Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire

Let’s Get Real About 6 Advantages of Video Interviews Clients and Candidates Share

The advantages of interviews performed through video differ between meeting the needs of your staffing team, what candidates experience, and what you provide your clients. However, there are also a few perks everyone benefits from.

Ultimately, if you’re going to invest in new staffing and interview tools, you want to know you’ll see a satisfying return on investment (ROI). This means something different to everyone. For some staffing professionals, saving money and time is a massive gain. For others, seeing staffing metrics like high placement rates, souring client satisfaction, and a positive candidate experience means investments in tools and resources pay off. 

When you look outward, though, and see the impact your tools and processes have on the clients and candidates you connect, you can access the bigger picture. This full perspective offers insight into many of the smaller details that make the most significant difference to your long-term staffing success.

We can’t tell you what is most important to reaching your goals, however, we have compiled a few of the video advantages of interviews that benefit both your candidates and clients. Here are six ways you’re making a difference by using a video interview platform:

Time savings

You’re busy. Your clients are busy. Candidates are busy. Busyness gets the best of everyone from time to time — and you don’t have time to waste.

Fortunately, video interviews work with anyone’s schedule and cut down on time for all parties involved. Candidates can record one-way video interviews on their own time. You can review their video responses to screen talent when it’s most convenient for your schedule. And clients get to choose when to review the final candidates you funnel into their hiring process and give their timely feedback.

This may seem like there is potential for a lot of picking and choosing and dragging the process out. It actually means everyone can fit in their contribution to the interview process sooner than trying to align many different people’s schedules at once.

The benefits of saving time for clients and candidates are countless. The candidate experience improves, impacting your staffing metrics and your client’s hiring metrics. Your placement rate relies a great deal on candidates and clients being satisfied with their experience with your staffing process.

The faster you can fill clients’ empty roles with the best-fitting talent, the more productive their teams are, saving their company more time and money. Additionally, more than half (55%) of candidates say they will give up and move on if they haven’t heard back after applying within two weeks, according to CareerBuilder research

Simple Scheduling

Part of what eats up time in the interview process and holds up decision-makers pushing top candidates through the hiring process is scheduling. As mentioned above, video interviews cut down on scheduling conflicts by putting the power to take up the next step in the process into the hands of candidates and clients.

Traditionally, you had to schedule a time for an early interview with the candidate. This could take a few days of back and forth to find a day and time that works for everyone. Then candidates would review your written recommendation and the applicant’s resume. From there, they would need to work out a time among their team members to review candidates and determine who to bring in for an interview before they even started the process of trying to schedule a time for the next in-person interview.

It’s exhausting to think about in this day and age! With video interview technology, your candidates can submit a video resume right along with their application. Or you can invite candidates to submit a one-way video interview to screen and add to your video library.

These video interviews can be passed right along to clients with your notes visible right along with the candidates’ responses. Multiple members of your client’s team can then access the video and evaluate the candidate from the original interview responses rather than relying on potentially biased impressions.

If you’re wondering why we’re not still discussing ‘scheduling,’ it’s because most of the scheduling can be avoided altogether until clients are ready to invite candidates for live video interviews and final in-person interviews. This means the process moves along with less juggling and more progress.

When it comes time to schedule those important face-to-face interviews, candidates can put themselves right into your and your clients’ calendars with scheduling tools unique to the video interview platform. There’s no need to email back and forth. Just send out a calendar link and let candidates file into open slots. Everyone shares in the relief of seeing the interview process move forward effortlessly.

Streamlined communication

Some of all of the back and forth we’re talking about has to happen. Candidates expect timely and clear communication. And clients cannot move their hiring process forward without adequate communication from your staffing team and candidates. Video interviews software cannot solve all of your communication problems, but it can certainly make it possible for you to make better connections with candidates and clients.

For example, you can send out video welcome messages when sourcing candidates creating a positive impression while helping them feel at ease funneling into your talent pool. You can use follow-up messages to clearly communicate or even demonstrate the value of your video interview process.

Your clients benefit in some of the same ways when using video messaging. For one thing, you become a person in their process rather than gear in the staffing wheelhouse. They learn to trust your evaluations based on connecting with you as a professional. Furthermore, you can use video messages to send quick, custom updates they can consume quickly in their day, meaning they never miss a timely request for feedback.

Similarly, clients can send video messages with their questions, concerns, or responses to candidates’ interviews. This helps keep communication flowing without some of the possible misunderstandings that can happen in written communication. You can even have clients record short feedback responses to candidates regardless of whether they are moving on in the hiring process, improving applicants’ experience with both the company they applied to and your staffing firm.

Personal connection

You’ve caught on by now how important it is for a personal connection to develop in the hiring process. Candidates want to be seen as a person and not a number in the unemployment line. They crave the opportunity to show your clients how they can make a difference in their company. Video interviews offer a unique opportunity to capture the genuine essence of their personalities and showcase their potential.

This experience is just as valuable for your clients. They are not looking to add a functional piece of office equipment to their workforce, but rather a member of their team. They need to know how candidates align with their values and culture. That’s easy to put on paper but difficult to assess accurately without making a personal connection.

Connecting top talent with your clients through video interviews in the early stages of screening ensures that time and resources are not wasted by moving ill-fit candidates on. And by using video interviews to capture these first impressions, you’re able to confidently determine if they could fit into other open roles. This keeps more top talent in your talent pool and more of your clients’ roles filled with the right people to complete their teams.

Another one of the advantages of interviews conducted through video is that you can refer back to your video library repeatedly to keep making valuable connections and placements.

Consistent process

Because your goal is to keep clients and candidates satisfied with your staffing process, you want to give them a consistently positive experience. This means making sure they know what to expect so they can rely on repeatable results.

This can get tricky when you’re constantly building out new job listings, sourcing requirements, interview questions, and evaluation criteria. Making these updates can drag down the process and unfortunately, mistakes are more likely to pop up from time to time as you try to keep everyone on the same page.

Making video interviews a standard part of your staffing process eliminates a lot of the bumps of transitioning between clients, candidates, and open roles. You can create a structured interview process that enables you to update your questions and evaluation process while keeping questions and assessments unbiased. Candidates feel more confident in receiving a fair evaluation and clients know what to expect from interview to interview.

By keeping your interview process consistent, you also create the perfect strategy for gathering valuable data over time. You can refer to these metrics to determine how effective your staffing tools are performing to meet both client and candidate needs.

Technical support

One thing your clients and candidates are going to need at some point is support. This could range from answering basic questions to issues with uploading resumes, downloading videos, or even getting live video interviews up and running correctly. This demand can keep you spinning in circles without the right kind of support system for your staffing team.

Fortunately, there are advantages to interviewing through a dedicated video interview platform. It provides you with the backup you need to keep your staffing process moving forward when user errors and technical issues arise. In fact, you can focus on more important areas of communication and building connections with your clients and candidates and let a trained support team keep interview tools up and running.

The candidate experience is going to be negative during the interview process if they run into too many problems getting their videos to record and load. And they will be frustrated for obvious reasons should their live interview not connect. Likewise, clients cannot afford to waste time on faulty video chat tools. This is why it’s imperative that you carefully research your video interview options and choose a platform that is set up to support you and your staffing needs.


Transform Your Placement Process with Video Interviewing

Josh Tolan

Josh Tolan is the Founder and CEO of Spark Hire, a video interviewing platform used by 6,000+ customers in over 100 countries.