The challenges that Human Resources has to meet are numerous. Lack of qualified applications for key positions, too many applicants for other positions, difficulties in distinguishing the good from the bad candidates, having long and painful recruiting processes … you choose! For these reasons, many companies are now looking at video technology as a possible solution. Video interviews can, for example, replace the conventional telephone interview that undoubtedly presents quite a lot of pitfalls and limitations. A new interviewing format among video technology is the so-called automated or pre-recorded video interview. What exactly is a pre-recorded video interview? What are typical use cases and how can this interviewing method sustainably enhance your quality of hire?
What exactly makes pre-recorded video interviews different from live video interviews?
Many companies think of “Skype” when hearing about video recruiting for the first time. Besides the fact that Skype represents significant data protection risks, there are a lot of other important reasons why pre-recorded video interviews are special and differ from the live video format.
Probably the most significant one is that they are asynchronous, meaning that candidates and recruiters / hiring managers do not have to sit in front of the computer at the same time. On the contrary, both parties are completely time and location independent which makes recruiting more flexible.
What does the interviewing process look like? Recruiters create job-relevant interview questions and invite candidates to the video interview. Candidates complete the video interview at their convenience and recruiters and their respective hiring managers assess the candidates’ video answers. Finally, they decide which candidates they want to invite to the next selection step (in-person interview, Assessment Centre, …)
Automated video interviews for PRE-selection
This is a major difference: while live video interviews are mostly conducted in a final selection step, pre-recorded video interviewing always serves only for PRE-selection purpose. It is an interviewing method to shortlist candidates! It does NOT replace the personal conversation, but rather allows to make better informed decisions on which candidates to invite for a personal conversation.
Automated video interviews optimise KPIs
HR increasingly needs to justify their recruiting approach by providing figures and data. You cannot just invite every interesting candidate to an interview; this would be much too expensive. The key performance indicators for recruiting are time-to-hire, cost-per-hire and candidate satisfaction.
All three metrics have been analysed in several studies about the benefits of pre-recorded video interviews. The results are as follows:
- The time-to-hire was halved
- In a medium-sized company with 60 vacant positions per year, you can save up to 41% of your costs in pre-selection, and up to 48% in a multinational with 420 vacant positions
- 89% of all candidates appreciate being able to personally comment on their application
