Top 6 tips to improve your hiring hit-rate with video interviews

With remote recruitment being the norm in 2020, teams in the Talent Acquisition space are embracing all that HR tech has to offer to improve their processes at each step of the hiring process.

With new ways of working, opportunities to embrace change and adapt are aplenty. 

Here are our top tips to ensure a seamless integration of on-demand video into your hiring processes and improving your hiring hit rate. 

1. Communicate the video interview (VI) process with your candidates

It is essential to communicate your process clearly with your candidates. By offering tips to help them succeed and feel more comfortable taking part in a VI, you will improve drop-offs (though some drop-off is always expected).

By merely communicating about VI in a way that connects with your candidates, hiring managers and teams will produce a more successful hire experience, with candidates performing better in their screening – mutually beneficial for all. 

 2. Choose the right provider. 

The platform you choose to go with can drastically affect the VI experience both for your candidates and your team. There are a couple of things you want to keep in mind when selecting the provider you will use.

1. Easy to use. As we mentioned already, you will experience some drop off using video interviewing, but this number will increase tremendously if the platform isn’t user friendly. The best way to assess this is to put yourself and your team through the interview process and trial several providers. 
2. Ability to share and collaborate: A big bonus of a VI platform is that it can support a hiring teams function and improve collaboration. Rather than hiring based off of one person’s perceptions, with the right provider, you can easily share between team members and efficiently collate feedback within the platform from as many team members as you like. 

3. It is all about timing.

Video interviews should be considered as a screening tool. They should be used as such and utilised early in the screening process before moving on to the more formal interview. You may use your VI with slightly different timing depending on the type of hire you are performing.

For Volume hires, VI is recommended to be used at the beginning of your process as an initial screening tool. VI is a very efficient way to screen large numbers of applicants very quickly while using automation within the program itself to efficiently and accurately identify the top candidates for your specific job requirements.

In fact, video screening means you are able to screen 50 applicants in the time it would take you to phone screen 15. This gives you a significant competitive advantage over competitors who are still using phone screening. By the time they have decided on who to invite for a F2F interview, you have likely already had the chance and the time to hire them.

4. The type of questions you should ask.

The questions you ask can make or break your hit rate. Try not to emphasise certain aspects of your business through your questions. Most platforms allow you time upfront to give the candidate a taste of your workplace culture, so use this space to showcase your employer brand and workplace culture. 

Formulate questions around the role you are hiring for. Work with your team to succinctly describe the position and the ideal candidate. From there, construct your questions. Here are some simple categories:

1. Warm-up 
2. Attribute related
3. Culture and role fit
4. Knowledge, skills and experience

Some questions that may work well for a phone interview, may not work so well for an asynchronous instance.

5. How many questions.

Getting this balance right will beget you just the right efficiency and have you relishing in the time-saving miracles that VI offers businesses and hiring teams. Formulating succinct questions that give you enough information to identify whether or not the candidate may be the right fit for your organisation is the aim of VI. 

There is no magic number and the beauty of VI is that you can add more pre-screening questions to the list without compromising your time. If you consider that pre-screening interviews conducted over the phone can take you anywhere between 20-30 minutes for five key questions then you may want to triple that amount if you want to spend the same amount of time conducting video interviews. 

 6. Assessing your candidates 101

With the resume, we tend to hire by job spec and skills. With video, we have the opportunity to hire for cultural fit. Focus on the right things and take advantage of what VI is offering you. 

In my 20 years in IT recruitment before founding Alcami Interactive, I used to train employers on how to make the most suitable hire. My recommendation was:

“If you hire for skill, you are going to fire for your behavioural competencies. So hire for behavioural competencies and train a slight skill deficit, should there be one.”

Focus on personality, culture add and behavioural competency. By assessing your candidates with these criteria, you are going to build a more robust workforce that has cohesiveness, alignment and longevity.

We recommend you test pilot a couple of active roles. Through this process, you will work out what works and what does not work for your specific organisation and candidate segments.

If you need some guidance shaping the process for your hiring needs, get in touch with us at Alcami Interactive to request a personalised demo.

Cover image: Shutterstock

This article is contributed by Alcami Interactive.

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