Bring Your E-Learning to Life with Talking Images!

Recently I had an opportunity to work on a unique project for one of our clients who was having trouble recruiting and retaining competent, loyal employees. So we developed a tool using Lectora that guides the hiring manager through the steps of recruiting. The tool was used in an instructor-led seminar attended by hiring managers.

If you think about the process of hiring someone, you know that a bunch of similar-looking resumes come flooding in. The hiring manager has to sift through them, and then most likely arrange a phone interview with the top prospects. A face-to-face interview is then scheduled with those candidates who passed the phone interview stage.

Realize that certain impressions are formed at each stage of this process. The hiring manager might think someone looks great on paper, but then finds they are a complete dud on the phone. Or maybe the candidate is great on the phone, but you find your impression of them alters greatly once they arrive for their face-to-face interview.

My team and I thought it would be a great idea to guide the seminar participants through these stages in a realistic, interactive way. How? By using audio to simulate the phone interview and avatars for the face-to-face interviews. An avatar, as you may know, is a digital representation of a human.

On the day of the seminar, the instructor divided the hiring managers attending the seminar into groups of five and provided one laptop to each group. Each laptop was pre-loaded with our interactive Lectora presentation.

Based on the results of a Zoomerang survey we submitted to the attendees in the weeks before the seminar, we created a job description for an account manager position for an insurance firm. We then created five resumes for potential candidates. We also provided participants with a brief bio on each candidate as well as the most common questions that we felt would be asked of these candidates.

We scripted answers to the interview questions unique to each candidate (fitting the personalities we had created for them – i.e. the older female had a deep voice and came across as no-nonsense, a lot of ‘likes’ and ‘ums’ were used for the younger candidates). Using the voice over skills of the good-natured folks on our staff, we recorded audio of the answers to be used in the ‘phone interviews’. (Techie note: I love the Blue Snowball USB microphone for audio recording and WavePad and Audacity for editing the .wav files.)

We had the participants conduct a ‘phone interview’ by having them click on a simple rollover button in Lectora that would play each candidate’s answers to the various phone interview questions. We then asked participants to jot down notes of their first impressions of these interviewees.

Now the fun part! The face-to-face interview using the avatars.

To create the avatars for this course, I needed .jpg images for each candidate and the CrazyTalk 5 program from Reallusion. I visited iStock photo and my other favorite image site, Dreamstime, and searched for five candidate images. Our team chose a young African American female, a middle-aged Caucasian female, a young European male, a Spanish male, and an older Caucasian female. The trick to choosing images for use as an avatar with CrazyTalk is to make sure they are facing front and have their mouths closed. It also helps to have them isolated against a white background.

I imported the images and pre-recorded audio files into CrazyTalk and with minimal intervention, the program brought the candidates to life. Using the masking tool in CrazyTalk, I was able to apply a background behind each candidate of an office environment, making them look like they were sitting across the hiring manager’s desk. I then exported the finished product into a .wmv file for insertion into Lectora.

In this phase of the exercise, the seminar participants were able to now put a face with a resume and could click on each candidate’s photo and hear their responses to the in-person interview questions. The participants were amazed at how their impressions either coincided with or were completely different than their original impressions from the resume.

Here’s an example of one of the candidates. This is a simple .jpg image purchased from Dreamstime.

Now here is the .wmv file of the avatar talking:

Remember, this moving, talking person was created from a simple still .jpg photo!

The feedback from this seminar was incredible. And creating these avatar images was easy and added zip to what could have been just another boring hiring presentation. Try it!