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.