TheInterviewr uses Twilio for call recording, SMS reminders and more

TheInterviewr uses Twilio for call recording, SMS reminders and more

A new interview app built on Twilio brings the benefits of cloud communications to everyone from bloggers to lawyers

It’s the Monday after a long holiday weekend, and you’re a corporate recruiter facing a long list of candidates you need to call. But first, there’s a mountain of information to locate and review, not to mention dozens of interviews and auto-reminders to set up.

You love your job, but this part of it is drudgery. You start daydreaming: If only there was an app that would organize all your interview notes, handle the scheduling and keep track of recordings.

If you were Roger Stringer, the founder of TheInterviewr, this would be the moment you would start coding.

A journalist and web developer, Stringer had been following the telecom revolution and Twilio in particular. A few years earlier, it would have been impossible for an independent developer to build the application Stringer was imagining. At a minimum, he would have needed an expensive telephony platform and PBX. But Twilio’s platform for cloud communications made creating the app easy and affordable.

“The first version of TheInterviewr was up and running in 48 hours,” Stringer said. Built on a custom PHP framework that integrates with Twilio for all SMS reminders and voice calls, TheInterviewr uses Box.net for document storage.

“If I didn’t have Twilio, it wouldn’t have been as quick, and it would have been a lot more expensive,” Stringer said.

TheInterviewr schedules interviews, sends out automated SMS reminders, handles recording and stored notes and related documents all in one place. Launched in July 2011, it was immediately embraced by journalists and bloggers.

“There are a few ways of recording phone calls—Skype, a third-party jailbreak app on your iPhone, a digital voice recorder with a headphone adapter, incoming Google Voice calls—but none have been as easy as using TheInterviewr,” lifehacker wrote.

“It is a dream come true and for now at least—it’s free,” wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor of ReadWriteWeb.

Stringer said use of TheInterviewr has spread to people working in human resources and public relations, as well as lawyers and researchers.

“The site is turning into the world’s first interview relationship manager, as we add the ability to organize interviews by contacts, organizations, and other methods,” he said. In the next version, Stringer said he plans to add the ability to conduct video interviews.