Key Services: Outsourced product development

Client:

One of the leading HR tech startup in India. As a funded startup, the founders had a large presence with products in the learning and recruitment space.

Challenge:

A first of its kind idea in the market. The client wanted to develop a video-based prescreening application to address a huge problem in the recruitment space – speed in hiring and availability of candidates for a face to face interview. The challenge was to build the application that can handle video reliably when the bandwidth was a real scarce commodity in India. It was a first of its kind thought in the Indian market.

Video over the internet had always been an issue in the days when the bandwidth was intermittent. The challenges were more technical that Chimera had solutions based on its historical works. The application had to work around corporate firewalls, work in varying bandwidth scenarios, have lip syncs.

Our Strategy:

The application had to be accessible over desktop and mobile platforms. Our expertise in this area showed us that we could use different techniques to address these two diverse channels that the candidates use. Fall back mechanisms to a regular HTTP port were identified.

Our Solution:

A platform like Wowza and Flash media server were proposed to address these issues on the server-side, and a flash plugin and native mechanisms were used on the desktop and mobile. Extensive testing and pilots were carried out in different corporate environments and on different road conditions to test the robustness of the solution. Different bandwidth scenarios were tested to optimize the usage and hence providing a balance between lip syncs, quality and frame rates. And of course, these were pre 4G days in India.

The success of this application further led us to develop a complete custom video conferencing solution that helped the panellists do a real-time video conference with the candidates that even records.

Business Outcome:

• The customer was able to focus on getting the application done, while we built the necessary video enablement.
• The customer was able to launch the product in the market on time becoming one of the pioneers in this field.
• The application lived upto its expectations by reducing the turn around time to hire and bringing transparency into the hiring process.

Tech Stack:

Wowza Media server, Flash action scripting, H.264, Usage of Audio and Video codecs, FFMPEG, Flash media server