Yes, the voice business has changed abundantly over the last few years. We've seen it give rise to entrepreneurial startups like never before, many with the hope of providing services that legacy operators either overpriced, or under-delivered on. Some have prospered, while others have found that taking on giants has its drawbacks. Many joined in on what I like to call the 'race to zero'--a clock that if we could watch it real time would display the downward spiral of the cost of a call (landline or mobile), and with it the valuation of a voice call as we know it.While this 'race' may not be completely over--believe it or not there is still a world out there that pays for long distance calls--it has moved faster than most predicted. This is a good thing, as it forces a new race to begin. The race to value. And recently, I was introduced to a company that suggests it's off to a good start.
SayHired, an early stage company based in San Francisco, recently unveiled its approach to the age-old problem of screening job applicants. The Internet Era has done wonders for the hiring world by changing the way hiring managers find candidates, and vice-versa. Candidates apply to more positions and hiring managers get more to choose from. With this though, new problems of sorting and evaluating applicants were born.
Complex algorithms have succeed at automating high-level filtering, but when it comes to hiring decisions, a person's voice still tells us many things. This is why final interviews are live ones. Voice--its tonality and delivery--helps us to gauge confidence, assess language command, even evaluate honestly and integrity.
With the help of the Twilio platform, SayHired rapidly built a solution that enables hiring managers to automate the process of candidate sorting and pre-screening. Managers simply provide the line of questioning and SayHired does the rest, including stepping candidates through voice-powered gating processes. Candidates, once glued to a desktop but now far more mobile, conduct their screening process from anywhere--and on their own schedule.
SayHired is new business so where they go from here to add value and scalability, remains to be seen. What's of note here is that while voice is an important part the offering, it is only one component among others.
History suggests that good entrepreneurs traditionally identify under served business problems, then determine how and what to build in terms of products and services to address them. With the notion of metered, costly voice mostly behind us, entrepreneurs like those behind SayHired are finally free to imagine what kind of problems voice could solve, and to integrate it in a profitable way.
