Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire
Bring Your Hiring Team Together With Video Interviews

Bring Your Hiring Team Together With Video Interviews

With the continued rise of remote work, video interviewing has become a critical component of talent acquisition. In our 2018 report with HR.com, The Pivot to Video and Interview Platforms, just over half of all organizations surveyed reported using some form of video interviewing. 

Recently, that number has skyrocketed. Many talent acquisition professionals are looking to maintain, or even expand their hiring so long as they can do it remotely. They’ve been able to uncover video interviews improve the overall candidate experience and drive better relationships with talent. When it comes to relieving conflicts within the hiring team, however, video interviews aren’t often considered to reduce this challenge.

Video interviews offer an opportunity to decrease countless challenges and frustrations by improving communication and collaboration across the entire hiring team. Here’s a breakdown of how video interviews succeed in getting your team on the same page and prevent hiring process missteps:

Connect busy team members

The elusive team member is a common hiring process challenge. And when everyone works from home, it’s likely a little more challenging to get everyone on the same page. Of course, it’s not deliberate disregard for the process. Scheduling conflicts sometimes make it impossible for everyone to be available at the same time. When this occurs, decision-makers rely on interview notes rather than experiencing the candidate’s exact responses, mannerisms, and conduct first-hand.

That’s likely one reason more hiring teams turn to video interviews. We found, in our previously mentioned report, nearly half (49 percent) of hiring teams that use a dedicated video interview platform benefit from asynchronous interviews.

This feature eliminates hiring process delays due to the scheduling conflicts, because every team member can review a candidates’ interview on their own time. In fact, anyone on your hiring team can take part in interviews regardless of their location so scheduling around business trips, remote work, and meetings is no longer a conflict. 

Make up for missed “in-person” impressions

Reviewing a candidate in-person early in the hiring process helps your team assess for important qualifiers that don’t translate on paper. Unfortunately, not everyone who’s responsible for final hiring decisions can be present in the early screening process or meet in person at the moment. This makes it difficult to factor in impressions of soft skills, cultural fit, and personality traits. 

Video interviews put all hiring team members on the same page by making the process more personal and accessible. With everyone reviewing the same interview, whether live or recorded, every decision-maker has the ability to capture critical in-person impressions and make fully-informed decisions.

Prevent communication breakdowns

Hiring should, when possible, be a collaborative process. When members of your hiring team are involved in different parts of the hiring process. If it’s not clear to them who is responsible for which stages, and what key attributes the team needs, there’s a communication breakdown. It might even create a candidate mix-up.

For example, while discussing the attributes of a potential hire, it becomes clear certain elements were not translated accurately from one evaluation to the next. At the critical point of making a final decision, you find a fellow hiring manager is thinking of an entirely different person.

Video interviews enable everyone on the hiring team to review the exact same interview and post clear comments where everyone can see, removing this confusion from the equation. You can also pull up the interview — whether live or one-way — to review together virtually. This ensures agreement about which candidates to advance by getting feedback from all stakeholders.


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.