AdamsHand's Interview Exchange Reinvents Online Recruiting; Bold New Job Service Amplifies Visibility of Top Applicants, Delivers Business-Process Improvements.

Business & Human Resources Editors

SHREWSBURY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 18, 2002

In a move to reinvigorate the online recruiting industry, AdamsHand, Inc., today unveiled the Interview Exchange (SM), a radically innovative, highly rational, cost-effective online job service.

The Interview Exchange is the first service of its kind to assure the most highly qualified and motivated applicants of face-to-face interviews with hiring managers. In addition, the service enables the immense number of under-qualified applicants, which Internet job boards generate regularly, to avoid unproductive job searches. Recruiters thereby can focus on attracting top talent rather than sorting through mountains of resumes.

"Every organization knows its success depends largely on hiring individuals who possess exceptional skills and the right fit," said Naray Viswanathan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of AdamsHand. "Yet employment recruiting arguably remains one of the most fragmented and inefficient aspects of business operations. The Interview Exchange is an unconventional, even bold solution to today's hiring challenges. This integrated online service provides a compelling, pragmatic approach for getting the top candidates through the recruiter's door fairly and efficiently."

He added, "No online job service can guarantee you'll be hired for your ideal job. But the Interview Exchange delivers the next best thing: real interviews for real jobs. The rest is up to you."

This breakthrough offering goes live today at www.interviewexchange.com with full functionality and real jobs posted by a growing selection of employers. The Interview Exchange will be broadly deployed starting in early-2003.

Not Your Father's Job Board

To begin a recruiting engagement, the hiring employer posts on the Interview Exchange job descriptions of real, high-priority positions to be filled. Importantly, the employer pledges to offer interviews to the top candidates recruited through the Interview Exchange. Next, as with conventional job boards, job seekers can search the postings for open positions in their fields of interest.

Then a series of user interactions - or filters - unique to the Interview Exchange takes place online to narrow the applicant pool and enable the top candidates ultimately to schedule job interviews. In step one, interested candidates are screened to make sure they meet the employer's minimum requirements appropriate for the job.

In step two, appropriate candidates can interact online to effectively "sort themselves out." In addition to posting resumes, serious applicants post Public Profiles, which are professional skills and experience inventories visible anonymously to other applicants. This step provides candidates with rational insight into their chances of competing successfully in a narrowing field of applicants.

In step three, dedicated applicants can differentiate themselves further by posting Interview Offers, or IOs. The IO is a monetary amount that represents the candidate's confidence in his or her qualifications. By posting an IO, the applicant's name is added automatically the employer's Short List of high-profile candidates. Applicants also can pursue job openings without placing IOs.

IOs, like Public Profiles, are both anonymous, to ensure privacy, and visible to other users. If they wish to improve their positions on the Short List, users can re-post higher IOs at any time.

In the final step, the Short List applicants are ranked according to their IOs. The employer selects three of the five top-ranked applicants, and possibly others, and offers each one the opportunity to attend a face-to-face job interview.

The Interview Exchange collects from the applicants invited for interviews their IO amounts as service facilitation fees. If a candidate is not invited, no money changes hands. Further, employers do not benefit financially from IO transactions.

Real Jobs, Interviews and Results

Ted Kolota, Vice President of Marketing at AdamsHand, said, "The employment recruiting process has drifted into an ironic and ultimately unproductive state of affairs, with undue reliance on costly, impersonal technology for a process that fundamentally is about building human relationships. The Interview Exchange is the first online job service to leverage `second-order' Internet capabilities to optimize, re-energize and re-personalize the critical link between job seekers and employers."

Conventional online job boards can generate many hundreds of applicants for every job opening, nearly all of them lacking the proper credentials. To cope with the flood of candidates, many recruiters resort to so-called applicant tracking systems, which scan resumes automatically in search of job-specific keywords.

Consequently, job seekers generally perceive conventional online recruiting as little more than a lottery, where their chances of gaining employer attention are virtually zero. The Interview Exchange transforms the job search from a frustrating, time-consuming chore into a streamlined, rewarding exercise in professional advancement.

The IO feature in particular serves candidates as a highly effective investment in career management, compared with typical job search expenditures such as travel, networking and resume services, which rarely produce job interviews.

For employers, the Interview Exchange eliminates the flood of resumes created by online job boards. It boosts the productivity of bandwidth-starved recruiters by enabling them to spend more "face time" with high quality applicants, generate a shorter time- and lower cost-to-hire, and bring higher caliber employees into the enterprise.

As a result, HR managers gain the flexibility to redeploy staff resources to the best-use needs of the organization, thereby adding strategic business value. In addition, the Interview Exchange helps CXOs achieve business process improvements and optimize the human capital of the enterprise.

AdamsHand, Inc., www.adamshand.com, creator of the Interview Exchange, develops innovative solutions for enabling job seekers and employers to connect with each other efficiently and productively. By harnessing rational human behavior such as self-selection and personal initiative, and by unleashing the potential of the Internet in new and creative ways, we deliver the ultimate in online recruiting services.

The Interview Exchange (SM) is a service mark of AdamsHand, Inc., and contains USPTO patent-pending technology.