Hannah GoldenbergAs a recruiting professional, it’s your job to get close to candidates to understand the roles they best fit. And yet, when you can’t physically get close to them, it makes your job that much harder. Phone calls feel inadequate, and chancing a masked in-person interview with every qualified candidate would be time-consuming and perhaps more risky than your open positions warrant.
And this is where video interviewing comes in. Not only can it create a positive interviewing environment, but in the era of “everything remote as much as possible”, it provides better insights than the “good enough” alternatives.
When someone says “video interviewing,” most people think of Skype. But the best uses of video interviewing come when you use a platform purpose-built for recruitment. When you use such a platform, the methods to see success expand dramatically.
A video interviewing platform is not just a two-way conversation through video. The platform can include one-way video interviews, branding options, automatically recorded interviews, customer and candidate support and resources as well as additional candidate-facing tools. These additional features upgrade your hiring process dramatically.
Let’s dive into 5 ways to make the most out of a video interviewing platform.
1. Interviewing at a Distance
Video interviews, whether they are live or one-way, allow you to gain in-person insights on candidates without in-person meeting concerns. This means you get to see how a candidate thinks about your interview questions, their gestures, enthusiasm, and other non-verbal cues lost over the phone. In addition, one-way video interviews allow you and your team to collaborate on the most crucial questions to ask candidates and allows them to answer on their own time, within your deadline. And all this happens virtually, without need for in-person meetings.
2. Increase screening efficiency
Phone screens and initial in-person interviews take a lot of people power. Reviewing resumes and scheduling 30-minute interviews on the phone or 60 minutes in person for your entire candidate pool may take weeks or months to complete.
In an ideal world, you would have a standard set of interview questions to ask candidates in the traditional phone screen and you’d know exactly which candidates were the best fit to invite for an in-person interview — ensuring no time is wasted for your hiring managers. Unfortunately, though, this is not the case.
However, video interviewing’s one-way interviews make this ideal into reality. Since one-way video interviews allow candidates to respond to your questions anytime, anywhere, your team doesn’t spend days on end pre-screening candidates.
One huge benefit of this type of video interviews is you don’t need to be present when a one-way video interview is completed. Using this tool immediately decreases the scheduling insanity of pre-screening interviews.
Another great thing about one-way video interviews is the ability to review responses question-by-question. This means you can skip to the most important questions to qualify candidates for the next step. If a candidate doesn’t seem like the right fit from those key questions, you can move on without sitting on the phone for another 27 minutes.
3. Learn more about your candidates while expanding the talent pool
In a phone interview, you have little idea of how a candidate carries themselves, their attention to detail, and commitment to creating the best first impression possible. The autonomy of completing a video interview means candidates who are seriously interested in your open positions will take time to present themselves in their best light, complete the interview in a timely manner, and demonstrate their ability to meet deadlines with quality work. Since video interviews are used as a screening step, your team gains intangible insights earlier in the hiring process and can spend more time on the most qualified candidates.
A faster, less time-intensive screening process means you can interview more candidates in less time. This expands your talent pool by allowing you to invite more candidates to interview, without sacrificing time. Expanding the number of candidates you interview means you might find a diamond in the rough candidate and can save the other candidates for a position more suitable for their skills.
4. Foster better collaboration with hiring managers
Video interviews are super powerful for collaboration. Since candidate responses and interviews are recorded, the entire hiring team has the ability to watch, rewatch, comment, and rate video interviews.
With this ability, every hiring stakeholder can help ensure an unbiased hiring decision. The decision to advance a candidate is based exclusively on the assessor’s analysis of how a candidate presented themselves, rather than a colleagues’ hastily-scrawled notes from a phone screen.
Once your team creates a shortlist of the most qualified candidates, hiring managers validate your decisions by selecting candidates for an in-person or live video interview. The hiring manager feedback helps your team improve and iterate on the best candidates to fill a role and your company as a whole. With the improved accuracy of the screening and assessment process, your whole team can eliminate bad later stage interviews and you can avoid uncomfortable conversations with hiring managers when their one-on-one interviews don’t go as planned.
5. Build a positive candidate experience
As the labor market shifts towards empowering candidates, the candidate experience becomes crucial. Candidates want to know quick and fair hiring decisions are being made. The time it takes to review resumes, complete all phone screens, shortlist candidates, invite, schedule, and conduct one-on-one interviews does not translate to a timely candidate experience.
With job seeker resources like a candidate boot camp to help candidates learn what is expected from them during a video interview and 24/7 technical support, even this relatively “new” experience of a video interview is easy for candidates to understand and complete.
The standard delivery of video interview questions allows all candidates a level playing field for first impressions. Completing video interviews anywhere at any time means candidates have plenty of time to practice and present their best selves in their interview.
Collaboration tools mean the decision to advance a candidate or not isn’t dependent on a single person. And video interviews mean candidates get the interview and hiring feedback faster. Your team’s efficiency gains with video interviews mean candidates get in front of hiring managers quicker than ever before.
Wrap-Up
Video interviewing can revolutionize your hiring process. With thoughtful implementation, this way of interviewing is a safe alternative to in-person interviews, improves the candidate experience, screening time, provides a better look at applicants earlier in the hiring process, and improves collaboration with team members and hiring managers.
All of these great benefits of video interviewing enable your organization to sustain revenue, grow, and maintain your culture with consistent, high-quality hires even in an era of predominantly remote work.
Josh Tolan
