XpressJobs unveils ‘recruitment by SMS’

Wednesday, 28 June 2017 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

There is no such thing as ‘Great workers are hard to find’, it’s just that you probably haven’t found the right person yet. For a blue-collar recruiter, filtering through 100s of applications for the right few is only half the battle. Fixing an appointment in another district and making sure that the candidate can go through with the interview is more complex than it sounds, especially when the applicant is far away. Much like many of the problems that XpressJobs is trying to solve, this was forwarded by recruiters themselves.

Candidates who are called in to fill vacancies in supermarkets from far away areas such as Matara and Hambantota are requested to come for interviews at the head office in Colombo. More often than not, these candidates miss or skip the interview altogether because of the distance and the vacancy remains unfulfilled. Rather than calling 100+ applicants and telling them how and when to come, XpressJobs automated the process by adding a simple text message to the equation.

XpressJobs came up with a solution for this via a mobile SMS. With SMART INTERVIEW, the candidate picks an interview date/slot in the location that is convenient for them. If their application is short-listed, they get an SMS from XpressJobs confirming the interview time and location along with a contact person from the recruiting company. This enables the branch managers to interview the candidates in the same branch/outlet that they will be working without asking them to come all the way to Colombo. This feature is already in use with companies working with Xpressjobs, and they have drastically increased the number of applicants who turn up for the interview.

Started in 2015, XpressJobs was founded by Chathum Henagama, Sampath and Oshadie Korale. Three experts from different fields namely; technology, recruitment and marketing/science respectively combined to connect the dots between job vacancies and potential candidates.

XpressJobs carries out extensive research and continues to build awareness among recruiters to understand what lacks in recruitment and how they can provide a solution to it using technology. Their role is to build a bridge between candidates in a tech-savvy generation and a more mature, cooperate-minded recruiters.

Among their solutions are filtering systems which allow recruiters to comb through candidates, CV-less application forms that allow recruiters to create a readily-available form for candidates to fill, video advertisements that paint a true picture about the company to build awareness to potential candidates and an Android app through which candidates can apply for jobs.