Josh TolanImplementing new technology into any work process at your organization can be daunting. It’s easier to adapt to the inefficiencies of antiquated tools and strategies, but it’s also more costly in the long run. Sometimes, the costs subtly stack up in terms of time, energy, and resources your team takes for granted.
Video interview software is an all-in-one hiring solution that reduces waste for your hiring team. You can virtually eliminate many of the challenges that slow your hiring process and improve the accuracy and efficiency of hiring decisions. In fact, video interviews can cut your hiring time in half.
Boosting your speed to hire, or hiring velocity ensures your hiring team is equipped to fill any role with high-quality talent when you need it. By implementing video interview software, you fill empty seats with the best-fit talent faster, build relationships with candidates earlier, improve collaboration across your team, and positively impact critical hiring metrics like quality of hire.
The bottom line is increasing your speed to hire is a key element to seeing improvements across every aspect of your hiring process. Here’s a guide to help calculate how much time you can save by implementing video interview software into your hiring process:
Speed up early screening
Filtering high-quality talent into your hiring process quickly is crucial to catching top candidates in your talent funnel before competitors. Job seekers submit applications on average to 2-3 open roles online per day. And according to research by Greenhouse, 58% expect to hear back after their application in one week or less.
One of the fastest ways to gain an accurate insight into candidates in the initial screening stages is to invite talent to submit one-way video interviews. Traditional phone screens consume approximately 30-45 minutes per candidate.
Considering the average number of applicants per role is 118, and you’re likely to advance around 20 of those candidates for consideration, you’re committing to at least 15 hours of screening time on antiquated phone interviews.
One-way video interviews reduce screening time to an average of 10 minutes per candidate, allowing you to screen candidates 5x faster than phone interviews. Cutting your earliest assessment down to a fraction of the time means you can send live interview invitations to your top candidates in hours instead of days.
To calculate the time saved by replacing phone interviews:
y = number of candidates
{ X = 45y / 60 } > { Y = 15y / 60 }
{X = time traditional phone screen} – {Y = time one-way video interview} = Total time saved
Mitigate scheduling conflicts
Scheduling is one of the biggest challenges to your speed to hire. In fact, 67% of respondents say it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to schedule a single interview – finding a time that works for everyone is the #1 interview scheduling challenge.
Unfortunately, top talent is not willing to wait for schedules to align. The majority (60%) of recruiters report they regularly lose candidates before they’re able to schedule an interview. With one-way video interviews, you bypass scheduling early interviews by sending candidates an invitation to submit video responses to structured interview questions on their own time.
When candidates submit their one-way screening video, you receive a notification to review their responses at your convenience. If there are other stakeholders in the decision-making process, you can simply share a link to review candidates’ videos and provide feedback.
You reduce scheduling time to 10 minutes or less to send video interview invitations with candidates or links to review responses with hiring stakeholders. Mitigating scheduling conflicts at every step of your hiring process ensures that you’re connecting with candidates faster, improving the candidate experience. And streamlining team collaboration proves you value everyone’s time.
To calculate the time saved by mitigating scheduling conflicts:
y = number of candidates
{ X = 60y / 60 } > { Y = 10y / 60 }
{X = scheduling time} > {Y = scheduling time}
Eliminate redundant interviews
Sharing video interviews with hiring team members also cuts down on time spent scheduling and performing redundant interviews. Traditional interview methods require aligning several schedules for panel interviews and follow-up interviews with additional managers. This can prove tricky and cause delays that drag out the hiring process.
With one-way video interviews and recorded live video interviews, hiring stakeholders can review responses and notes from other managers as well as weigh in with feedback from anywhere at any time. This helps mitigate scheduling conflicts and reduces the number of people who need to be included in in-person and live video interviews without sacrificing valuable team collaboration on important hiring decisions.
The candidate experience improves when the interview process is short and simple as well. Nearly 50% of candidates in a Sterling survey admitted to considering dropping out of their most recent hiring experience due to reasons such as
- The process was taking too long 39%
- The hiring process was too complicated 37%
- There were too many touchpoints in the process 27%
As a bonus, team members also save time and money by focusing on other HR and management tasks instead of blocking out time for repeat interviews. Panel interviews, for example, can be a scheduling nightmare and incapacitate a large portion of your team at one time. Eliminating this round, when possible, keeps production on track.
To calculate the time/costs saved by eliminating unnecessary interviews:
y = number of candidates
x = number of team members
{ X = x(60y / 60)} > { Y = x(60y / 60) }
{X = interview time} – {Y = interview time} = Total time saved
*Note – you repeat this equation for each in-person interview stage. Here’s an example to find the amount of time you spend in the traditional interview process in terms of productivity cost (pc).
Traditional hiring process
- Initial live video or in-person interview: 5 candidates = 5 hours (time) x 5 team members = 25 hours (pc)
- Call-back interview: 3 candidates = 3 hours (time) x 5 team members = 15 hours (pc)
- Final ‘panel’ interview: 2 candidates = 2 hours (time) x 6 team members = 12 hours (pc)
___________________________________________________
Total (time) – 10 hours
Total (pc) – 52 hours
+/- scheduling time
Video interview process [example with the elimination of one interview round due to sharing recorded video interviews]
- Initial live video or in-person interview: 5 candidates = 5 hours (time) x 1 team member = 5 hours (pc)
- Call-back interview: 3 candidates = 3 hours (time) x 1 team members = 3 hours (pc)
- Final interview: 2 candidates = 2 hours (time) x 1 team members = 2 hours (pc)
___________________________________________________
Total (time) – 7 hours
Total (pc) – 7 hours
+/- scheduling time
As you can see, in this example, the time and resources taxing the hiring team in terms of lost productivity are reduced by more than 40 working hours. And by reducing the number of unnecessary interviews, time to hire can be shortened by days once you factor in potential scheduling conflicts.
