Is India ready for automated video interviews?
For those who are not familiar with the term (majority might be) automated video interviews is a concept where interviews can be conducted without the presence of an interviewer using pre-designed video or text questions and the responses of the candidates can be evaluated by the panel members at their convenience using an inbuilt evaluation tool.
It is possible at this point that you have many doubts of how the product works and especially how it is different from skype or video conferencing.
There are two major differences:
1. The first difference is that unlike skype or video conference you don’t need an evaluator to sit across the candidate. You design a set of questions (text or video) candidate should answer or what should he/she talk about, put them together in the form of an interview using our tool and post it via a public link in your website or mail invitation using our tool to email ids of candidates you already have. Candidates who attend the interview will be taken to an online portal where they can submit their video responses to each of the questions using webcam and mic in a secure environment.
2. There is an inbuilt evaluation dashboard within the application. So your team of HR executives or experts can go online whenever they are free and wherever they are, quickly vet through the video interview submitted in a structured dashboard, rate them on different skills you are looking for in a particular role and shortlist and hire them as needed.
This is primary used as a screening tool and if effectively used can provide you even 80% conversion in final face to face interview.
Some use cases:
Scenario 1:
You are recruiting for 10 open positions for freshers, you get 5000 applications and after resume shortlisting you select 1000 good profiles. Typically you conduct a written test and select the top 200 and then invite them to your campus for a interview. Without automated interview, it will take atleast 5 man-days from your HR executive to schedule it and 20 panel days for interview. You miss out on some good candidates who couldn’t attend it as their schedule didn’t allow them. For many candidates the moment they walk-in you no they are not fit for the position, but still you have to spend atleast 10-15 minutes on them. All the days of interview, productive time of your panel members are lost, disruption in office environment due to over crowding, employees might have to stay back and HR team generally will have sleepless nights.
If you use automated video interviews, then your HR team deploys randomly generated interviews using pre-designed questions suitable for the position to 200 candidates within minutes and give them or 2 or 3 days to attend the interview. Once interviews are submitted panel members can login to the application and independently go through the interview where-ever they are and evaluate them on standardized parameters. Top 20 candidates can be selected for final face to face interview in your campus and best 10 can be selected.
Scenarion 2:
You want 5 experienced candidates and have identified 100 potential candidates. Without automated interview, HR executives will try their best to schedule face to face or skype interviews with them but you end up interviewing only 30 to 40 as you had time constraints for a new project. You were not satisfied but because of urgent requirement you are forced to give offer letter to 5 of them. Using automated video interview, once you deploy interviews through followup you will get 80 candidates to attend interview as they can take attend it when it is convenient for them. From 80 responses you can quickly shortlist 10 for face to face interview and ooffer jobs to best 5.
Scenario 3:
You are company who hire people in large numbers especially when you get a new client, your skill requirement is specific and your churn rate is also high. Sometimes you even let go projects because you cant source enough candidates as quickly as the client would want. You get a lot of walkins on a daily basis but majority of time and effort spent in interviews are wasted as conversion ratios are very low. It is also difficult to keep track of so many interviews as you can’t make a record of everything. You also miss out on good talent as you couldn’t interview them when they were available as you were already full for the day or week. Using automated interviews you can collect interviews from all interested aspirants and whenever you have a requirement you can through the evaluate the interviews and absorb the best that too at fraction of the cost of doing it otherwise.
We launched our product, Interview Master, a web application with an application tracking system and automated video interview facility and so far got some great responses. We have come across various uses for the application including recruitment, interview training, casting videos, video surveys, collecting testimonials etc. There could be many more to but I thought it will be a great idea to get feedback on the concept and get some more ideas for application from Rodinhoods community. If you did like the concept please do like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for updates.
Mandar Joshi
This is really a very nice concept and I believe that our country and the speedily evolving recruitment model in India is getting ready for this innovative format. I shall touch base with you soon as I may have some ready customers for this product. You can reach me at me(at)mandarjoshi.com or at +91 98908 17339
SanjoeTom Jose
Thanks Mandar for your post. It was nice talking to you this morning.
SanjoeTom Jose
Is there any Rodinhooder who is already familiar with the concept?
Nishant Agrawal
Sounds like an interesting idea, specially for India as people here have serious issues with punctuality.
But this concept requires the interviewer and the interviewee to be tech-friendly, and the interviewee should be comfortable expressing himself looking at a monitor.
Companies recently toyed with the idea of a satellite coaching for CA studies. I thought that it would be great. But I was in for a serious disappointment. Technically, it sounds great. But, for me at least, it just wasn’t productive enough. For me, it’s just the last resort now.
Similarly, if I were an HR executive, I would try to stick to live interviews. For me, what’s most important is to gauge the applicant’s personality, responsiveness, honesty, fluency; I would want to talk to him. I can’t do all that looking at a video of him speaking.
Also, those with a high-resolution webcam will have a huge advantage over others.
But this can carve a niche.
SanjoeTom Jose
Hi Nishant,
Thank you for your feedback. As you said automated interview has lot of applications in India and abroad.
Regarding tech-friendliness by design automated video interviews are more user friendly for candidates than any of video conferencing technology including skype. All candidate has to do is click on a link in email invitation and he is taken through entire interview by just clicking next buttons and speaking when necessary. Compare this to skype or using an ERP or even an OS after joins the job.
Also unlike satelite coaching here only a part of the process is taken online and automated to improve efficiency. This is not intended to replace face to face interview, but reduce the numbers to eliminate unfit candidates and improve efficiency allowing panel members to better evaluate fit candidates.
Unfamiliarity with the application might be the reason behind your apprehensions whether an HR executive would want to use this. We have got very encouraging responses from HR executives, who have been plagued by inefficiencies due to poor quality candidates, scheduling hassles, time zone differences, unavailability of resources etc. I am very happy to invite you to try out a demo, view responses of the candidates in a structured dashboard and see if you are able to judge them.
SanjoeTom Jose
We were recently featured by pluggdin. Please see the article at https://www.pluggd.in/video-interviews-interviewmaster-297/
anoop
I think this is a great tool and of value add in sectors like BPO and Sales where there is a great focus on communication skills and personality of the candidate,these sectors have struggled with the telephone interview,consultants where most often the recruiter/company rep ends up speaking to a different person on the phone and an entirely different candidate lands up for the interview .
Please do let me know if I can be of any assistance to you .I am available at anoop.sashi@gmail.com
SanjoeTom Jose
Thank you Anoop. It will be great if you can introduce us to people in your network who will benefit from the product. I will mail you with more details of the product.
Amit Mishra
A great tool indeed. Having worked with a lot of HR professionals over years, the first thing they talk about is punctuality. This will solve a lot of problems at the initial phase of hiring. I remember Shine.com coming with a similar tool when they first started and only this video interview idea got the initial traction but they gradually failed to tap a bigger share of the market. A few lessons you can learn from their story also.
As Nishant pointed out, the only challenge you may face is interviewees being uncomfortable staring at a computer and doing the talking. It may look easy for people who have been using Skype etc. but majority of people will face some problem. This may force good candidates getting rejected on unknown parameters. Two things which I can recommend is you can create a few tutorials including some professional videos on how to behave while doing the interview, it may help. Secondly, you will need to educate recruiters that they may or may not consider a candidate based on his facial expressions during this round of interview as many of the candidates will not be comfortable at the first go. Focus more on the content, the way a person responds, logical answers, technology knowledge etc.
And trust me when I say this that the reason you are getting a good response is that you are decreasing the work load for HR professionals but you may still need to spend a lot of time to train them( literally spoon feed in many cases) on using this option effectively.
I am sure this application is going to do good but in case you need some more ideas, feel free to get in touch.
SanjoeTom Jose
Hi Amit,
Thank you for your valuable inputs. You are right, we have been spending good efforts in preparing tutorials and tools to make candidates and HR executive comfortable. The application’s design is inspired by philosophy of some of the most used web tools and we have tried to keep it as simple as possible so that without any training anyone can use it. We have tested it for user friendliness within target groups and the feedback has been that the processes are intuitive and easy to understand without prior introduction.
We also have a structured 1 hour training plan for client executives and the reason it is one hour is because that is all what is required for someone to start using it. And as you have rightly pointed out since this is a new concept in the industry we are all prepared to spend adequate efforts required to assist every client in effectively using it. I would like to get in touch with you for more inputs and ideas
Thanks for your support,
Sanjoe Jose
Amit Mishra
Hi Sanjoe,
Good to hear that you have already working on the things I mentioned, I am sure than getting customers on board will be easy task for you.
PS – I am working on a idea around personal branding which will cover both individuals and companies aspects and certainly deals with a lots of recruitments. I have inboxed you my contact details in case you need any help.
Regards
Sachin Karpe
Its a great concept and is time saving too. The doubt i have is how could we analyze the level of confidence a person exhibits in the presence of senior management and what if a person is not comfortable replying to an recorded conversation.
SanjoeTom Jose
Hi Sachin,
Thanks for pointing this out. If the job requires you to understand how he/she will behave in front of management etc you can have a face to face interaction as these are factors you would have to judge based on in person interaction. Automated interview will help you to limit these to a few selected candidates. Think of the scheduling constraints and loss of senior employees’ time if you have to do these for all the candidates.
Regarding if a person is not comfortable to answer questions without an interviewer on the other end, that is a call the company will have to take. One option is to arrange for face to face interviews only for those candidates. But job market today is very competitive and if one has to remain competitive then he/she has to shed such inhibitions. Adaptability is a key trait sort after today. The candidate has to be proactive and see how his prospective employer is gaining from this and embrace it.
Another advantage of automated interview is that it is bandwidth independent compared to skype or video conference. Questions can be in the form of text and answers recorded will be buffered and saved according to the speed of internet connection. So even candidates from areas with poor connectivity stands to gain a lot from this. Thanks Anoop for reminding me to post this advantage here.