Outline:
Beyond the realm of podcasting
A step outside of live interviews can open a whole new world on how you work and communicate with others.
The first level allows you to record your questions and the guest’s answers at a convenient time for both parties. You create and send your outline to the guest, and they respond with well-thought answers whenever they can. Podcasting thus becomes asynchronous.
With this simple principle of asynchronous audio creation, we can take it a step further. Companies can be sorted into many categories where these tools help overcome many challenges at work, and at Rumble Studio we support podcasters daily, but what else can we do with this technology? Let’s take a look at how tools like ours can change how we interact with our users, employees, customers, fans, and even job candidates.
Recruiting and other HR activities
Recruiting takes a lot of time to go through the resumes, schedule interviews, carry them out, and then filter them until you find the right one for the job. There’re steps you can’t avoid, like screening through resumes, but others can change.
Think about avoiding scheduling so many candidates until you find a few for a more thorough interview process. With asynchronous tools, you could have a set of questions you send to the candidates and ask them to record them in their own time before a certain deadline. Once you get all the audio (or videos), you can easily compare candidates on each question and select the best fit for the final interview phase. You’ll cut to the chase quickly and save a lot of time and resources during this initial phase.
You could apply the same principle in other areas of HR. Experts in a field can record training tutorials that HR can send or upload to a specific intranet and track the employees’ completion rate.
They can also record video testimonials for upcoming events that can be shared with the whole company or with certain departments. Even partners or clients can be part of this asynchronous communication and integrate them frequently in company updates without the need to arrange time-consuming (and expensive) events.
Onboarding: accelerate employee adjustment
You can have introductory videos from HR to help new workers find their way around the company, but what if you could easily explain the firm’s products and services without taking time from senior employees?
Companies like Nickelled help you design guided tours to onboard them on your software tools and help them adapt more quickly. Instead of having someone explain each time a new worker comes in, they get a thorough self-paced guide to walk them through the whole process. These intranet tutorials can save a lot of time for employees but they can also accelerate the learning curve for the ones just starting out.
Now, these tutorials can also extend to your customers. They’re sent or referred to a special onboard page to help them understand and use your products and services more efficiently. With more educated clients you can reduce customer service inquiries, increase satisfaction with your products, and help them feel supported throughout their learning process.
Educational asynchronous courses
The same principle you use to create tutorials for employees and clients can apply to educational content creation. Much of what we learn online is not live and thanks to its asynchronicity we can take our time to go through the course at a comfortable pace.
You can record audio for each slide of a presentation or develop a whole teaching course and upload it to sites like Udemy or Coursera. What you once taught going from one class to another in school can now be online and available to everyone around the world. And you don’t even have to be involved in their process, they can go there whenever they want. You create your course once and get thousands of students without repeating yourself over and over again.
But you can also make it more local. You can create an educational tool for kids at a local school to help them create a podcast during class or you can do mock interviews with your students to show them how they can improve in a certain subject (e.g. teaching English to non-natives).
You can also enhance school communities that connect teachers, students, parents, and ex-alumni through a podcast, like what they already do in public schools across the world. Different topics are discussed that are relevant to the students and parents and ex-alumni to keep updated with their school community.
Strengthening family ties
In line with cultivating and maintaining a community, we also find the use of asynchronous tools for more family-oriented challenges.
Being a parent is no easy job, especially for first-timers. But what if you had micro-lectures where veteran parents share their tips with the rookies? Juan Diego Network, a Mexican platform that supports content creators, created that resource for every parent out there and they’re still releasing new episodes each week.
Other companies, like Vocalid, have turned towards voice preservation where family members record their voices to preserve family stories in audio format for future generations. These voice capsules also benefit people that might develop speech problems due to an accident or illness (e.g. neck cancer), serving as a sound prosthetic to retain your vocal identity.
The possibilities are endless. Just look at the following list to get you hyped on the future:
- Voice casting: assess many voice actors very fast.
- Student applications: screening interviews when applying to University.
- Political engagement: reach local communities at a scale.
- Site reviews: gather customer testimonials on your website.
- Religious groups: connect preachers with their flock and answer their questions.
- Help assistance: reaching people to help you get unstuck from a problem.
- Event feedback: capture audio from event attendees.
- Business research: get UX feedback on products and services.
- Counseling pre-sessions: early contact with patients.
And much more!
Summary
Asynchronous tools can be found in a variety of industries, not just podcasting. With the right technology, work and communications can reach new domains that will change how we interact with each other. We see some interesting developments in recruitment, onboarding, education, and even in family matters that expand our notions of where we can apply asynchronous tools. It might take time to find the best way to apply these tools, but it’s part of every innovative journey.
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