Video Interviews Save Time and Travel Budgets for HR Pros

You may have heard that conducting your job interviews by video will save you enormous amounts of time and travel money, and there is certainly truth to that. But like so many things, this new way of doing hiring also comes with some caveats.

The reality is that online interviews are no different than face-to-face interviews in many aspects. That is, you get out of them as much as you put into them.

In other words, you have to know your end goal and invest time in preparation in both traditional and video interviews. You have to know precisely what kind of jobs you have to fill now and in the near future and the skills and experience your ideal candidate should have.

Then you have to create a good interview strategy. You must be prepared to ask the questions that will guide your candidate into revealing the kind of information that will help you determine whether or not they are right for the job.

Besides the preparation work, you have to consider the often cited advantage of video interviews, namely that they are easy to share with your colleagues so that you can invite more opinions into the hiring process. The assumption is that more opinions will lead to a better decision.

But as a human resources professional, you know that is not always the case. If the colleague you are sharing a video interview with has no experience in hiring and goes strictly by his or her “gut” or first impression, their responses may be superficial and not really helpful.

If you are going to engage wholeheartedly in video interviews for job candidates, make it part of your strategy that the colleagues who will weigh in on them will have had some training in what to look for in a candidate and how to interpret their answers.

These caveats aside, video interviewing is still a great tool and a way to handle the hiring process efficiently and cost-effectively.

If you decide to engage in the process, make sure that you select a good app such as Recruitby.net, SparkHire, Camooze, HireVue, Compact Interview or LaunchPad to name a few, and familiarize yourself with it.

When asking your job candidate to do a video interview, inquire if they have engaged in the process before and if not, take the time to describe the process and make them feel comfortable with it. Allow for them to have sufficient time to get used to the app (about one week) and achieve a level of comfort with it.

For more information on how you can save time and travel costs with video interviews, contact SkyPrep today!