Over the years business practices have changed and evolved to better adapt to society, its people, and the technology that is created. Every single part of a business is affected by change and innovation, and as a modern manager, you must be well aware of this and try to keep up. It is too easy for the next guy to pick up the slack and quickly have you fighting for scraps at the bottom. With technological advancement has come much greater utilization of video calls and conferencing. Just about everyone in the modern world owns a smart device that is capable of conducting a video interview.
These video calls are actually a great way to conduct job interviews. It gives you a huge advantage over traditional face-to-face interviews and can make the hiring process so much more efficient. You will notice a lot of benefits to conducting video interviews, such as easier scheduling, but also some things you cannot get like feeling out a handshake or looking someone in the eye. Regardless, everything in life has its positives and negatives, video interviewing is here and it is going to help you hire smarter and hire better if you use it properly.
Key Benefits of Using a Video Interview
If you decide to start using video interviews in your hiring process, you most likely will be using them for preliminary interviews, maybe some a bit further into the process. The whole point of using these is to have a more efficient hiring process, which means faster, smarter, better. Using video interviews will help your hiring process in the following ways:
- Speed-up preliminary interviewing
- Better scheduling
- Records of each interview
- Save time and money
These are not all of the advantages of using a video interview in your hiring process, but these are the four that you are going to notice the impact of most. It doesn’t have to be the same old process of setting aside three or four days to meet with candidates just to get a feeling for who should be considered. It is time to take advantage of the resources available and make your hiring process work for you.
While you are not going to be relying on video interviews for the entire hiring process, they are by far the most efficient way to get the ball rolling. If you are a larger operation this can be absolutely lifesaving when it comes to time management and organization.
Speed-Up Preliminary Interviewing
Depending on the industry and size of the business you are running, hiring for one or multiple positions, can land you hundreds if not thousands of applicants. It is going to be near impossible for any hiring manager to go through all of the applications and figure out which people are going to fit the profile. Instead of even starting with the resume and CV you can utilize technology to your advantage.
A lot of modern recruiters like to set up interviews over video chat as soon as you apply for the job. This can be done with the use of one-way interviews where the potential candidate will answer a series of questions that have been recorded in advance. That way you have a standardized measure on which you can initially base your recruitment decisions. As long as you prepare the questions properly, to give you the information you really require, you should be much faster at choosing those candidates you really want to meet.
Even smaller firms are going to be able to get a lot of use out of video interviewing to speed up the process. There are many online translation and localization services like The Word Point that depend on sourcing their professionals from overseas. As a smaller manager or owner, you may not have hundreds of people applying for positions, but you also may not have a lot of time to physically conduct interviews. You can use video chat to quickly meet your applicants and get a feeling of them right off the bat.
Better Scheduling
For anyone who has done hiring for a larger-sized business, you will completely understand how much of your schedule it can fill. If you were to get 1,000 applications to one position, which is not unheard of, you are going to need to schedule a percentage of those people to do some form of an interview. To try to get even five percent of those people in for interviews at the office you would need to book close to a full work week off for it. When it comes to time versus money it just isn’t going to be worth your while.
Video interviews can save the day, or a week, by making everything go much quicker and on a much tighter schedule. There will be no more waiting around for applicants who show up late, no people dragging out interviews and messing up the schedule even further, it just makes sense to do it this way. You can have quick, prompt interviews set up online that will happen one after another with barely any downtime.
If you have applicants that decided not to show up, for one reason or another, then you can easily and quickly move down the list to the next person in line. Video interviews are far more efficient and easier to schedule, and they also allow for far more flexibility in your schedule, which any busy manager can certainly appreciate.
Records of Each Video Interview
Unless your office has camera equipment ready to go in the conference room, which some actually do, a video interview is going to offer a huge benefit to recruiters. You can take a recording of the video interview and easily watch again or send it to other colleagues to offer their opinions on. You can use these recordings to compare candidates that you have been considering by playing their interviews one after another and comparing responses.
Having a record of all of your interviews is going to give you a leg up when you start selecting candidates to come in. It is going to be impossible to remember everything that every candidate said during the interview, so take advantage of video recording technology to make sure you don’t miss a single response.
Save Time and Money
The number one goal of every single business on the planet is to make a profit for themselves and their shareholders. Hiring new employees is actually one of the most expensive parts of running a business. You have everything from basic hiring costs, to training, benefits, and more that are going to eat away at those bottom-line numbers. It makes sense to try to save as much as possible during this process then.
By revamping your interview process to include video interviews you will be saving a large amount of time and resources that would normally be spent doing in-person interviews and going over candidates and resumes. So do yourself a favor and implement videos into the process, it is going to save you more time and money than you realize.
Video Interview Recruitment Works
While a lot of businesses and their management are still hesitating to do much to their old hiring process, it is always worth it to look into new methods and technologies. Video interviews are not going to do the whole hiring process for you, but they will give you more information, more easily than ever before. As long as you take advantage of the information you get, you will waste less time, free up your schedule, and have a better chance of hiring the absolutely best employee for your business.
BIO:
Erica Sunarjo is a professional writer, translator, and editor with a Master’s degree in Marketing and Social Media. She writes thought-provoking articles for publications in a variety of media and is an active member of the translator community.
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