Video Interviews and Employment Tests Keep Hiring on Track During the Coronavirus Outbreak

If you’re an HR Manager, your world has changed due to the Coronavirus outbreak. No more recruiting expos. The campus recruiting day is canceled. And forget about bringing in that large group of candidates to screen for the customer service department expansion. So, how can you continue to conduct business without compromising your own and your co-workers’ health and well-being and avoid putting candidates at risk?

Use video interviews along with employment tests. Combining cognitive and skills-related assessments and video interviewing is the perfect solution because it enables you to get to know candidates beyond what you see on their resumes, evaluate their skills to determine whether they have the right experience level for the job, and judge whether they are a good fit for your company culture.

You probably rely on resumes and interviews to screen candidates, but have you ever wondered how reliable they are? Applicants often exaggerate their experience on their resume because they want to make a good impression and many candidates sound great during interviews. So, if you rely on resumes and interviews alone, you could end up hiring an employee who doesn’t work out, which means you’ll have to go through the recruiting and hiring process again in a few months. And since it takes around 45 days and costs anywhere from $1,500 to $5,000 to hire a new employee, a bad hire increases your hiring costs and disrupts productivity.

By using video interviews along with cognitive and skills-related employment tests you can gather all the information you need to identify top candidates without conducting face-to-face interviews. Choose pre-prepared assessments from our Test Library or build customized assessments using questions from a variety of skills- and subject-based tests along with your own questions. Add simulations that replicate real-life tasks so you can see how candidates will perform on the job and video questions so you can completely assess their abilities.

• Evaluate Verbal Communication Skills – Verbal communication skills are important for many positions such as call center operators, customer service agents, and technical support representatives. You can easily evaluate these skills by listening to a candidate’s response to video questions.
• Verify Language Proficiency – If you’re hiring for a position that requires a lot of customer interaction, you can verify that candidates have a pleasant phone voice and can communicate effectively in English. If proficiency in a foreign language is required, you can ask them to translate sentences or paragraphs.
• Ask Candidates About Themselves – You can ask applicants to submit a short video “resume” about their background and experience to judge how articulate they are and get a feeling for their overall personality.
• Prevent Cheating ID – Many recruiters have found that candidates use “cheat sheets” during phone interviews. Video interviews prevent cheating because it’s possible to see candidates while they’re answering questions. Another best practice is to ask applicants to verify their identity by displaying a driver’s license or other picture ID. 

Screen Candidates in Minutes Instead of Weeks

Video interviews are six times faster than live interviews because you can interview and assess candidates in one easy step. So, you can easily identify top candidates as well as reduce time-to-hire. You also eliminate the time-consuming task of reviewing hundreds of resumes and scheduling multiple candidates for on-site interviews.

• Screen Multiple Candidates Simultaneously—Recruiters can send all candidates a link to the video interview. They complete it by answering the questions using their computer, tablet or phone, and recruiters can review them at their convenience.
• Consider Candidates for Other Positions –If a recruiter doesn’t think a candidate is the right fit for a role, and thinks they might be better suited for another position, they can forward the video to team member or a hiring manager for consideration.
• Streamline the Interview Process – Determine which employment tests are working and eliminate others. When Typeform recruiters reviewed their current process, they found they could consolidate a five-step hiring process into three shorter steps. As a result, they reduced time-to-hire to 20 days—a 43% decrease.
• Eliminate Time-Consuming Scheduling Problems – Humana implemented on-demand voice and video interviews to simplify the employment test process and found it also eliminated scheduling problems associated with live recruiter phone interviews. Candidates who pass the initial screening test automatically receive an invite to complete an on-demand voice or video interview and recruiters can review the responses and give them an answer in days instead of weeks.

According to Software Advice 60% of hiring managers and recruiters use video interviews for remote job interviews, and in a recent survey of 506 companies, 47% said they use video interviewing as part of their employment testing process to shorten time-to-hire. These are some companies that use video interviews and job roles where they are most effective.

AT&T – Sales Executives, Customer Service Reps, Senior Data Scientists, Data Network Engineers, Principal Architects and candidates for their B2B Sales Development Financial Internship programs.

Proctor & Gamble – Sales Account Manager, IT Associate Data and Analytics Manager, Plant Technician, Purchasing Manager, Warehouse Driver and their Quality Assurance and HR Internship programs.

Allstate – Insurance Sales Professional, Sales Associate, Senior Trial Attorney, Financial Specialist, Marketing Designer, Business Information Security Officer, Senior Product Manager, Field Sales Leader and UX Researcher.

CapitalOne – Manager of Product Management, Synthetic Data Product Manager, Scrum Master, Visual Designer, Lead UX Writer, Cafe Ambassador, Director of Software Engineering and Voice Data Scientist.

Eliminate Bias With Standardized Interviews

Since every candidate goes through the same interview process and takes the same employment tests, you can be assured that all candidates will be judged using the same criteria. This helps you eliminate bias from your hiring process and protects you against discrimination claims. 

Build a Talent Pipeline

Video interviews are easy for applicants since they can interview anytime and from anywhere. This means you can use them to attract and recruit “passive” job seekers that otherwise would not have been interested in your company. You can also build job profiles by reviewing top performers’ videos to identify commonalities in responses and candidate traits so you can improve the quality of future hires as well as find promising talent within your organization. This helps you build a talent “pipeline” to fill future positions.

The coronavirus has definitely affected the way companies conduct operations, but business must go on. While some companies are imposing hiring freezes or postponing filling roles, many are continuing to hire as usual or are expanding to accommodate increased demand for products and services.

Contact us to schedule a demo to learn how you can use video interviews along with cognitive and skills-related employment tests to keep hiring moving forward in the age of Coronavirus.