In order to meet today’s work requirements, employees need the right set of competencies, skills, and knowledge. Hence, it has become a crucial factor for companies to identify and select the right candidates from the very first stage of the selection process. The pool of suitable specialists is not as big as it used to be… However, in the war for talent, it’s not only about being the quickest. Every wrong decision is devastating. That‘s why every stage of the selection process, whether CV screening or face-to-face interviewing, has to focus on efficiency and reliability at the same time. Everything is nothing without the correct selection decision.

Resume screening is prone to bias!

As soon as candidates’ pictures are available in the selection process, the professional selection decision proves to be biased by physical appearances – unconsciously! (Read more about bias in recruiting here.)

We assume that you would not like your decision to be biased, right? In this case you should think about other solutions. We do not state, however, that you should replace CV-screening with something else, but consider supplementary methods which give a more complete picture of your candidates than a CV could ever provide.

Video screening could be a way to avoid bias. As a matter of fact, research found that candidate ratings based on video sequences remained unbiased regarding the candidate’s attractiveness (viasto 2012).

Video interviewing is focused on competencies

Using pre-recorded video interviews you will be able to make objective decisions. Through short video sequences, where all candidates answer the same job-related questions, you obtain an objective overview of your candidates’ skills and abilities. Reviewers – whether it be recruiters and/or hiring managers – are capable of easily distinguishing between different competencies. Competencies like “team spirit”, “analytical thinking”, “fluency in a foreign language”, “customer-orientation” or “performance-orientation” can be directly and unambiguously observed in the video interview.

Based on your and your hiring managers’ evaluation of each candidate, you can see which candidates are the most promising ones and invite them to a personal interview.

What is unique about pre-recorded interviewing is that the recording of the interview by the applicant and its assessment by the recruiter occur independently. Both the company and the candidates are time and location independent of one another, meaning maximum flexibility for all involved.

Conclusion: Combine resume screening and video interview

We think those study findings are a good reason to seriously consider video interviewing for your candidate pre-selection. So, what you could do is to invite all those candidates who passed resume screening to a pre-recorded video interview – and decide afterwards which candidates invite to an in-person interview!

If you’re still not convinced, have a look at how Bertelsmann or Telekom are using video technology for their recruitment and let us know what you think!