Job interview by Phone

Next time you apply for a job, the first person to interview you may not be a person at all - it might be a computer. An Israeli company has developed an automated system to handle the first stage of the human resources process, analysing the applicantís voice responses to questions to see how trustworthy an employee they are likely to be.

No company wants an employee who is going to take drugs, steal from their employer or engage in other questionable activities. However, even experienced interviewers can be fooled by an interviewee who is doing everything to impress and not necessarily telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A human interviewer can quiz the applicant at length about his or her ethics and morals, trying to determine whether hiring them would be a risk, but, says Israel-based company Nemesysco, a computer can do it better.

Nemesyscoís HR1 Automated Integrity Profiling/Risk Assessment system, which has just launched, requires a job applicant, speaking into a telephone-like handset attached to a desktop PC, to answer questions on various topics, from loyalty and honesty to drug usage, theft from a place of employment, bribery, kickbacks, fraud and deceit. The test questions, which the company developed together with a human resources expert based on standard HR methodology, are displayed on the screen and spoken out loud, so that the system can be used by people with visual or hearing difficulties. HR1 is currently available in English, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish but can be translated into any language.

HR1 was developed by an Israeli company called Nemesysco Technology and is based on eight years of research in voice analysis. It uses poly-layer LVA (Layer Voice Analysis) technology which employs over 800 algorithms to analyse 129 emotional layers in the voice regardless of the language they are speaking. ìThe technology doesnít care what you are saying,î explains Nemesyscoís founder and CEO, Amir Liberman. ìThe technology analyses the different paths that your brain is taking while it is deciding what to say next. For example, if you are excited, your voice gets higher and faster. If you are confused, your speech slows down. You can try and mask your reaction at the level that you can hear, but computers can hear much better.î

The LVA technology, which Nemesysco developed in conjunction with a number of psychologists, analyses states such as excitement, confusion, stress, whether the person is remembering something that happened or making something up. Liberman emphasizes that the subject should be alone in a room when using the system, and the intervieweeís answers to what are often sensitive questions are not stored so the potential employer cannot have access to them. ìThis is the fairest and most ethical system that is out there,î says Liberman. ìIt is based on three fundamental elements: your past activities and how comfortable you feel about them, your ethics and how you feel about them, and the effect the environment has on your beliefs over time.î

HR1 assigns the potential employee scores for each category from 5 to 95: the higher the score, the higher the risk, so someone who scores 95 on drug usage, for example, would be ìhigh riskî. The HR manager receives a printed report colour-coding the responses for the different categories, and can then decide whether to call the person back for a second interview and focus on those subjects that the report highlighted as problematic.