Whether you’re looking for the star candidate from hundreds of applications, or hiring in a sector where competition for talent is huge, you need recruitment processes that help you succeed: help not only find the right candidate, but do so quickly. Traditional recruitment strategies – paper resume reviews and in-person interviews – tend to satisfy one or the other. Video interviews, by contrast, combines the best elements of both, and is fast becoming the recruitment trend for 2019.  Here’s why…

Video interviews improve the quality of hiring decisions

Video interviews are often seen as mainly a time-saving measure. While they certainly are (we’ll come to that), perhaps the greater benefit is their ability to improve the quality of your hiring decisions. 

By ensuring a consistent set of circumstances and questions, every candidate gets the same opportunity to shine, and – for you – comparing them becomes much easier. And because you can record interviews, there’s always scope go back and verify any initial impressions or seek a second opinion.

The result? Better decisions, every time.

It’s quicker

Using video interviews allows you to meaningfully engage with candidates much earlier in your recruitment process. It minimizes risks of the best being poached while waiting to hear and of wasted time in interviewing candidates in-person whom a video would quickly reveal are not suitable.

And, of course, a video frees you from the tyranny of scheduling and its associated time and resource costs. The candidate gets to hold their interview when they want (meaning fewer no-shows), and you can review it whenever and wherever suits you best. Small time savings, yes, but multiplied across a whole recruitment process, they can make a big difference.

It allows you to see more candidates

Selecting a small handful of candidates for interview from hundreds of resumes can feel like a lottery; one plagued by a fear of leaving the perfect candidate ‘on the pile’.  But cost and logistics will always severely limit the number of candidates you can interview in person.

Video interviews solve this dilemma, providing a way to engage with, and more effectively appraise, a larger number of candidates, wherever in the world they are.

It’s more collaborative

Particularly with large-scale recruitment involving several interviewers or reviewers, you may want a second opinion on a candidate.

Video interviewing enables this, facilitating more collaborative, more robust interviews with lower risks of inconsistency or bias.

It creates the right impression with candidates

A negative impression created early in a recruitment process can be hard to shift. Imagine, you could miss out on a star candidate simply because they were left waiting for a response to their application. That’s why connecting with a candidate early on – even just by offering a video interview – could make all the difference. It shows your firm to be efficient, responsive and innovative, exactly what you’d want to see in a candidate!

We’ve seen the convenience of video interviews for recruiters. But in truth, candidates will appreciate that convenience even more– just knowing, for example, that they don’t have to make excuses to attend the interview, or to worry about transport delays.

Trust us, they’ll thank you for it.

You know what to look for when recruiting. The trick is finding it. Putting video at the heart of your recruitment strategies could be your secret weapon for doing so.