Spark a Conversation: Employee Retention with Video Interviews

Here at Spark Hire, we want to help companies utilize the power of online video to find the best candidates. We get a lot of questions from readers about best practices for using online video in the hiring process. These posts will address those questions about how to find your next superstar employee.

Question: How can I use the video interview to improve employee retention? – Gerard from Chesapeake

Thank you for your question, Gerard! Employee retention is very important and is certainly something every company should be working on. If you have poor employee retention then chances are you have a high turnover rate as well. This means that employees are constantly coming and going from your company and no one ever stays long enough to truly contribute. Because of this your company culture suffers and so much more can go out the window. That is why making great hires right from the start is so important. If you hire employees that fit into the company culture you already have, those employees are much more likely to stay and grow within your company.

Hiring the right people can bring down your cost of hiring and simply make your company more pleasant to work for. Using video interviews in your interview process is a great way to ensure you are hiring the right people from the start. In using video interviews you are able to see a candidate’s personality right away. Chances are you know what kind of person you need to hire in order for them succeed in the position and mesh well with the rest of the team. Watching a candidate on video before even formally meeting them can really help out with this.

Furthermore, you can use one-way video interviews or live two-way video interviews to ask candidates probing and curveball questions in order  to test how they handle themselves in a more candid moment. Sure, you can do this in a traditional, in-person interview as well but why not test your candidate out right away? When you have narrowed your qualified candidates down to a small pool you can then have them come into the office for an in-person interview and put them to test even more. However, making your candidate pool smaller in the beginning helps you out greatly in the long run.

You should also be sure to ask your candidates about their career aspirations and their long-term goals in order to assess whether this position is good for them right now or not. Are they looking to advance pretty quickly in their role? Can they do that in this position or will they be unhappy and jump ship right away? Finding a good match in this respect is also very important for employee retention and you should be sure to touch on it in your video interviews.

Do you have a question you need answered? Spark a conversation with the Spark Hire team by submitting your question to blog(at)sparkhire.com or in the comments below.