As a recruiting professional, you have to get close to candidates to understand which roles they’ll fit best. 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 reqs warrant.
This is where video interviewing comes in. Not only can it create a positive interviewing environment at a trying time, but in the era of making everything remote as much as possible, it also provides better candidate insights than the “good enough” alternatives do.
When someone says “video interviewing,” most people think of Skype, but for the best video interview results, you should really use a platform purpose-built for recruitment. When you use such a platform, your chance of success expands dramatically.
A video interviewing platform is not just a two-way conversation through video. A great platform can also facilitate one-way video interviews, branding options, automatically recorded interviews, customer and candidate support and resources, and additional candidate-facing tools. These features upgrade your hiring process dramatically.
Let’s dive into five ways to make the most out of a video interviewing platform:
1. Interview at a Distance
Video interviews, whether live or one way, allow you to gain in-person insights into candidates without in-person meeting concerns. This means you get to see how a candidate thinks about your interview questions, their gestures, their enthusiasm, and other nonverbal 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 candidates are granted the ability to answer questions on their own time (within your deadline, of course). All of this happens virtually, without any need for in-person meetings.
2. Increase Screening Efficiency
Phone screens and in-person interviews require a lot of people power. It can take weeks or months to review resumes, schedule 30-minute phone interviews, and then bring candidates in for 60-minute in-person interviews.
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 qualified enough for in-person interviews. This would ensure your hiring managers don’t have to waste any time. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.
However, video interviewing’s one-way interviews can make this ideal into a reality. Since one-way video interviews allow candidates to respond to your questions any time, anywhere, your team doesn’t have to spend days on end prescreening candidates.
One huge benefit of one-way video interviews is you don’t need to be present when the interview is completed. Using this tool immediately cuts out the scheduling chaos that arises with manual prescreening 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 based on those key questions, you can move on without sitting on the phone for another 27 minutes.
3. Learn More About Your Candidates While Expanding Your Talent Pool
In a phone interview, you have little idea of how a candidate carries themselves, their attention to detail, or their commitment to leaving a great first impression. With one-way video interviews, on the other hand, candidates have more autonomy over how their interviews are carried out. 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. When video interviews are used as a screening step, your team gains these valuable 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 your own time. Expanding the number of candidates you interview means you might find a diamond in the rough, allowing you to save the other candidates for positions more suited to their skills.
4. Foster Better Collaboration With Hiring Managers
Video interviews are super powerful for collaboration. Because candidates’ 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 work together to ensure an unbiased hiring decision. The decision to advance a candidate is based exclusively on the assessors’ analyses of how a candidate presents themselves, rather than a colleague’s hastily scrawled notes from a phone screen.
Once your team creates a short list of the most qualified candidates, hiring managers can validate your decisions by selecting candidates for in-person or live video interviews. The hiring manager’s feedback will then help your team improve and iterate the recruiting process to find the best candidates to fill each role and your company as a whole. Thanks to the improved accuracy of the screening and assessment process, your 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 toward empowering candidates, the candidate experience becomes even more crucial. Candidates want to know quick and fair hiring decisions are being made. The time it takes to review resumes, complete phone screens, short-list candidates, and schedule and conduct one-on-one interviews does not often translate to a speedy candidate experience.
While video interviews may be relatively new experiences for candidates, they can be easily educated on the process through job-seeker resources like candidate boot camps and 24/7 technical support. Plus, the standard delivery of video interview questions grants all candidates a level playing field on which to make first impressions. Because candidates can complete video interviews anywhere at any time, they have plenty of opportunity to practice and present their best selves in their interviews.
The collaboration tools offered by video interviewing platforms facilitate decisions about candidates that are not dependent on a single person’s thoughts. Video interviews also make it easier for candidates to get their interview and hiring feedback faster. Your team’s efficiency gains with video interviews mean candidates get in front of hiring managers more quickly than ever before.
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Video interviewing can revolutionize your hiring process. With thoughtful implementation, this method of interviewing is a safe alternative to in-person interviews, improves the candidate experience, 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 consistently high-quality hires, even in an era of predominantly remote work.
