Apex Systems is the worst employment contracting company I have ever encountered. Apex tried to coerce me, a job candidate, into producing videos for their clients. An Apex recruiter from the Austin office emailed me about an IT position in Austin. When I called her back to discuss the job opportunity, she demanded that I submit a "one-way video interview" via a third-party tool called SparkHire. This SparkHire tool requires the job candidate to record a video response to interview questions. According to SparkHire's Terms of Use, the job candidate surrenders copyright control over the video to SparkHire, which is entitled to use the video in any way. After reviewing these terms, I told the Apex recruiter that I am not an actor who makes videos, and that I would not provide video footage of myself without copyright protection. I told her that I was searching for a job, and that I was not in the business of producing videos for the benefit of Apex or other companies. The Apex recruiter replied that, if I wanted to be considered for a job, I would have to make the video for Apex, and that her company was promoting these videos to their corporate clients as a way to avoid "wasting time" on interviews. Finally, I informed the Apex recruiter that her characterization of standard job interviews as "wasting time" is fundamentally mistaken. Other employment contracting companies do not require job candidates to submit third-party video footage of so-called "one-way interviews." In fact, the concept of a "one-way interview" is a ridiculous and absurd oxymoron, considering that the word "interview" is explicitly defined on Google as "a meeting of people, especially for consultation; discussion, conference, examination, interrogation; audience, talk, dialogue, exchange, conversation." How is it possible to conduct a meeting, or have an audience or discussion or dialogue or exchange, with just one person? The answer, of course, is that the video is NOT an interview, it's a gimmick used by Apex Systems to coerce job candidates into supplying their corporate clients with free video footage so that they are not "wasting time" on interviews. read more