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This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the July 17, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Your Next Job By VideoCam

The technology to do videoconferencing has been around

for four decades, but — with everyone aggravated by the difficulties

of air travel, it is coming into its own. A particularly ripe area

for this technology is recruiting. Why pay thousands of dollars to

bring candidates to your site, only to find that you don’t like their

looks?

Tom McKeever, right, has licensed the Princeton and Manhattan

areas of a national videoconferencing company to tap this recruiting

market. He has opened an office for Vexcorp (Video Exchange Professionals)

at Lawrence Commons on 3371 Route 1 South. Vexcorp hosts an open house

on Thursday, July 17, from 4 to 8 p.m. It is free and everyone is

invited. For the Florida-based firm, which so far has 31 offices nationwide,

McKeever will concentrate on professional services — recruiting

for medical, legal, and technical professionals — and digital

video teleconferencing.

"Some of our clients will be hospitals for whom we will recruit

nurses and doctors," says McKeever. "Let’s say a nurse from

Princeton wants to move to Florida. We do the interview and put it

on a CD-ROM. Then our recruiters find a hospital in Florida that is

interested in hiring a nurse with that skill set. They can play back

the CD-ROM interview instead of flying the nurse down." Then the

hospital’s HR person can go to a Vexcorp branch office and meet the

nurse in a real-time virtual interview.

McKeever grew up in Rahway where his parents, now deceased, worked

for Bond Bread (his father was a route driver) and RCA. After graduating

from William Patterson University in 1970, he did sales and marketing

for RCA in New York. He worked for a satellite earth station, Communications

Satellite Corporation, in Washington, D.C., then for Continental Telephone,

Automated Concepts Inc. Most recently he was vice president of sales

and marketing for RDA, a Philadelphia-based firm that recruited technology

professionals. He lives in Plainsboro with his wife, a marketing manager

for an Atlanta-based software company, and their two teenage boys.

McKeever has licensed both the Princeton and Manhattan territory.

McKeever started his business in January by perusing the commercial

real estate ads in U.S. 1, finally settling on the Lawrence Commons

space from Commercial Property Network broker Barry Blackwell. "I

needed something on the main thoroughfare with a lot of parking, a

professional-looking building that is easy to find." He also has

two addresses in Manhattan, one on West 35th street, near Penn Station,

and another at 150 Broadway, "a couple blocks from Wall Street

and a nine-iron shot from Ground Zero."

He is hiring. "You don’t need to have camera expertise, because

the set up is user friendly. Lots of companies are doing teleconferencing,

but I don’t know anybody that is doing exactly what we are doing,"

says McKeever. Even Kinko’s is getting into the act, although the

branch at Nassau Park won’t add that capability until the end of 2002.

"Kinko’s is taking a stab at doing teleconferencing, and employment

is one of the things they target, but we are professionals," McKeever

says, "and the quality of our video is as good as when you are

watching television."