Ready for the Skype Interview?

That was the year 2011 when Microsoft buys the Skype for $8.5 Billion dollars. There were lot hues and cries for that deal till late 2012 when Microsoft decided to make the Skype for Business, an Enterprise edition with some advanced features.

Advantage of the Skype for Business are;

1. Cut the cost of your business calls
Any small/medium businesses tend to communicate differently than larger enterprises. Instead of internal meetings, you spend more time reaching out individually to customers, prospects, off shore colleagues, and partners. Making VoIP calls can be costly, especially if you’re talking to colleagues and customers on their mobile phones or when they’re in other parts of the world. Skype for Business helps to Keep the costs to a minimum.

2. Keep track of your expenditures
Monitoring your expenses is essential when you’re trying to manage your operating costs. Skype Manager enables you to manage your Skype accounts centrally. You can set up accounts for your staff, allocate credit and keep track of how much everyone spends – making it easier for you to budget for your calls and identify where savings can be made.

3. Reduce your business travel costs
Using Skype can help you and your employees cut down on non-essential business travel. A Skype video call is the perfect replacement for a face-to-face meeting – it’s just as personal as a traditional meeting, but you can schedule it into your normal work day at the office, saving you time and money.

4. Stay in touch with colleagues
Skype’s instant messaging feature is the perfect tool for keeping in touch with colleagues. You can use it to check on each other’s progress, ask questions about an ongoing project and even send documents instantly, thanks to the file transfer feature.

5. Stay in touch with customers
Customers who also use Skype can call you from wherever they are just by clicking the Skype number on your website.

Apart from the communicating with customer or colleagues, Skype business is useful for Recruiters and HR to arrange the Interviews over the Skype. Candidate adapt the Skype as alternate arrangement over the face to face interviews. But the Skype didn't use in the technical round of the interviews, as a candidate has to toggle between the screen or share the screen with Interviewer.

Microsoft has solved this problem by launching the Skype for Interviews. This will help the small/medium businesses to use the skype to arrange the technical interviews over the Skype.

The Skype Interview allows Interviewer to have a video call on top of the code editor. Skype Interview supports most popular languages like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python and Ruby. The Video and Code editor runs in Microsoft Edge and Chrome Browser (version 32 and/or above) with preferred language English only. The feature includes the built-in syntax highlighting to help prevent the syntactic mistakes during an Interview. This will help both Interviewer and candidate. 

This is in preview and anyone with or without Skype ID can use this for the technical round of the interview. 

Log On to https://www.skype.com/en/interviews/

Click on the "Start Interview."

It will create a unique URL with ID, This can be shared with another participant. 

The participant needs to follow the link to initiate the interview.

Click on the "Start the Interview" to start the video call.

The Interviewer can change the programing language when both Interviewer and the Candidate are in the video call.

As this is in the preview, Microsoft is expecting a feedback to improve this feature before launching as the business product. 

This will change the traditional way of the Technical Interviews.