hosted in March. After showing it there, I decided to expand the concept demo to tell a broader story. If you want to read about that, stay tuned for Part 2.

Itching to sound off on this post, find the comments.

Update: The standard disclaimer applies here. This is not product of any kind. It’s simply a concept demo, built to show people the type of R&D we, Oracle Applications User Experience and this team, do. Not product, only research.