Video Interviewing Software – Choosing the Right Tools For You

One-way video interviewing is screening tool used in the recruitment process to help recruitment teams decide which applicants to take forward to a face-to-face) interview (either in person, or as a two-way video call).

Candidates are sent a link to an online platform where they record a video response to pre-written questions in their own time. These videos are then available for hiring teams to review.

Some of the biggest benefits of video interviewing include:

1. Reducing time spent on screening by replacing time consuming early stage interviews and phone screens.
2. It’s much easier to get a feel for a candidate’s soft skills and culture fit from a video than from words on a sheet of paper.
3. Hiring managers consistently rate reviewing video interviews as easier than reviewing CVs.
4. You can easily assess the culture fit of more candidates. Reviewing a 5-minute interview in your own time is much easier than scheduling an hour long face-to-face (and much less awkward if you discover the candidate’s a terrible fit in the first 5 minutes).

Adoption

When getting started with video interviews, you may notice that not everyone you invite to join the process will complete it and some level of drop-off is inevitable. But there are several things you can do to minimise drop-off, including how you communicate the process to candidates and how you design the questions.

Diversity and inclusion

Improving diversity through the recruitment process is becomingly increasingly topical. Reducing the risk of conscious and unconscious bias in the recruitment process is one part of this. Using blind recruitment, it’s possible to significantly reduce the risk of bias in pre-interview assessments by removing personally identifying information from applications and CVs programmatically. It’s harder to do that with video interviews, but tools like candidate scorecards can help make feedback from hiring teams at this stage more objective and consistent.

Yet another technology

Some of the organizations we speak to see video interviews as “yet another technology” they need to implement. But it doesn’t have to be hard. By choosing a video interviewing provider that already integrates with your applicant tracking system, your ATS provider will be able to help you integrate the video stage into your hiring workflows.

One-way video interviews are designed to be used as a screening tool before you’ve met a candidate face-to-face and are particularly useful when you have a large volume of applicants.

By introducing video interviews between the CV screening stage and a full face-to-face interview, hiring teams can give more applicants who maybe didn’t shine through in their CV the chance to sell themselves through video without committing the considerable time needed to complete a face-to-face interview.

That said, for senior hires and niche roles where applicant volume is limited there’s often no real need for video interviews and it may be better to go straight to a face-to-face interview.

1. Start by making the candidate feel comfortable and help them get used to the technology. Open with a broad warm-up question that isn’t too challenging to answer.
2. Follow up with questions about specific qualities you’re looking for in the hire. For example, you might ask a manager something like “What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a leader and how did you handle it?”
3. Use questions that help you work out whether the candidate will enjoy working in the role / at your company. For example, “What are the top three things you choose when deciding whether to take a job offer?”
4. By this point, you should have a good feel for culture fit. Now’s probably the time to focus on skills and experience. For example, if you were hiring a digital marketer you could ask something like, “Tell us about your most successful campaign and talk through the key metrics.”

There are a couple of options for scoring video interviews.

1. Be mindful of introducing bias (conscious or unconscious) into the recruitment process – judging things like what someone’s wearing or the background of their video shouldn’t impact on your decision making at this stage of the hiring process.
2. Involve your hiring managers in the process if possible. In the same way as you’d share resumes with them prior to scheduling a face-to-face interview, ask hiring managers to give feedback on videos.
3. Focus on the content of responses and ensure feedback is as objective as possible. Ensure you capture rationale beyond “gut feel”. A combination of free-text comments and some form of pre-defined scorecard will help with this. Your applicant tracking system will usually include this feature and allow you to rank candidates by how they score against different criteria so make sure your applicant tracking system integrates with your video interview software.
4. Watch the whole interview – it often takes candidates a while to warm up.
5. Don’t worry about the level of polish (unless you’re hiring a professional actor). Candidates may feel a little uncomfortable or nervous. This is to be expected.

A quick Google search will reveal the huge number of online video interview software providers. Based on our experience working with a number of video interviewing solutions and a broad range of clients, these are the top 5 things to look for in a video interviewing platform:

1. Quality of candidate experience – is it simple and easy to use? Does it work across all devices?
2. Easy collaboration – is it easy to integrate with your applicant tracking system and other existing workflows?
3. Filtering tools – does it allow you to filter videos for responses that indicate good fit, then quickly identify where in the video these responses are given?
4. Branding – is the software brandable so that it can form a visually consistent part of your candidate experience?
5. Integrations – does it integrate with other key HR and recruiting software you use?

There are lots of providers of online video interviewing software. Here at Pinpoint we integrate with two providers:

myInterview

myInterview is used by a wide range of clients including Biffa, Pandora, and P&O Ferries and offers several ATS integrations (including Pinpoint).

Like Pinpoint, they’ve invested heavily in the design of their software with a focus on making it a great experience for hiring teams and candidates. Getting started is made easy with a guided tour and sample jobs built right into the platform.

If you’re interested in giving myInterview a test drive, you can activate a free account, or request a demo through their website.

Sonru

As one of the first entrants into the video interview software market, Sonru’s clients include BDO Ireland and Qatar Airways, and they integrate with a number of popular applicant tracking systems (including Pinpoint).

If you’re interested in seeing what Sonru has to offer, the best thing to do is to request a demo through their website.

Whilst we don’t sell video interview software ourselves, we have great knowledge of the HR software ecosystem so if you’d like some impartial advice on getting started with video interviewing, we’d be more than happy to have a quick chat and point you in the right direction. You can get in touch with us here.