Tag: Google Meet

How Innovators use Workomo #2: interviewing over video

During work-from-home, all hiring is now taking place over Meet & Zoom. Be it founders, big company execs, or recruiting managers in startups, interviewing candidates over video is the norm now globally.

During our conversations with Workomo users, several hiring managers have highlighted inadequate prep-time due to back-to-backs, as a key challenge 🧗🏽‍♀️ Pre-WFH, offline interviews happened in structured environments (eg. office spaces, on-campus etc.) with a scheduled cadence that let hiring managers plan their day and get breathing room. Now, interviews happen from messy living rooms & home-offices, squeezed between home-schooling kids, putting toddlers to sleep & doing personal chores. What makes it worse is an ever-increasing number of video meetings throughout the day, both internal & external. End-result: not enough time to prep on candidates, leading to ineffective interviews & anxiety.

Even under this time pressure, hiring managers still recognize getting a holistic perspective on a candidate’s persona as a critical need💡 In today’s knowledge economy, getting that one key hire right (or wrong!) can disproportionately impact team outcomes.

In a nutshell, in this working environment of back-to-back Zoom/ Meet interviews, skimming PDF resumes or LinkedIn profiles to do prep on candidates at high scale & velocity has become cumbersome. This is exactly where innovator users are using Workomo.

As a hiring manager, even if you don’t have enough time to prep before a video interview, Workomo automatically pops-up a candidates’s professional profile in your meeting workflow at the right access points (browser, calendar, Meet, Zoom) a few minutes before the meeting.

Via a meeting timer on the browser
One-click access on the calendar
During the video call

Do you feel the mental-overload of quickly making sense of a cluttered PDF resume (unfortunately, candidates don’t build resumes keeping your user experience in mind🔥)? Don’t worry — Workomo presents people info in the form of Cue Cards. These are distilled professional insights about the candidate, designed to be consumed in a 1–2 mins “last-minute-prep” scenario.

Distilled insights into the person, including commonalities

As a founder hiring for my own startup, I now consciously look beyond static resumes, to understand the holistic persona of someone I am about to interview🔍 What are the thematic interests of this person? What does the person tweet about? Are there any commonalities that I can find & subsequently utilize to ice-break and create a more comfortable interviewing environment? Workomo Cue Cards are a great way to access these insights in a byte-sized way.

1-click Twitter personas

As we introduce more powerful product features over the next quarter, we are super excited to see how the usage of Workomo by hiring managers evolves further. If you are in the midst of hiring over Zoom or Meet today, try Workomo & see if it works for you🙇🏽‍♂️

PS: this post is part of the “How Innovators use Workomo” series, in which we share how our most retained users are using the product. Check out the previous post on using Workomo for meeting someone new on Lunchclub here!

How Innovators use Workomo #1: LunchClub meetings

Source: LunchClub & Workomo websites

It’s been almost 3 months since we launched Workomo on Product Hunt. Since then, we have seen double-digits week-on-week growth in new users, with Innovator users from all over the world using the product and giving active feedback on how to make it more useful for them🙏🏽 We are also starting to notice interesting patterns emerge from how retained users are using the product.

Given Workomo’s core value proposition of “one-click people insights for virtual meetings” applies to many different kinds of professional personas and scenarios, I have been getting this question a lot from users — “what are the kinds of meetings & situations where Workomo will provide the most value to me?”💡

Am starting this “How Innovators use Workomo” series of posts, essentially to share how our most retained users are using the product. Hopefully, this will help better explain Workomo’s potential benefit to you as a professional, and illustrate ways it can help make your video meetings over Zoom/ Meet more productive.

To begin with, let me talk about LunchClub meetings as one of the main scenarios where users are finding Workomo extremely useful. During our Product Hunt launch itself, the community highlighted how LunchClub & Workomo could potentially be used together in a powerful way.

Source: Workomo’s launch post on Product Hunt
  1. Doing people-prep before meeting a new person

LunchClub is a global platform that does curated 1:1 introductions, helping professionals connect with other like-minded people. It’s HQ in the Bay Area and rapidly growing in traction across key markets.

In its current form, Workomo has immense value when meeting a new person & hence, is being used by LunchClub users to prep before meeting a new person they got matched with on the platform.

Typically in this scenario, users pre-Workomo looked up people on LinkedIn or via Google search, each meeting-prep requiring multiple clicks & significant mental bandwidth. If one wanted to go deeper and also lookup people on platforms like Twitter, this took even more time. In fact, trying to fit this people-prep effort within a user’s crammed professional life led to most just giving up on prepping, despite fully understanding the value it creates.

Workomo solves this problem really well:

— With one click in the browser, Workomo ‘Cue Cards’ show you summarized professional insights aggregated from multiple platforms, all in one place. This eliminates the need to go to multiple platforms, saving mental energy, time (& clicks!)⏳

— Because Workomo integrates into the calendar📅, it’s able to auto-identify meeting schedule & attendees, thus popping up the Cue Card at exactly the right time with exactly the right info. One-click, zero-typing experience 🖲

2. Especially strong benefits for video meetings during WFH

With the prevailing WFH environment, LunchClub meetings also went fully virtual over the last few months. This has helped unlock Workomo’s video meeting value proposition. Today, LunchClub users, via the browser, view info about the person they are meeting with, without leaving their Zoom/ Meet/ other meeting screens👩🏽‍💻

3. ‘T-60 to T+60’ secs

Specifically in the video meeting workflow, we have noticed an interesting pattern from how users are leveraging Workomo. Most use it in the time window of 60 secs before+60 secs after meeting start time⏲ Because networking meetings typically get crammed in the middle of hectic job tasks & personal errands, prep-time at disposal is really less, and therefore, time-saved in people-prep is extremely important.

Given Workomo Cue Cards have been designed to make the info skimmable & easy to digest in <60 secs, they perfectly solve this problem. Carefully-timed pop-up reminders embedded without friction in the user’s workflow, combined with the ability to view people-info directly within Meet & Zoom via the browser, further drives the 3P benefit (Productive People Prep) for users.

T-60 secs (on the calendar)

T=0 (entering the video call)

T+60 secs (beginning of the video call: waiting room scenario, round-the-table intros etc.)

So next time you are meeting someone new, especially on a virtual networking platform like LunchClub, do give Workomo a shot and see if you find it useful🙇🏽‍♂️