In the last of this 3 part series I want to share the main tool we used to actually conduct our live interviews. If you missed it, I previously shared in Part 1 about the critical online collaboration tools our team needed to stay organized in our communications and resume evaluations. In Part 2 I shared the tools we used to efficiently find times to conduct interviews.

We would use these methods to review and filter down to a handful of candidates that seemed to be a possible match and we where interested in talking with. Once we had our meeting time, we would ask the candidates to use a web cam, so that we could conduct our initial interviews online with video.  We used TokBox as our tool for the video interview.

TokBox was very easy and FREE to use!  We found that being able to conduct initial interviews this way to be so much more helpful as we had visual non-verbal communication which goes so much further than a regular phone interview.  So often you get a better feel for someone when you can see them, not just hear them.  Being able to do so online for free also saved us much travel expense that would have been required without this technology.

We choose ToxBox over others like Skype because there was nothing to install – it is completely web-based and the ability to have a group discussion was so easy to set up.

So this is how we used technology at Fellowship to help us stay organized and efficient in our pastor search and to ultimately find the man God had for us – Eric Koehler.  I am looking forward to 2010 and how God will use him and his leadership at FC.

Has anyone else found a practical use for technology in a project or team activity? I would love to hear about it!

In Part 1 on this topic, I discussed two of the tools that our Search Team used to stay organized and to administratively deal with the 400 resumes we received for job posting for the position of Lead Pastor.  In this post, I will describe the tools we used to set-up and conduct interviews and the benefits I saw from each.  Unless otherwise noted, all of these tools were FREE to use.

The first was TimeBridge. One of the most difficult things about trying to set-up and interview is trying to figure out when everyone is available to meet, or at least to pick the time that is best for the most people. With six people on the search team plus the candidate himself the logistics of just finding the meeting time could have been almost a full-time job. To avoid the never-ending back and forth that email communication would result in, I could use TimeBridge to propose up to 5 meeting times and simply have it send an email to each person which included a link that they could follow and then specify the times that were best for them within the TimeBridge database.

In addition, you could we were able to set up each member with a free account on TimeBridge so that you could share your calendar availability ahead of time which even made scheduling meeting times even more efficient.  There are many more features as well to TimeBridge and I would highly recommend it as a way to spend less time arranging meetings and more time being productive.

The next tool in the kit was from FreeConference.com. While you could get a dial-in meeting number to use from TimeBridge, one feature they didn’t have was the ability to record or save that audio file.  This was an important feature for us as despite best efforts to find the best meeting time, there would always be 1 or more persons who might not be able to make it. Having the recorded audio file available allowed team members to listen to the interviews afterwards and still be able to contribute to the post meeting discussion.  Note: There was a nominal fee to have the ability to do the audio recording ($9 per month), but we found it well worth the price.

I will save the last tool for my next post, which will go into the details of the interview itself.