Josh TolanStaffing pros everywhere must function like a well-oiled machine to serve clients. Effective sourcing requires a continuous flow of qualified and engaged candidates. At the same time, mechanisms for swift communication have to run at full speed. The current talent shortage makes tuning up your staffing process — your great placement machine — even more critical.
The increasingly high demand for top candidates in a tough market creates a challenge for talent acquisition pros. Without quality candidates, your placement engine can’t run. And you can’t waste time filtering ill-fitting candidates through the staffing process while competitors are grabbing up suitable candidates.
Structure is a necessity when building efficiencies in your staffing process. Video interviews can provide that structure. They offer numerous benefits, from quicker turnarounds on screenings and evaluation characteristics to keeping staffing pros, candidates, and hiring decision-makers on the same page.
By streamlining the entire process with video interviews, staffing pros can make the best placements faster — even when the talent pool is thin.
Create an exhaustive list of interview questions
Before you even get to the video interviews, you have to overhaul your current arsenal of interview questions. Many of us fall into the habit of pulling from the same old bank of interview questions. But needs and trends change, which means your inquiries should too.
This is the perfect time to dust off your research skills and turn over every rock in your hunt for the best interview questions. Google isn’t going to be your primary research tool for this search.
As a staffing pro, you have vast networks at your fingertips. Crowdsource interview questions by getting in touch with industry peers, employees, clients, mentors, and anyone else you have an established relationship with. No network should be left untapped. Don’t forget social media!
Your list of questions should be relevant to companies, roles, cultures, and other critical components you regularly source for through your process. At a glance, this list may be intensive and even overwhelming. But you’re not going to ask or even keep all of these questions at the end of your list-building endeavor. You’re going to use them as a guide for creating a list of custom questions to set up structured video interviews for different clients and varied roles.
Keep the list organized by category, topic, or whatever works best for you (we’ll dive deeper into this later on). Taking the time now to catalog the list means you’ll spend less time digging for the best questions when you need to make fast placements. Plus, the work you put into developing these questions will make the interview a better experience for everyone. You’ll be more likely to ask relevant, engaging questions (great for the candidate) that reveal valuable, need-to-know information (great for you).
Just remember, once your master list of interview questions is complete, it’s essential to regularly update it to adhere to current trends, desired skills, and relevant experiences.
Tip: Metrics matter when it comes to interview questions. As you finalize your list, be sure your success metrics are clearly understood for each item.
Set up specific, structured interview questions
Once the heavy lifting of your interview question overhaul is complete, it’s time to begin sorting and categorizing your questions to help identify core aspects of success in the roles you’re staffing for. Some categories to consider include:
- Soft skills
- Hard skills
- Culture fit
- Leadership potential
- Promotion potential
Each of these categories can be broken down further to better meet your needs. For instance, culture fit-focused video interview questions can be separated into values, vision, personality, etc. The more categorization in your list, the quicker you can put together a perfectly structured interview to meet your client’s demands.
For every specific role you’re sourcing for, tap into the categories as you build your video interview’s structure. Putting in the work upfront helps keep your interviews free from bias. Not only will candidates have a positive experience and fair assessment, but your placements will also be more diversified. All of this will fuel you in your fight against the talent shortage and please your clients.
Build out structured evaluation criteria
Arguably more important than asking the right questions is knowing how to evaluate the responses. A structured evaluation system ensures candidates are assessed fairly. Not to mention, a predetermined process is efficient and effective for those involved. It prevents mistakes and common oversights, eliminates confusion for evaluators, and guarantees objectives are met.
Your evaluation process is an excellent place to loop in metrics. Focus on the original metrics you’ve gathered to identify if clients are satisfied with your recommendations. Your continued focus on these targets will help ensure you’re making the proper recommendations. And by always keeping metrics in mind, your structured interview questions and evaluation criteria will stay up to snuff.
Here are some metrics worth tapping into in your evaluation:
- How quickly and efficiently were they able to funnel candidates into their hiring process?
- What was the quality and outcome of those placements?
- What is the retention rate of your placements?
- Are you identifying the right talent regularly?
Choose a screening platform that streamlines communication
Before you start interviewing candidates, you’ll need to choose a means to move candidates through your staffing process effectively. Consider the key components of this process:
- You’re going to need to corroborate with staffing peers from time to time.
- You’ll need to communicate with candidates.
- You’ll want to be able to move the process forward with candidates seamlessly.
The screening platform you choose can either help or hurt your efficiency.
Your screening platform should be equipped with features to streamline every aspect of communication in your staffing process. Features to look for include:
- Scheduling efficiency tools, such as one-way video interviews
- Allowing candidates to screen on their own schedule
- Collaborative evaluation elements for your team
- Easy rating and comments systems to speed up communication
Send convenient one-way video interview invitations
When it comes to collecting valuable interview responses from many candidates, one-way video interviews are a fast and effective asset. You can seamlessly schedule numerous candidate screenings for different clients and roles without booking yourself solid.
What’s more, you can review video responses, collect feedback from decision-makers, and keep a record of candidates without losing track of anyone or anything. A streamlined screening process saves time for everyone — your staffing team, candidates, and clients. The best part? Because you have more time, you can respond quickly to everyone involved and make placements faster.
Gather and organize video interview feedback
Without a structured process, sifting through feedback about candidates can be a mess. Fortunately, video interview platforms can alleviate this issue. When video interview submissions come in, you can funnel them into your evaluation system and start tracking feedback immediately.
By using a dedicated video interview platform, decision-makers can add comments to interviews and rate candidates on a preset scale. This allows you to easily see who lands at the top and who deserves a second look with a live video interview. There’s also the benefit of seeing what feedback can be shared directly with candidates who don’t make the cut. Crafting thoughtful candidate rejection letters, including a tip to improve for next time, keeps qualified candidates in your talent pool for future sourcing.
Respond through personalized video messages
Standing out is mandatory for thriving in a talent shortage. Personalized communication is one way to get noticed and improve your interactions with both candidates and clients.
Use a dedicated video interview platform to create custom video messages for a more personalized touch. These video responses keep candidates engaged and feeling connected to you and the process, which is especially helpful in a fully virtual environment.
Video messages also cut down on the time you spend typing out personal messages or playing phone tag when trying to catch a candidate at the right time. Rather than queuing up a canned response in your email, you can get in front of talent and make an accurate impression. Clients will love the personalization too.
Share top candidates easily with clients
Gone are the days of dated, complicated spreadsheets with endless links to PDFs of candidates’ application materials and screenings notes. No one has time for sifting through these documents.
With video interviews, you can send clients a few links to review top candidates’ interviews at their convenience. Your clients can then decide who they want to proceed with and request the specific information they need from you to push talent through their hiring process.
Without video, staffing clients don’t get the opportunity to mirror an in-person experience with potential hires. Getting clients ‘face-to-face’ with candidates from this initial screening stage helps them get a more accurate feel for how each person would fit with their team. And the simplicity of this streamlined process allows clients to make better-informed decisions and placements.
Create a video library of top talent
No matter what your client’s decision is, you can save the videos of all candidates who showed potential. Should they enter your staffing process again, these videos can be called on to assess how much a candidate has grown or how well they fit an open role.
You can also look to this library to cut down on sourcing time and get you connected with talent faster. Your video archive becomes an ever-growing resource for your future sourcing needs.
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