Recruiting has always been an incredibly time-intensive process, and it has been increasing in recent years. When you’re dealing with upwards of 5,000 candidates per year, recruiting becomes a numbers game that’s very hard to win. Coupled by the fact that the best candidates are only in the market for ten days, identifying only the top 5% of candidates that apply as potential members of our team in a fast way makes it a challenging task to cover our open positions.
We are incredibly proud of the quality of our employees and the work they do for our clients, and we knew any change we make in our recruiting needed to maintain our standards and fit our specific needs. With this in mind, we started looking at options on how to be more fast and efficient in our hiring process, and we found out that video interviewing is a trending option that solves many of our needs.
Speed
According to a talent acquisition research by Aberdeen, companies with video interviewing tools in place are 2.7 times more likely to improve their cost per hire on a year-to-year basis, as compared with companies without such mechanisms in place. Companies who use video interviewing improved their time to hire by 60%.
On the other hand, an overwhelming 70% of companies need more than 30 days to process a new hire, according to LinkedIn.
Quality
Video interviews allow candidates to present themselves in another way than written form and showcase their personality and skills. You can give more chances to people who aren’t strong with written communication, but who could be the right fit for your company.
While some recruiters think video interviews might drive candidates away, 83% of candidates reported being satisfied with video interviews as a method, according to our 2019 Candidate Survey.
Many HR teams, like ours, struggle with high staff turnover rates and interview no-shows. There is an exceptionally high turnover rate for software developer jobs in an agile software development environment. Younger candidates don’t always take their job search seriously or apply to too many interviews at the same time. Candidates will behave better when you provide a better candidate experience.
Efficiency
Compared to traditional recruitment methods, using video interviews can help your business to stand out to job seekers.
Video interviews allow you to see more candidates during the early stage of the hiring process and avoid wasting time on unproductive face-to-face meetings. You can review video replies when it’s most convenient for you—whether that’s in your store or on your couch at home—and only meet stand-out candidates in person.
Conclusion
So, we did the most logical thing a software outsourcing company could do: we developed an in-house tool to help our recruitment team with the screening process.
Our automated video screening tool is now in its final stages. Once beta testing is complete, it will replace the completely manual screening process that consisted of a call with a candidate that took an average of approximately 40 minutes. We aim to cover more candidates in less time and ultimately hire more team members.
We hope that this tool will also allow my team to work more efficiently and provide a more personalized experience for our employees once they are hired. It will reduce the time spent on the hiring process and add more information for us to evaluate before making an offer.
We’ll provide the candidate an access code to our system, and they’ll validate their information and answer 10 to 15 questions from an initial technical evaluation, all recorded on video. It will help us evaluate their experience and their English skills as well as more intangible qualities like body language, attitude, and expressions that we don’t get in a phone interview. In the end, it will be a complete evaluation of a potential team member then we’ve had before, and it will save time in the process.
By screening as many candidates efficiently, we can fill open positions quickly and ensure that we are presenting the best possible team members to our clients. As a bonus, our in-house development team gained valuable experience in creating this useful tool – my thanks to them and my team for all the hard work they do!
