Voices in the void

What if, instead of conducting dozens of phone interviews with the same set of questions, and saving notes on each of those phone interviews with a staff of potential decision-makers, hiring managers could let a computer call a job candidate, ask those job candidates all of those pre-determined questions, record the answers, share them with an entire group of hirers and file them for future reference? And what if, instead of sending out the same generic resume to 1,000 faceless potential employers online, you had a chance to speak in your own voice about your qualifications, as they pertain to a particular job?

The web telephony platform HarQen and one of its new applications, VoiceScreener, is making it happen.

Jeff Fitzsimmons is an entrepreneur, inventor and joke-lover, and co-founder of HarQen, which at its most elementary allows users to create audio through the telephone and interact with it over the web. You can see HarQen in action at ComicWonder.com, a website that seeks the best joke-teller on the web’s wild west.

Mark and Jeff talk about where the Internet has been, where it’s going and what it means for entrepreneurs. What have we learned from early web business model mistakes? How will we continue to generate revenue with web applications? In the future, will we even need to know how to write?

Think about those questions and more as you listen to this week’s episode: Backstage with Jeff Fitzsimmons

This week kicks off a whole series of conversations with inventors, tech trailblazers, Internet playground architects and other creative entrepreneurs.  To make sure you don’t miss a thing, subscribe to Backstage with Mark Metcalf through iTunes.