Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire
Video Interviewing: Do This First

Video Interviewing: Do This First

Updated March 2020 with up-to-date best practices.

You’ve finally done it, congratulations! You integrated video interviews into your process. This technology is a powerful tool, but like any other technology, its success is determined by how quickly and successfully it is implemented.

With these tips, you’ll create the most efficient and effective video interviewing process.

Get Training

Upon signup, the best video interviewing platforms provide their customers with not only a dedicated account manager, but also an onboarding specialist. These employees are well-versed in the specific platform’s best practices and optimal operation for each member of your team. They proactively reach out to you and other users to offer live training, and some even offer to assist in setting up your account.

Training sessions give your hiring team the confidence they need to begin using video interviewing easily and efficiently. Additionally, video interviewing platforms’ customer success teams have seen every application of their platform in action, can advise on best practices, and deliver ROI reporting. Training helps you decide where video interviewing will live within your process and a rubric for a bad, okay, good, and great video interview.

Create Team Buy-In

You went through the process of researching the best video interviewing platform for your needs, but if your team does not adopt video interviews, you won’t see as high of a return on your investment in the platform.

Build buy-in from your team by showing them real-world examples of how video interviewing can increase your hiring efficiency by 5-7x, eliminate phone screens, and identify talent that will stay with your organization. Another way to create buy-in is to have each member of your team complete a video interview. This will reassure them of the candidate experience, and show, rather than tell, them how the video interviewing process will improve their workflows.

Set Up For Success

Setting up your video interviewing account is easy, especially with an assist from your onboarding specialist. Together, you should tackle: setting up all branding elements, creating your first job, question set, and intro and outro videos. 

The branding elements of your platform are very dependent on the platform itself, but can include setting your logo, primary colors, and completing your company profile so candidates invited to your video interview have plenty of resources to learn more about your organization.

Set up your first job on the platform. “Jobs” are open positions with candidates you intend to interview through video interview. In our 8+ years of video interviewing, we’ve found any job can see successful hires with video interviewing. The best jobs to start with are typically customer-facing positions, as a video interview demonstrates how candidates sell themselves, which is reflective of how they work with customers. When setting up one-way video interviews for your initial jobs, the question set will likely be similar to the set of questions asked on a phone screen. When it comes to your video interviewing account, the only “new” material you should create is an intro video. 

Intro videos are pretty simple. They are an opportunity for you to thank candidates for applying to your open position, tell them a little about the company, direct them to your platform’s candidate resources, and wish them luck on the interview.

Educate Candidates

Not only might your team need a hand with video interviewing, it might be new for your candidates as well. There are a few opportunities to educate candidates on your new process. First, outline your process. This can be done on your careers page, or in an auto-responder email candidates receive when submitting an application. 

Second, provide candidates with resources about video interviewing. This can include a candidate bootcamp, custom PDFs introducing video interviewing from your video interviewing platform, and links to a help center, as well as technical support. These resources allow your candidates to learn about and prepare for your video interview without any further assistance from you.

Third, explain how video interviewing helps candidates. Not only do you save time and money, candidates have the ability to interview when they feel ready and present their best selves for your interview. When candidates are fully-informed of your process, they’ll be more confident with their interviewing and in their place in your hiring process.

Personalize

Personalizing the video interview experience means reminding your candidates there’s a person on the other end of the video interviewing platform. You’ll be surprised at the positive feedback you receive for implementing video interviewing.

The best way to personalize the experience for candidates is to create and implement candidate experience videos. Candidate experience videos play automatically at the beginning and end of a candidate’s interview. 

For example, in an intro video, greet the candidates, introduce yourself, and thank them for applying to your organization. Briefly explain how the video interview helps them, as candidates, present themselves even better and sell themselves for the position. At the end of the interview, an outro video gives you an opportunity to personally thank the candidate and explain the next steps.

Another element of personalization you can add to your video interviewing process are video questions. These allow any member of your organization to ask candidates one of your interview questions on video. Asking questions on video give candidates the added benefit of understanding the tone of your question. Then, they can react more naturally so the video interview feels more conversational.

Wrap-Up

By following these guidelines you’ll be set up for success before you even send out your first interview. Your team will have well-practiced, genuine candidate interviews to review, giving you the best shortlisted talent and ultimately, better hires in less time. 

Hannah Goldenberg

Hannah began her career on Spark Hire's sales team and now capitalizes on her long-standing passion for writing with the marketing team. When she's not working on content marketing efforts for Spark Hire, she spends her time baking, watching her favorite sports teams, and listening to astronomy, cooking, and history podcasts.