Human resources professionals and recruiters can now create, review and distribute virtual interviews without leaving their ATS

November 29, 2010 -- HarQen, a leading enterprise voice platform company that develops smart, user friendly voice applications to help optimize business processes, and Advanced Personnel Systems (APS), the makers of the SmartSearch applicant tracking system (ATS), announced they have partnered to provide a seamless interface between their award winning products through an API integration of HarQen’s Voice Advantage capabilities.

The integration provides SmartSearch customers who use Voice Advantage with tools to conduct “virtual interviews” with candidates. SmartSearch provides real-time, talent management software that centralizes sourcing, recruiting, applicant tracking, and hiring activities in an online database where all the pieces come together in one easy-to-use solution.

Recently named Top HR product of 2010 by Human Resource Executive magazine, HarQen's Voice Advantage allows recruiters to conduct virtual interviews with a simple web dashboard and any telephone. Recruiters record interview questions over the phone and can invite candidates to interview via email or an 'Interview Now' button in an online job posting. With the SmartSearch integration, users can create a new Voice Advantage campaign in a matter of minutes -- right from the SmartSearch dashboard. The integrated system tracks the candidates’ experience from the invitation to interview all the way through the hire.

HarQen’s reporting engine also provides SmartSearch users a real sense of what is happening during the interview process – answering questions such as recruiter interviewing efficiency and quality based upon outcome data – including Total Time to Hire (TTH) and retention. Voice Advantage can decreases TTH by upwards of 50% while significantly increasing recruiter efficiency, candidate quality and placement ratios.

Once candidates are qualified through standard pre-screening questions, HarQen’s Voice Advantage prompts them to enter their phone number and calls them immediately. The candidate hears a custom greeting and series of questions in the voice of the recruiter or hiring manager. When the candidate completes the interview, Voice Advantage automatically updates the candidate record in SmartSearch and notifies the designated recruiter. The recruiters can then review and rank the recorded interviews in SmartSearch, allowing these voice interviews to become a permanent part of the candidate record. After reviewing the candidates, recruiters can use Voice Advantage's presentation tools to easily share highlights of the actual interview with hiring managers or others involved in the hiring process.

“We are excited to have Voice Advantage’s capabilities integrated with SmartSearch,” said Doug Coull, CEO of APS. “This is another step in bringing our clients value-added capability to identify more qualified candidates and reduce hiring costs.”

The integration of SmartSearch with Voice Advantage is one of a number of v14.1 updates to SmartSearch. Users who wish to take advantage of this new integration may set-up an account directly with Voice Advantage and pay per-seat or for blocks of interviews. There is no additional cost for the integration to SmartSearch.


About HarQen: Founded in 2007, HarQen (pronounced HAR‐ken) is an enterprise voice platform company. With HarQen's Voice Advantage, recruiters can capture, organize and distribute the original voice of the candidate, turning previously disposable phone interviews into valuable voice assets. By eliminating the time consuming process of scheduling interviews, the 'no-show' candidate problem, and the obligatory courtesy interview, Voice Advantage offers time savings up to 70% per candidate. For more information, visit www.HarQen.com or www.voiceadvantage.com