8 Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Incorporate Video Software in Its Recruiting Workflow

This post was contributed to the VidCruiter Blog by Reuben Yonatan, founder and CEO of GetVolP.

Video Recruiting Service is a new way to hire employees. But, it’s also a new way to think about hiring new employees. The old way consisted of sifting through resumes, then interviewing just a few in person. This leads to unintentionally filtering out some of the better candidates, and the interview process itself may be influenced by unnoticed biases.

There are several different ways to interview a candidate remotely: from phone and video to more data-driven approaches like automated questionnaires. With these different methods in mind, here are eight reasons you should use video interview software to find the best candidate:

1. Get the Whole Story

UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian estimated that tone of voice and body language combined made up 93% of successful communication, compared to only 7% of the words used. If you are having a video conference rather than a phone interview, you are able to see, both literally and figuratively, much more of your interviewee. If a job requires face-to-face interaction with customers or with your staff, it’s now possible to get that kind of interaction early in the interview process.

2. Reduce Personal Bias Due to Appearance

As important as visual information can be, there are positions, like phone support and sales, where appearance does not matter. In those cases, it’s important to focus on the results, not the personal or cultural background of the candidate, or even certain physical disabilities. We all have unconscious biases, and for a work setting, it’s easier to put those aside when you have systems in place that emphasize the product, not the producer.

For example, orchestras today have auditions behind a curtain. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, among others, even have their musicians take off their shoes to avoid the clacking of high heels before an audition, which would give away the gender of the subject. The combination of automated questions, which we’ll get to in a moment, and remote audio interviews, can in many cases yield better results than relying only on in-person interviews.

3. Reduce Personal Bias with Automated Questions

A number of studies, including university studies from Harvard, Bowling Green State University, and the University of Florida have shown that objective tests, like paper-and-pencil tests, are superior to unstructured interviews in predicting the success of students and job hires. Video recruiting offers a way to ask the same questions to each candidate and have them record their answers. This way you can review every candidate with the same criteria.

4. You Can Always Benefit from a Second Opinion

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Larry Ruvo likes to say that one person doesn’t have the ability to do hiring alone. “It’s a team we put together,” he said in an interview with Jon Taffer, “they see things I may not see and vice versa.” That’s solid advice from someone who has spent decades hiring the best in the sales and hospitality business. VidCruiter’s live interview allows for multiple participants in real-time and video recording. Even if your business only has one person making those decisions, taking a second look at an interview recording can give you a chance to notice small details you missed the first time.

5. You Can Share Your Screen with an Interviewee

If you are video interviewing someone, one great tool is screen sharing. The two of you can both see a relevant website, review a resume line by line, or any other task that requires two or more people to share information in real time.

6. Learning Starts Before You Even Walk In the Door

Onboarding, which is the process of teaching your new hires the way things work in your office, is expensive if you use the old equation “time = money.” During that early period, you’re slowing down your other employees to teach and paying the employee to learn with little output. Even worse, some new hires drop out right away. Video recruiting software can cut down on that time by showing the candidates how your office functions, and what the responsibilities are. A resume can’t measure soft skills, but test scripts and skill checks give you a way to predict how your candidate will behave in a real problem-solving situation.

7. Calendar Integration

Video recruiting software, like most cloud-based products, integrates with your online calendar of choice. You can access it from anywhere, and if you have a public calendar, other members of your team can as well. You can automate reminders and notifications and send them to yourself, your candidate, and anyone else involved in the interview process.

The VidCruiter calendar integration can also automatically put interview guides and other important material at your fingertips to save you time and keep you from forgetting important questions. And needless to say, it also blocks out your calendar so you won’t be interrupted during an interview.

8. Make Test Scripts to Predict a Candidate’s Potential Success or Failure

One useful tool that remote recruiting gives you is the ability to have a candidate listen to an audio clip of a sample call, then test after for comprehension. It can be, for example, a sales call or a customer service call. You can hear for yourself how the candidate would handle the issue in question, but even better, you might not even have to waste your time if the candidate is unqualified to make it past that early step. Remote recruiting lets you filter out the least qualified candidates before you start interviewing potential hires.

Today we have an interconnected world; anyone across the entire world is a potential customer, and anyone with a computer and the skills you need can be part of your team. With so many choices for hires, you need a system that filters in only the best candidates. Your most valuable resource is not your money, it’s your time. Video recruiting will help you save lots of it compared to the arduous and laborious way it was done in the past. With video recruiting, you will see more of the best candidates, and have a reliable way to bring them into your team.

About the author:

Reuben Yonatan is the founder and CEO of GetVoIP — trusted VoIP comparison resource that helps companies understand and choose a business communication solution for their specific needs. Reuben assists SMBs align business strategy with culture and improve overall corporate infrastructure. Follow him on Twitter @ReubenYonatan