Using Video to Improve Candidate Experience

One consideration for recruiters that remains consistently important over time, is candidate experience. In the early days of video interviewing, there were a lot of concerns about how this would affect the candidate experience, with many doubting its ability to improve it. But as the video interviewing trend gets bigger and bigger, more and more organisations are reaping the benefits while providing a positive experience for their candidates too.

1. Flexibility

One of the biggest selling points of video interviewing is the convenience of being able to complete the interview in your own time – giving a lot more flexibility than having to take time off work to attend an in-person interview. Especially when recruiters can often decide in the first 10 seconds that someone isn’t suitable for a role, those in-person interviews end up being a waste of time for both the candidate and the recruiter.

With video interviewing, candidates get to showcase themselves at a time and place that suits them, often in the comfort of their own home, from a variety of different devices. Then, if invited for a face-to-face interview, the candidate is more invested in the role and the interviewer knows they’re the type of candidate they’re looking for.

      2. Engagement

Especially when it comes to high volume recruitment, maintaining communication with candidates to keep them engaged can be a difficult one. Using video interviewing allows you to maintain engagement with your candidates through aspects like automated emails and texts throughout the process. This includes invite emails and texts, as well as completions and reminders too.

Your provider should also be able to supply you with content for your candidates to help them through the process too, such as blogs on top tips for video interviewing or candidate dos and don’ts. That way, you’re providing your candidates with the knowledge to do well and put them a bit more at ease during the process.

      3. Employer Branding

While it might initially sound detached, allowing your candidates to answer pre-set questions with no recruiter present, the employer branding capabilities are very far from depersonalised. First of all, the platform you use will allow you to use your company colours and logos throughout the entire candidate experience, meaning that the candidate is interacting with your brand rather than that of your provider.

Secondly, the capabilities to include multiple company videos to showcase your organisation and its culture means the process is anything but dull. This allows you to engage candidates before they answer their questions, showing them why your organisation is truly a great place to work. Great things to include are topics like a welcome message from management or a ‘day in the life’ video. You can also use video questions – meaning that a member of your team can be seen asking the questions, rather than just displaying text on the screen.

There are many different ways you can promote your employer brand while being more interactive and engaging with your candidates during video interviewing – helping you to improve the candidate experience.

     4. Speeding up the hiring process

Nothing ruins candidate experience like an unnecessarily long, drawn out recruitment process where there’s radio silence for long periods of time. Of course, it can be difficult for hiring teams to manage issues like this in high volume recruitment, when the screening process can take a long time and they also have to interview a lot of candidates to find the right person for the role.

With video interviewing, you can tackle all of these issues. You can speed up the hiring process while actually being able to efficiently review more candidates. Did you know that you can screen around 10 video interviews in depth, in the time that it takes to complete one telephone interview? So not only are you spending less time screening per candidate, you’re gaining a deeper understanding on their suitability for the role by seeing their enthusiasm and body language, as opposed to talking on the phone.

The Stats

There’s long been the misconception that candidates don’t like video interviews. Often labelled as impersonal and nerve wracking – but we’ve got candidate feedback that proves differently (and we’re sure that other providers do, too).

For example, our candidate surveys revealed that 97% of those who participated in the survey would be more than happy to complete another video interview in the future. To us, that proves that no matter how nerve wracking the process may feel before completing their video interview, they realise it's pretty smooth sailing and would not be put off applying for a role because of the involvement of video in the interview process.

Not only that, our survey shows that 42% of respondents said they have a very positive opinion of the company they applied to prior to completing their video interview. This might not sound great at first glance, but after completing their video interviews, this statistic rose to 70% - showing that using video interviewing actually has a positive impact on your employer brand. A further 24% of those candidates responded that they had a “positive” opinion post interview, meaning that 94% of candidates who participated had either a “positive” or “very positive” opinion of the organisation after completing the video interviewing process. Not bad, right?

Getting it Right

Video interviews are most popularly used in replacement of telephone interviews. With video interviews, there’s a much deeper level of interactivity between a candidate and the organisation they’re applying for, rather than just a call on the phone where there’s no apparent brand or face behind the voice. That’s why they are so beneficial to the candidate experience – the variety of possibilities that video interviewing platforms have allow us to design it to represent our brand the way we want.

But, if video interviewing is not done properly or strategically, then it can risk having a negative impact on candidate experience. Video interviewing should always be used as part of a larger recruitment strategy, meaning that any negative experiences here can have an impact on the whole process. Don’t skimp out when it comes to choosing a video interviewing provider – consider all the different aspects that will help you reach your goals. You can find out about all different features and functionality here, to help you decide which provider is right for you.

After all, when done right, you can speed up your hiring process, find the most suitable talent, create an engaging and fairer process, and improve collaboration in your hiring teams by introducing a simple platform into the mix.