“COVID-19 has turned the world upside down, this shouldn’t deter companies from hiring talent. Greetings all….”
PS : This is not just a Revolution but a REMOLUTION!
This is how we nervously began our presentation in front of our peers and mentors. Phew, two months of work, 3 hours on zoom with the team apart from the 2 hours of work each of us separately put in.
Before I start, I would like to thank my peers Mansi Sharma from Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University, Delhi and KHS Supriya from VNR VJIET, Hyderabad. They have been extremely supportive and considerate. These ladies are talented beyond measure and always give it their best. Conversations turned into arguments but we still managed to come to an understanding and sorted out most of our issues. I would also like to thank Siva, Adarsh and the entire team at Nuvepro Technologies for providing support and help in building our project. A special thanks to Giridhar LV, CEO of Nuvepro Technologies , my dad, who has been another pillar of support and guidance all through this journey.
In the month of June, as a part of the Women Techmakers Engineering Fellows program , which I am a part of, we were assigned to build a project of our own interest. We wanted to be different and build a solution that can be used by the masses.
We decided on building an interface that can facilitate the conduction of remote interviews. We call it REMO. Check out our website !
A short video describing the Minimum viable product we have at present:
Work from home is the new normal, so how about interview from home then ? This is what primarily inspired us, but thinking of it , we also address many other potential problems that are encountered while conducting interviews.
There is no interview-specific platform. The ones currently is use are all video-chat applications with a few added functionalities. Testing of technical skills requires screen-sharing or giving remote access, neither of which respect the privacy of the candidate. More so, a candidate’s portfolio is an important parameter to gauge the level of expertise and ability, these are accessed by opening multiple tabs and going back and forth.
So a solution we propose to offer:
- A video-chat interface
- A whiteboard
- Access to the candidate’s portfolio
- An instance of a virtual machine that supports the testing of any skill(not limited to technical/coding skills only)
- Proctoring
Why REMO ?
- Access to virtual machine ensures there is no invasion of privacy (It basically means, the interviewer and interviewee have access to the same machine running on the cloud, and given access to a computer any software can be installed and worked with)
- An integrated interface
- Connect interviewers’ and interviewees’ from across the globe
- Made in India, unlike most of the other applications used
We pretty much built all of the functionalities from scratch. Tried, tested and failed at some, but ultimately made it through. The biggest takeaways for us is the information and knowledge gain. Exploring various permutations and combinations and figuring the best solution. This is just the start, we are working on enhancing the features and adding a few more in the future.
Turns out our mentors and peers were impressed by what we had built, an outcome of our consistent efforts, I suppose. Our ulterior motive is to improve the experience of an online interview, for the candidate as well as interviewer. We aim to scale it and make it available to the masses.
It was a sneak-peak into the real-world, I am grateful for the opportunity we received. Building a product is not as easy as it sounds but is surely exciting and adventurous. I am ready for it, are you ?