Chris Russell (15)
Recruiting
Hiring Process Steps Explained
The hiring process is comprised of many steps for bringing a new employee into your company. Employers identify a need, recruits from a pool of talent and eventually hires the candidate to fill the role based perviously determined qualifications. Most companies follow the same process but all have certain variables added to thehirinqg mix that vary widely based on culture and types of jobs. Below are the most common steps in today’s hiring process. Hiring Process, Step by Step Identify Your Need Hiring starts with identifying a role that needs to be added. Usually a hiring manager will tell his HR team that he needs to add staff to fill a need in their department. It could be a newly created job or one that has to be backfilled after a person leaves. Job Description A job description should be generated that is unbiased and speaks to the candidate. It should contain job requirements, how you qualify, salary/benefits and even reason(s) for why a prospective candidate should apply. Start Recruiting Recruitment starts with announcing the new opportunity both internally and externally. But before you begin that figure out where you are going to publicize the role, how you will screen potential candidates, what the interview process will be like and who will conduct the interviews. Advertise the Job Begin by posting the job to your applicant tracking system.Promoting the new job opening should start by informing your existing employees. They may be able to refer a friend or colleague to the position thus helping you generate candidates quickly. At most companies referrals are a major way (40% or more) people get recruited. Next, advertise the job on national and/or niche job boards to attract active job seekers. Post the job link to your companies social media channels as well to help spread the word. Job promotion will be important especially in tight job markets where good candidates are at a premium. Source Candidates If you have an internal recruiting team, sourcing candidates proactively should also begin. This type of practice recruitment ensures you are targeting good quality candidates who are already employed but might be the perfect fit for your role. Leverage sites like LinkedIn social media and external resume databases to find this talent. Review Applicants Companies receive applications mainly two ways, by email or through an applicant tracking system. At this point its up to your recruiters to review each resume and reject or move to the next stage. Some ATS platforms also will rank or score resumes according to criteria you set which is helpful when having to review a high number of applications. Screening Process Most interviews usually will begin with a phone screen (with recruiter or HR) although nowadays a video cover letter might be included in the process. These phone screens last around 20-30 mins and are used to determine if the candidate meets the minimum qualifications and is actually interested in the role. These quick interviews are used to narrow down the list of candidates for the next stage. Formal Interviews Each company has a different interview cadence but generally interviews are comprised of the following; One on ones with the hiring manager that usually focus on the candidates experience, skills, work history and fit for the role Follow ups for group interviews (or within a team) that take place in person or in a virtual interview setting. Technical interviews for candidates who may need to take coding tests or whiteboard complex problems. Final round with leadership so they can sign off on the new hire or go more in-depth on a particular topic to validate their expertise. Assessment tests may also be given after interviews to help gauge a candidates proficiency with certain software or other complex skill. The key to interviewing in today’s environment is to keep the total number of interviews to a minimum to ensure a smooth candidate experience. The Background Check For many roles expecicially ones that work with money or sensitive data, a background will need to be done to check if a candidate has any kind of major red flag in his/her background. Some employers may go a step farther and review any public accounts found on sites like Facebook and twitter. They are looking to ensure this person would represent the company in a professional manner. Dry screens may also be required at this step. Decision Time After whilltling down your final list of candidates to 3 to 5 people and vetting them, it’s time to make your decision on who to hire. Your team should also have a backup candidate identified in case your first choice turns down the job. Acceptance rates are usually high at this stage but it pays to be prepared for the unexpected. Check References Reference checks help verify any pertinent information shared by the candidate about previous employment. Questions like ‘would you rehire this person’ or ‘what do they need to work on’ are great for generating valuable feedback on your candidate. Make the Offer Once you’ve decided on a candidate it’s time to give them the good news and prep your offer letter. The letter must include the following information; Job title Start date Starting salary Location (or remote) Benefits and vacation time. Any other terms and conditions of the role. Your candidate may wish to negotiate the salary so be prepared to adjust the offer letter based upon those conversations. Onboarding After your candidate accepts its a matter of process of filling out paperwork related to their employment. You’ll need documents like: Form W4 I-9 form and E-Verify Tax Withholding and Registrations Copy of drivers license Employee handbook NDA Once the paperwork is finalized your onboarding can begin in earnest. Some employers do a better job at onboarding than others. You’ll need to make your new hire feel welcome by properly introducing them to your team, setting them with a computer, training if applicable, passwords and whatever else they need to be successful. You may even want to assign them a buddy or mentor to help guide them in their first 33/60/90 days of employment.
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Recruiting
How to Define Recruiting
Recruiting involves the art of attracting, screening, engaging, and hiring candidates from the available pool of workers. At a high level, it involves identifying the skills, traits (culture fit) and qualifications of your ideal candidate. To expand on that definition you can add the development of your employer brand and the evolution of the candidate experience to ensure a smooth process for both applicants and recruiter. Recruiting Definition Recruitment stages include: job requisition, job posting, sourcing proactively, assessing talent and engaging them. Recruiters must be trying to convert the candidate at each stage, eventually leading then to apply and accept the job offer. In Job analysis you identify the need and specify it on paper via a written job description. in Souring you scour the web for candidates and contact them proactively to “pitch” them your opportunity. In the assessment stage you screen them to ensure good fit and then convert them into an applicant. To complete the act of recruiting an offer is made, an agreement is reached on a salary and onboarding begins. Generally speaking recruiting is conducted by talent acquisition professionals (recruiters and sources) but if you are a smaller organization can also be handled by business owners and office managers. Alternatively some companies choose to outsource recruiting to 3rd party staffing firms who act on the company’s behalf and take a cut of the salary if a hire is placed. That’s Recruiting! A simpler definition of recruiting might be something like this: Convincing talent to come to work for you. Got your own definition of recruiting? Tell us.
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Recruiting
What are the 3 Types of Recruitment?
From job board postings to employee referrals, texting to talent pools, twitter announcements, LinkedIn messaging and scouring lists of conference attendees, these are just a sample of how recruiters try to attract candidates. As varied and creative as these tactics are, for our purposes we’ll sort them into three broad, yet basic types of recruiting: Inbound Outbound Internal These may appear to be distinct methods of recruiting workers, and they can be. More often employers use all three, announcing openings on company intranets to encourage internal applicants and employee referrals while simultaneously posting to job boards and reaching out to previous candidates and others sourced from business and social networks. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these categories. Inbound recruiting In its simplest and most basic form, recruiters post openings to job boards and then review, rank and select candidates from the resumes and applications they receive. Referred to as “post and pray,” this type of reactive recruiting – reactive because recruiters react to the incoming applications – now is part of a broader and sophisticated recruitment marketing program. Inbound recruitment today is a year-round strategy that begins with building a strong employer brand. It’s a program of continuous attraction and awareness that encourages the best talent to want to come to work for you. As they apply – even without a specific opening – they become part of a pool of talented people already interested in working for you. Then as jobs come open, recruiters tap the pool inviting candidates with the right combination of skills and background to take the next step. A solid inbound recruitment strategy includes showing what it’s like to work for the company, demonstrating the organization’s sense of social responsibility and providing an objective perspective on employer review sites. Posting jobs, participating in job fairs and college recruiting and similar recruitment tactics are all part of a comprehensive inbound effort. Outbound recruiting This type of recruiting is sometimes called sourcing, even if sourcing specialists insist the term should only be applied to them. It involves searching for people with special skills and unique backgrounds for jobs that are particularly hard to fill simply by posting a job ad. When the inbound effort fails to produce the right kind of talent, or the job is especially unique or senior, a recruiter will go hunting. They are looking for passive candidates, the people who aren’t job searching and might not even be considering a job change. More than a few studies tell us that 75% to 85% of professionals fall into the passive category. These are the candidates most coveted by employers for reasons both understandable – no one else is competing for them, and if they are working for a competitor, all the better – and less realistic – they must be good otherwise they’d be looking. Finding these passive candidates may be as simple as searching LinkedIn and texting them a compelling message. (Texting gets a much better and quicker response than email or voicemail.) Or, as is true in more cases, sourcing for especially challenging positions – the most difficult are called a “purple squirrel” hunt – may take weeks and involve scouring conference attendance and speaker lists, academic paper authorships, association directories and dozens and dozens of contacts. Once potential candidates are identified, the second step is to convince them to become applicants. That involves skills closer to sales than to recruiting. Though the statistics on converting a sourced candidate to an actual applicant run as high as only 1 in 30, the ratio of hire to sourced applicant at 1 in 43 is much better than for inbound candidates. Internal Recruiting Of all sources of hire, internal recruiting has historically been the weakest. That’s changing as employers recognize the value of promoting workers already familiar with the company culture and procedures and who have a verifiable work record. Many years ago, the tech company Cisco surveyed its entire workforce to inventory the skills and talents of each employee. Not only did Cisco want to know about the talents they use on the job, but what other skills and abilities did they have. The company then used this information to recruit first from its existing workforce. More commonly, recruiters will simply post job opening notices internally. A majority of companies, including many SMBs, have referral programs that pay a bonus to employees for recommending people who are later hired. Other companies leverage their alumni networks for this same purpose. The biggest challenge to internal recruiting is the reluctance of managers to part with their best talent and their eagerness to suggest the less able. To get around that problem, smart employers provide incentives to managers for mentoring and nominating employees for promotion. A combination of all three As we said earlier, at all but the smallest companies, recruiters employ all three methods in their efforts to find and hire talent. Building a positive employer brand and showcasing it on the company website and social media not only helps attract quality active jobseekers, but helps convince the passive workers your source to join the company. And no recruiter should overlook the top talent that may be working right down the hall.
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AI
What Is an AI Recruiting Assistant
Regis Corporation, the largest salon owner and franchiser in the United States, hires thousands of stylists a year with almost no help from a recruiter. How do they do it? By using an AI recruiting assistant. “Tasks that are assumed to take a team, or an individual, to manage are no longer the case,” explains Jacob Kramer, associate vice president of talent acquisition and head of the Regis automation project that turned over the sourcing, contact, and application process to an AI assistant. “AI can be used to thoroughly streamline the recruiting process, enhance the candidate experience and build out workforce planning automation.” AI-powered natural language assistants are fast becoming must-have recruiting tools, freeing their human recruiters from tedious routine tasks while simultaneously improving the candidate experience. As the Regis example demonstrates, these assistants make it possible to connect with candidates, walk them through the application process answering questions as they go, qualify them and schedule them to meet with a hiring manager in minutes or hours instead of the days it would take a human to handle the details. AI assistants are chatbots AI assistants are chatbots, similar to Siri or Google Assistant, and deployed not just by large companies with high volume hiring needs. Smaller organizations benefit just as much by implementing them on their career sites. There, they will answer questions about health benefits for one candidate, help another with their job search while asking others qualifying questions – and do it all at the same time. These bots as they’re sometimes called are a far cry from those of just a few years ago. The first chatbots were text-based decision trees, identical in approach to the “touch 1 for this or 2 for that” of automated corporate phone systems. While these types of chatbots still outnumber AI assistants, they’re rapidly being replaced by bots that understand questions the way a human can. For example, an AI-enabled recruiting assistant can tell from the context and nature of a conversation about benefits that a candidate asking, “What about pets?” is probably inquiring if the organization offers pet insurance. Without the help of an AI assistant, a potential candidate who considers pet insurance essential might simply choose not to apply if they couldn’t reach a recruiter directly. Answering questions on a career site is the most common use of AI or natural language processing chatbots. A 2019 survey found half of all TA leaders that have deployed a recruiting assistant on their career site say the single biggest benefit is an improved candidate experience. Not far behind is the saving in recruiter time they provide. What’s more 71% report candidates were satisfied by their interaction with the chatbot. That alone makes deploying an AI assistant a worthwhile investment. More Than a Bot Yet, there’s much more these bots can do. Regis and other companies are using recruiting assistants to sift through the digital resumes and applications they keep on file to find talent matching current needs. Without having to involve a recruiter, the assistant will send each an invitation to become an active candidate, directing them to update their resume, answer a few questions, take an assessment or directly schedule an interview. Companies like Ernst & Young and Triumph Motorcycles are also deploying them internally to answer employee questions about vacation accruals, sick leave, scheduling and others that previously would require an HR person to answer. Ernst & Young’s Goldie HR chatbot saved more than 10,000 HR staff hours over six months. Call them AI recruiting assistants, conversational chatbots, virtual assistants or just bots, they are all built to serve the same function — improve the user experience and free up talent acquisition professionals to do what they do best.
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Recruiting Technology
What are the Best Sourcing Tools?
Like a good carpenter, recruiters need a variety of tools to get the job done. And like good carpentry tools, sourcing tools make the job of proactively finding the right talent easier and more efficient. There are dozens of sourcing tools on the market. Some are free, though they limit the number of searches or the amount of information they provide. The more powerful and effective tools can cost from a few dollars a month to enterprise versions costing well into the hundreds. There are specialty tools for tracking down email addresses and phone numbers, sourcing top tech talent, identifying the best candidates among the resumes already in your ATS or CRM and others that will search the internet, social media or just specific sites. We’ve compiled a list of some of the more useful all-around sourcing tools, and, for good measure, a couple specialty tools. Most offer a free trial or have a freemium version, perfect for recruiters who actively source just a few positions. Hiretual Imagine having a highly skilled researcher at your elbow. That’s Hiretual, a 2018 product of the year. What makes Hiretual a standout is that it employs artificial intelligence to analyze a job description using its contextual understanding then sift through hundreds of thousands of candidate profiles to find the right match. Hiretual’s ready database contains more than 750 million profiles with information aggregated from dozens of networks and social platforms and the open web. It has specialty search solutions for tech and healthcare professionals, and searches for candidates based on their patents and academic and professional journal publications. Its Chrome extension provides additional insights and contact details right from candidate profiles on several professional networks. SeekOut Only four years old, this sourcing platform already has 600 million profiles in its database. Each is compiled from a broad variety of sources to create, as the company says, a 360 degree view of a candidate. Besides providing all the basic, resume essentials about experience and education, SeekOut’s profiles include enhanced details about skills, interests, talents, diversity and professional contributions gleaned from more than three dozen social and professional networks, publications and public profiles. Like other AI sourcing tools, SeekOut has a Chrome extension to enhance Google candidate search results with supplemental information. HiringSolved The company was one of the early pioneers in candidate profiling, aggregating data from multiple sites to build profiles far more detailed than any resume or LinkedIn profile. Last year, it announced it would focus on searching only internal databases, which may well be the most underutilized sourcing resource at any company. HiringSolved’s AI search engine now will quickly surface the silver and bronze medalists and others with the required skills that already exist in every company’s ATS or CRM. Matching can be by keyword, Boolean string or uploading a desirable resume or the job description itself. Humanpredictions Any recruiter ever tasked with sourcing tech professionals knows how hard it is just to find the right talent, let alone convince them to become a candidate. Humanpredictions simplifies the first part of that job. Focused exclusively on the tech industry, the company builds candidate profiles from a variety of sources and especially the open source code sites like GitHub and StackOverflow. That much it shares with the general sourcing platforms. Humanpredictions, however, goes a step further, logging changes to each professionals public profiles to predict who among them might be or might soon be starting to look for another job or who are at least most likely to respond to a cold call or email. Using Humanpredictions is pricey when compared to other sourcing tools, but then, hiring tech professionals is highly competitive so getting an edge can be well worth the cost. Swordfish This is one of the simpler, yet powerful tools for finding individual contact information. It’s a browser plug-in that will search for email addresses and phone numbers for profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and a few others, including Bing and Google. Besides business email addresses and business phone numbers, Swordfish will also list cell numbers and personal email addresses. The free version provides for five lookups a month. Lusha More limited than Swordfish, Lusha works exclusively with LinkedIn profiles. As a Chrome extension, one click yields not only contact information, but also, for the premium version, some details about the company where the person currently works. Five lookups are free each month. Paid versions allow for many more, and export as a CSV or into a CRM. Your results with each tool will vary, try the free versions before you buy and then determine which sourcing tool is best for your team.
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Recruiting
What are Sourcing Techniques
The most critical part of any recruitment program is searching for the talent a company needs to fill a current opening or for jobs expected to become available in the future. There are multiple methods of finding candidates. Sourcing active job seekers by posting a job and selecting from among the applications that come in is the most common. Passive sourcing is the art of proactively searching and identifying talent that isn’t looking for a job and may never have even heard of the company. Sourcing these passive candidates is a more challenging and time-consuming process, especially if the job has unique requirements or is in high demand. But it also can yield candidates who are more productive and more likely to make a strong, positive impact. Sourcing is Proactive The first place to start a proactive search is in your own backyard. For every job opening a company will receive dozens or even hundreds of applications. But only one candidate gets hired. The runners-up were likely just as good. Many have since gained more experience and learned new skills. Now, instead of the silver or bronze medal, these once and future candidates could become your gold medalists. Social media, too, is a powerful way of identifying potential candidates and developing leads. Every day, hundreds of recruiters sift through the 740 million profiles on LinkedIn for the people who best fit their open jobs. Not only do these profiles have such basic information as work experience, skills and accomplishments, many include links to portfolios, projects and professional articles. Communicating with these potential candidates may be the hardest part of sourcing on LinkedIn. Professionals in high demand areas like software development may not even read your message. So instead, text them. Research puts the open rates for text messaging at 90% and the response rate is 2x as high as for phone or email. Go Beyond LinkedIn Though LinkedIn is the most popular way of sourcing passive candidates, don’t overlook other social media. Facebook is especially useful for searching for candidates among the thousands of active affinity groups on the site. While LinkedIn has its share of groups, many of those where the most in-demand professionals gather are closed. Facebook’s groups tend to be more generous. Besides joining a group, recruiters can use Facebook’s top of the page search tool to find members fitting basic search terms. With the help of web scrapers and free profile building tools, a skilled recruiter can source candidates they may not find anywhere else. Other social media can be even more fruitful, since there’s not as much competition from other recruiters. Using hashtags, Twitter and Instagram will turn up individuals as well as groups of relevant professionals. What makes them more valuable is using them to turn up leads to potential candidates. While both can be searched for specific skills or titles, searching by hashtags can be far more useful. People attending conferences, publishing articles and other work related events will tweet about them. Instagram, which is all about photos, can be especially useful. You’ll find people identified in the captions of photos from company and industry events who might not turn up elsewhere. Not sure what hashtag to use? Check the directory. Additional Sourcing Techniques Other valuable sources are association directories and professional lists and collections of academic and scientific papers, journals and books. Access to professional directories may be limited to members. Those that are open usually provide much more than a name and affiliation, so cross-check against Google Scholar and JSTOR. Professional publications will have contact information at least for the lead author, as well as the affiliation of every named contributor. Another good place to look for scientific talent is the Patent Office database. One clever and little known way of limiting searches of all kinds is to use Google and emojis. Yes, we are talking about those smiley faces and other icons people use to enhance email and text messages. By including a telephone, cell phone, email and related emojis in a Google search with your other criteria you’ll get only those results that also have contact information. Check here for a cheat sheet of emojis you can use. Our list here is just a sample of the many ways to source passive talent. We once heard of a tech search firm in Silicon Valley that distributed free paper placemats to restaurants and bars with a coding puzzle leading to their job site. You may not ever go to such lengths, but it shows that sourcing great talent can be done in all sorts of ways.
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Recruiting Tactics
What is Automated Resume Screening?
How much time does a recruiter spend reviewing a resume? Would you believe mere seconds? 7.4 seconds to be specific, at least according to a 2018 study by The Ladders. With every recruiter handling a dozen or more openings and every opening getting 50 or 100 or more resumes, there’s little choice but to quickly scan. At least, that’s the way it used to be. Now recruiters at companies all over the globe rely on screening tools to review, score and rank the incoming applications and resumes. These tools free them to look more closely at those candidates that come out on top. They also can eliminate the bias that might unconsciously influence a human recruiter. The earliest of these screening tools merely compared resumes against the requirements of the job description. This keyword matching ranked candidates by how many of the requirements were present in their resume. AI Resume Screening Today, AI resume screening is the state of the art. Going far beyond the keyword matching of an applicant tracking system, these tools understand context, and can impute good communication skills to a candidate whose resume mentions conference presentations and written work. Many will supplement a resume with information gathered from social media and public profiles. The most valuable – and controversial – feature of AI screeners is their ability to learn a company’s hiring preferences. They do this by analyzing existing company records for patterns among those who were hired. If a company tended to hire more people who had worked for a competitor, candidates with that background would score higher than those without that experience. When performance information is included, AI systems can perform even better, looking for those candidates who most closely match the company’s best workers. Because preferences change, AI screening tools do, too. Their machine learning algorithms constantly update the scoring system based on who now is getting interviewed and hired. The more data these programs have to work with, the better their scoring and ranking. However, if the data used to train these systems about hiring preferences is biased, then the screening criteria and scoring will be too. Amazon’s company-built AI recruiting system may be the most famous example of this. After bringing its program online in 2015, Amazon discovered the system was biased against women for technical jobs. Programmers had trained it using a decade’s worth of tech hiring information. Since most of the software developers were men, the system learned to prefer male candidates. It penalized resumes that included gender-suggestive backgrounds and phrases. Eliminating Bias After trying unsuccessfully to eliminate this bias and finding unqualified candidates were being recommended due to other problems with the training data, Amazon shut down the project. Builders of these screeners have learned from the Amazon experiment and now routinely audit their scoring and selection systems. The data used to train these screeners is also scrubbed of details like names, gender and racial references and even suggestive phrases. Some vendors of these programs have turned to skills and personality assessments to predict candidate success. They work by comparing how candidates perform on these assessments to the performance of the company’s best workers. Though this selection method is less likely to discriminate on the basis of sex or race, it can result in hiring workers who all think and act alike, limiting the potential for creativity and problem solving. There’s no question that AI candidate screening is a powerful tool to help recruiters find excellent candidates they might otherwise overlook in a 7.4 second resume review. When audited regularly and managed by talent acquisition professionals sensitive to the issues, AI resume screening can lead to hiring better workers more quickly and more efficiently.
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Recruiting Technology
Intro to Interview Scheduling Software
One of the biggest pain points in recruiting today is the interview scheduling process. It often ranks as the biggest complaint among recruiters and candidates. All that back and forth, multiple calendars, different time zones can be a headache to actually complete. The actual process of scheduling candidates for interviews is important for two key reasons: Candidate Experience: By not having a simple and easy way to schedule an interview your candidates will notice. Today’s tech savvy generation expects a nearly one click experience to get on your calendar. Disappoint them at your own risk. Opportunity Cost: the time wasted in the scheduling process can be a detriment to recruiting. Speed is essential in today’s competitive job market. By dragging out scheduling you can lose a good candidate. A slow or incompetent scheduling process can only lead to disaster. Just head to Glassdor to see those rants! Making scheduling painless should be a priority for your entire talent team including the hire manager. Thats why having interview scheduling software in place is the answer. But before we dive into that, let’s talk about ways to improve that interview invitation. Ways to improve your interview scheduling invite Be mindful of the time commitment required to interview. Realize that the candidate is missing their own work to interview. Check with them to see how much time they can devote to your interview rounds. Reminder them via text and email about who they’ll be meeting with, the time and address (if in person). Add directions your office inside the invite if necessary. Keep a tight schedule. Try to eliminate down time between interviews if they are happening in a single timeframe. Lastly, get yourself some interview scheduling software to streamline, automates, and sync the entire interview scheduling process for all parties involved. Platforms such as Cronofy say that automating interview scheduling saves recruiters 284 hours per year and results in a 59% faster time to hire ratio. How to Choose Interview Scheduling Software A host of interview scheduling tools exist today in the market. But what should you look for before making a commitment? Obviously you’ll want a full demo and perhaps a few client referrals. Below are some things to consider if you’re in the market for this kind of software; Look for the following features; Automated Triggers: alert and invite candidates to self schedule themselves according to a calendar you set in place with certain interview times. Calendar Management: users should be able to update interview details at anytime, and see availability. Room Bookings: employers should be able to add physical meeting spaces to the app. Multiple Interview Types: the software should allow for group interviews as well as one-to-one. Support is an essential piece of any HR technology. Be sure your vendor offers some form of live support (chat/phone) to assists you with questions. Ask about their onboarding prices as well. If they just promote it as a DIY solution you could run into problems. Pricing generally involves how many employees you have. Many are subscription based (monthly) based on your company size. The beauty of this kind of software is that your recruiters can send customized emails to candidates to self-schedule themselves. Recruiters can be direct, rather than engaging in frustrating back-and-forth email chains. Interview scheduling software can and should be part of your modern recruiting technology stack.
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Recruiting
How Video Interview Platforms Work
It’s hard to believe that only 10 years ago an innovative and economical alternative to flying a candidate in for an in-person interview was sending a webcam to them or have them go to an office with live video capabilities to conduct a virtual interview. Today, after a year of companies implementing effective ways to keep teams connected globally while working remotely through team collaboration tools and web conferencing software, using video interviewing has become the norm for most interviews and there’s no indication that we’ll go back to the way things were before Covid-19. Synchronous and Asynchronous Formats Currently there are two technologies within the platform ecosystem: synchronous, which is used for live interviews, and asynchronous, which is used for prerecorded interviewing. Early on, employers scheduled Skype interviews – which is a synchronous platform. Now employers are primarily using Zoom and Microsoft Teams to conduct virtual interviews. It’s convenient and economical for the candidate and the employer, plus candidates are typically very familiar with these applications. It is the new norm. Asynchronous is essentially a prerecorded interviewer. The popularity of asynchronous video interviews is increasing and the benefits are numerous. Setting up a pre-recorded interview is a simple process. First, the recruiter enters questions into the software and then invites job candidates to answer the questions. Candidates view an introductory video that describes the employer and informs them about the position. Then they are asked to respond to interview questions, using the software to record their responses using a webcam-equipped device or smartphone. The candidate can record their answers at a time that is convenient for them and the recruiter can also review the video when they are able. Besides the convenience and ease of the process there are many additional features available using an asynchronous, video interview platforms including: Intuitive and easy to get started video interview software Candidate assessment tools Video interview platforms with a full recruiting suite Video interview platforms combined with your CRM Candidate support and communication tools that keep the candidate informed of their status You can learn more about these features by checking some solutions by Select Software Reviews which recently reviewed the top 11 Video Interviewing Platforms. Cost/benefit Analysis The technology and innovation supporting the wide assortment of recruitment tools is constantly changing and improving. It’s challenging to know which tools make the most sense for your organization and what is the best long-term investment. A good way to start is doing a cost/benefit analysis. Know the full costs as well as identify the savings and gains based on the benefits when considering video interviewing including: Video interviews are 6x faster than phone interviews. You can conduct five video interviews in the same amount of time as one phone interview which is typically 30 minutes long. Making it more effective than phone screens. 84% of the candidates schedule a video interview within 24 hours of receiving a text invite; thereby reducing the cost and inefficiency of scheduling in person interviews. Video Interviews can be conducted at any time that is convenient for the candidate! Plus, candidates also can rerecord their video responses, leading to candidates having a better sense of being able to answer the question. The hiring team can better evaluate candidates because they can re-watch the video whenever they want, allowing them to go beyond a quick look of a resume in order to learn more about more applicants, helping to make better hiring decisions. Less time spent screening applicants, especially with the use of AI and various candidate assessment tools. Standardizing of the interview process with increased consistency in questioning and interview techniques. Less biased hiring. Decreased time-to-hire. Better candidate experience and excellent opportunity to positively reinforce your employer brand. Automated communication throughout the interview process. Two critical actions and some additional cost to keep in mind to ensure a successful process is to: Provide ample communication to your candidates on the video interviewing process and set expectations for their experience as well as how this content will be used. Make sure there is readily available technical support, should your candidate run into issues or need additional instructions. Just sending a link to your candidate for the video interview will not be a successful approach. By integrating video interviewing strategies into your talent acquisition processes, you can achieve cost savings and major long-term benefits resulting in better hiring decisions. ### Margaret Boros contributed to this article.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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