For Employers - The Best Thing To Come Out of the Pandemic: Video Interviews!
Human resource professionals during the entire pandemic were amazing. You had to answer tons of questions from employees about the virus, shift employees to home offices, provide safety policies for physically located employees, and the list goes on and on. This was followed by the “great resignation” which gave you the pleasure of figuring out how to keep your current employees employed while recruiting new people to join your company. Many of you are now responsible for bringing your remote people back to the office, which is basically a re-recruiting project. Who knows, maybe you are looking for a new line of work!
With all the craziness for talent acquisition and human resource professionals have been through, the horrible pandemic changed one aspect of the recruiting process forever; video interviews. Using Zoom or Microsoft Meetings has become the “new normal” and, quite honestly, a huge win for employers.
Think about all the ways video interviews will help employers:
-Time to Hire. In a challenging hiring marketplace, interviewing a potential candidate quickly is more important than ever. A thirty-minute first interview is thirty minutes. The candidate doesn’t have to schedule travel time, find parking, locate the office, fight the weather only to show up to wait for the hiring manager. Scheduling first interviews will allow you to speak with that job seeker in a day, with effortless scheduling. Employers will hire more people by making it easy for the job seeker.
- It’s Natural. Video interviews started twenty-five years ago. Covid, in two years, has eliminated the wall that employers and, more importantly, job seekers had because they understand what a video interview involves. Today, job seekers prefer video interviews.
- Easy Technology. Employers don’t have to get a tech stack with high costs to implement world-class video interviews. The actual price for employers is that you provide a real or virtual background that is fun and can brand your company. Just like a face-to-face interview, the energy and excitement you build with a job seeker on why they should work at your company is always the key.
- Recording Interviews. With permission from the candidate, recording the interview to share with the recruiting team and hiring managers saves a ton of time.
- Live and Recorded Interviews. You can do a zoom interview or use companies like Spark Hire to send potential candidates a link to answer the interview questions directly and send them back to the employer. The way companies use video interviews will depend on the type of jobs, scarcity of candidates, and location. If your company receives 70 applications for a job opening, sending out a self-service video interview link to all 70 candidates will yield some outstanding hires.
Face-to-face interviews are certainly not disappearing. Many candidates would still prefer to come in and meet your company directly, especially anyone over thirty-five years old. For higher-level jobs that require “courting” the candidate, you may want to bring them into the office to meet the hiring manager. However, if your first interview is only human resources, you can save a lot of time and stress for the candidates by doing that virtually.
Nothing against human resource interviews, but asking a viable candidate who is currently working for your competitor to come to your office twice is hard to schedule, and you need to figure out the best way to reel them in!