Impresico: Challenging the Way We Do Job Interviews
Interviewing, and being interviewed, can be a time-consuming process. Impresico, an online interviewing platform by Omicronsoft, aims to facilitate the process of candidate selection and candidate short listing by offering a mechanism that saves companies time and allows them to work more efficiently in the process of recruitment. GEORGIA TODAY met Irakli Svanidze, Head of Omicronsoft, Former Graduate of ESM Georgia, to find out more.
Tell us a little about the company beginnings
Omicronsoft was founded in 2009 on a home computer as a web development service that slowly gained more and more clients and saw us hiring more web developers and expanding our office. 2012 was our breakthrough year when we managed to reach out to the international market, with the help of our British partners. We realized several high profile projects that gave us a possibility to export all of our resources outside Georgia. As the company started to grow, it became clear we needed further investment to help us offer a top quality product that fully answered the needs and requirements of a hugely competitive international market. With the investment of one of the leading Georgian companies, CBG (Caucasus Business Group), we got additional funds. Today, CBG is our full partner. This gave us a chance to develop our company further, and realize projects in the US and Europe. At the same time, we decided to make our own product- an online auction web portal named ‘Centorio’ and in January 2016 we introduced online interviewing platform ‘Impresico.’
How did the idea for Impresico come about?
The idea of its creation was rather spontaneous, based on our own experience, coming from the problems we encountered while recruiting staff for our own company. The uniqueness of this platform primarily lies in the fact that it’s not a face-to-face type of interviewing experience. There is no need for an interviewer and applicant to be in the same room simultaneously: it’s enough for an interviewer to create and upload an interview on a cloud platform, giving a certain deadline to a potential candidate, so that the applicant can be interviewed online (with a webcam or smartphone), in any location in the world. The process then goes to an assessment stage by the company that posted the actual vacancy.
Impresico facilitated the process of candidate selection and candidate short-listing for us. With this online interviewing platform, we’ve created a mechanism that enabled us to save time and work more efficiently in the process of recruitment. We tested the product within our own company first and were stunned with the results.
With Impresico it became much easier to recruit people, and the process of selection also became less time-consuming.
How does it work?
Candidates interviewed through our platform are given a certain number of questions to be answered in a specific given time frame, after which, when a candidate has finished the interview, the interviewers (either one or several) access the answers and give them scores. The system then automatically calculates the cumulative score for each candidate.
Why do you think it is needed and why is it innovative? What unique features does it have?
Impresico is interesting for companies which have regional offices. For example, one of our top clients in Great Britain is an old auction house, Spink and Sons, founded in the 17th century, with offices in Europe, Singapore and the US, and a centralized HR department in their head office. With Impresico they now have the possibility to considerably save their time during the recruitment process since the platform makes it possible to interview potential candidates online and only conduct a further face-to-face interview with the successful applicants afterwards.
Your slogan for Impresico is a “Better way to hire.” Tell us more
We recently updated our product with a keyword matching system. When a vacancy is created it also has special keywords, more frequently used for technical vacancies such as IT Manager’s Assistant, first line, or second line technical assistant etc. When an applicant’s CV is uploaded, it’s scanned for the keyword match.
Technically, a company registers on our platform, acquiring one of the packages we offer, and can design the platform’s control panel according to their brand. The platform has its own dashboard where you can see a snapshot of the ongoing recruiting process. Every vacancy has a public URL or an embedded code that is incorporated both on social media and on job-listing sites.
You’ve been registered as a contestant for the TBC Business Awards. What do you think are the benefits of participating in such projects and what do you plan to do if you win?
I think this is a very important initiative and the team that’s organizing the TBC Business Awards is a top professional one.
Our decision to participate came spontaneously and we were pleasantly surprised with the exposure it gave our company. We’re now in the process of signing a deal with one of the biggest companies in Georgia and all of it happened because Impresico is taking part in the Awards.
Any last comments?
I’d like to say a special thanks to all the people who worked on the Impresico project. Their dedication, passion and enthusiasm made it all possible. Their work fosters financial investments to our country, since Impresico is a totally exportable service. Impresico is gaining popularity fast, and we’re planning to expand it by creating a larger HR platform for the future. I hope that with the same team we’ll develop our products, services and company further.
Nino Gugunishvili