June 2010

Lord Cultural Recruitment and the CLR Global Group chose TalkingCV for first round interviews for a major UK national museum

Lord Cultural Recruitment, a division of the CLR Global Group, was recently awarded the assignment to fill two new roles for a major British national museum based on their international position and worldwide reputation.

The museum houses major collections of British and international art, both modern and contemporary, and with expansion in mind they ideally wanted to attract applicants with the strongest conservation background within an international context.

The two posts attracted over 70 applicants from specialists in this field from four continents, however the client emphasised that the candidates must also have “people skills”. The personality fit of the candidates was most important to them.

The CLR Global group was founded in 2001 with the desire to bring a fresh and innovative approach to strategic business consulting in the cultural and leisure sectors, and this approach to recruiting remains fundamental across all eight companies within the group today.

Demonstrating this desire to embrace new technology Lord Cultural Recruitment suggested the use of TalkingCV as an alternative to the traditional face-to-face first round interview

Applicants were initially asked to fill in an online application form, which was then processed and a short list of candidates chosen. The selected candidates were then sent an email inviting them to record their first round interview. The candidates were all given the same set of questions to answer, however, unlike a face-to-face interview the candidates were able to record their interview at a time best suited to them. With applicants from four continents and numerous time zones TalkingCV became an effective tool in Lords’ recruitment process.

Asked whether any of the candidates had shown resistance to this method of interview, Lord Cultural Recruitment’s Director, Micah John Styles, stated:

“There was no resistance whatsoever. In fact, bearing in mind the candidates had never seen anything like this before, they all welcomed the opportunity of getting face-to-face with their future employer at such an early stage of the recruitment process.”

“You have to understand, most of these candidates are people with a museum background and by their very nature are not as technologically advanced as the vast proportion of the “y” generation that use Skype, MSN Messenger, Facebook and mobile uploads on a daily basis. One of the key advantages of a TalkingCV is the candidate is able to rehearse their performance thereby ensuring that their best attributes will shine through.”

“TalkingCV has certainly saved us money by eliminating travel costs associated with getting all applicants to one central place. We in turn can pass those savings on to our clients. We’ve learned our lesson the hard way. We had a recruitment drive in Qatar a few years back and flew Executives in from all over the world – Business travel fares and 3 nights in a hotel – which is not cheap. There was one man who upon disembarking from the plane I knew immediately was not the right person for the role. Had we had TalkingCV back then we would have been aware of this and wouldn’t have wasted our time and money bringing him in for an interview.”

Asked to sum up the effectiveness of TalkingCV, Micah stated:

“TalkingCV supplements the recruitment process. It adds value and certainly enhances our ability to evaluate candidates for all our Clients. This recent assignment was a specialist role at the museum, one that relied on people and presentation skills and TalkingCV allowed us to capture the essence of this. Some candidates had a couple of technical issues at first which was frustrating but the technical back-up team at TalkingCV were very impressive considering they were working across so many time zones. Unlike a number of people that say ‘we’ll get back to you’ they resolved the problem immediately. We’re now lined up to use TalkingCV for another senior executive role that we have been asked to fill.”

TalkingCV is now offering a no-obligation 60 day free trial so that companies may experience the product for themselves. Registration can be completed via the TalkingCV website at http://www.talkingcv.com/freetrial.html or by emailing sales@talkingcv.com.