Antal develops virtual meeting room
The aim is to reduce costs for itself and clients by facilitating internal meetings and candidate interviews across its 52-plus offices around the world. Devised by the company’s systems administrator Dan Glen, it costs only £50 per month to run but offers a quality similar to that of more expensive video conferencing technology. The system uses high-definition video cameras and runs on a Flash Media server in the company’s London office, which allows users to stream live video. The service will be offered free to clients and candidates.

Recruiter conducted a live interview using the system with Tony Goodwin, chairman and chief executive of Antal International at the company’s Beijing office. Very little delay was experienced and the experience was smooth, despite the system having to overcome the challenge of going through the Chinese government’s firewall.

Goodwin told Recruiter that because of its ease-ofuse and accessibility, he believes it will become part of the culture and everyday life within the organisation which operates across 28 countries. “As well as interviewing candidates and holding meetings, we’ve already used it for training and development where we had a three-way meet-up,” he said. “It will certainly give us a competitive edge and help us cut costs for clients. I think more and more recruiters will be using technology like this.” Vivien Xie, a partner in the Beijing office, is among those who have made use of the system already for interviewing candidates. “It allows us to add value for clients. We carried out an interview for a French company in Beijing and a candidate in the US,” she said. “It lasted 45 minutes and I believe it was a good experience for the candidate and the client was happy. It will also allow us to pre-screen candidates to save time and money for clients.”

www.recruiter.co.uk
13-May-2009

Byte Night On the 5^th October 2007, four of the staff of Antal International’s head office slept out in the streets of the UK’s capital to help raise awareness and funds for the many homeless children in London. The event is called Byte Night and directly supports the NCH (National Children’s Charity). 270 IT Professionals joined them in this event and in total helped contribute over £400,000. The idea is for the sleepers to experience what so many of the homeless children of London experience every night. It got very cold and could have got very wet. A lot of these children have nowhere else to go and they're not always homeless of their own choice.

Byte Night was set up ten years ago and since then has raise over £1.7 million. This has been put towards a range of accommodation, from emergency accommodation to long term safer accommodation. It has also been put towards developing the skills of these homeless people so that they have a better opportunity to get jobs and earn an income.

The donations raised by Antal totalled £2,670 in 2007 and we’re doing it again in 2008. Byte Night aims to raise over £500,000 from more than 300 sleepers in 2008. Will you be helping our out guys to beat this total?

http://www.justgiving.com/antalbytenight/
www.antalcharitablefoundation.org
5-October-2007