The Benefits of Video Screening

The computer age has brought a revolution to the practice of recruiting–both finding candidates and video screening them. Just 20 years ago, the world of recruiting was opaque. Finding candidates meant a lot of cold calling, sometimes in unfriendly places. Your search was limited by distance and expense. You relied heavily on paper resumes and the wide open market in resume writers who would fuzz the truth. Today, social media and computer-based communication has given us a community of relatively easy accessibility.

The All-Reaching Digital Community:

Everything is in the digital community. Job boards are digital data bases, where they used to be literal bulletin boards in employment offices. Job applications are forms that are downloaded, filled out and e-mailed directly to your office, where in previous times, neatly dressed applicants would have to come to your offices and fill them out by hand. The process of screening applications and resumes requires minimal paper nowadays.

From the desk of human resources officer, candidates can be sourced, reviewed, preliminarily screened and interviewed without a single dollar spent on recruiting costs. Once selected, most of the time candidates credentials can be checked and references are taken as well. Many companies use internally validated behavioral assessment tools in forms that can be sent through email attachments as part of the application form. Sometimes the tools include applications that can be run and scored electronically with results added to the application file.

The Place of the Video Screening Interview:

Matters of fact are one thing, but matters of personal response and personality fit are another. Each position in an organization has a personal footprint that will identify the person (qualified in every other way) who will optimally fit into it. A job is a complex profile of aptitudes, learning styles, interpersonal involvement and skill, attitudes toward supervision, preferred kind of direction, flexibility, desire for change and growth as well as the desire for stability. Accurate job descriptions and full understanding of what the job entails on a three-dimensional level are essential for final screening to find people whose tastes, traits and needs fit what the position has to offer. It is not true that there is one kind of ideal candidate who are “just the best people”. Research has shown that most often people leave jobs because of the intangibles, not factors of simple professional qualification.

Once basic credentials are established, the best ways to assess job fit are behavioral interviews and job sample testing. These can only be done face-to-face. Video screening represents an opportunity to see the candidates responses to behavioral queries and to go beyond simple answers to questions. The video screening interviews give skilled human resources professionals a chance to get beyond favorable response biases that can be pre-trained in applicants who need employment.

Give-and-Take:

The video interview can be done in such a way that it can provide the potential employee with important information and at the same time collecting important observations about the candidate’s reactions and appearance. On the information giving side, sometimes, the interview process may include showing the candidate where they would sit and whom they will meet every day. The topic of supervisory style may come up. The culture of the office community is an important variable that should be presented to a candidate and his or her attitudes toward these factors evaluated.

In some ways, the video interview is an economical compromise. However, the use of video also keeps a personal distance between interviewer and applicant which is important to objective observation. Face-to-face live interviewing has certain advantages, but also introduces some complications which can interfere with an accurate assessment. The live interview can rarely get past the hospitality part of the process, which often distorts interviewer observation.

Hirenami’s video interview software saves time in the candidate filtering process and allows your human resources to take advantage of the unique perspective of impersonal viewing to identify the best candidates for your positions. Please contact us to find out more.