Video: Bringing Humanity Back to Hiring

For all the benefits that technology brings to recruiting, advanced tech has also caused us to hire reactively. Hundreds of candidates (to no fault of their own) fill out a job application online based on the job title — with no little to no clues of what the job involves or if they’re a good fit for the organization. On the hiring side, we’ve turned the resume into a keyword search instead of being a window into a person’s performance potential. Hiring automation that’s designed to create efficiencies instead creates a human resource nightmare and ruins the candidate experience.

Is it possible that, on our path to modernize, we’ve lost our humanness?

There’s good news: Tech can help us return humanity to the hiring process. And it’s all thanks to a technology we’ve had since roughly 1951. Video.

Why Is It Important to Hire the Right People?

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates a bad hire will cost you 30 percent of that person’s first year’s earnings. Consider one of our retail clients. Their recruiting process was broken. They were unable to hire clerks that could eventually be promoted to managers. Because of this, they wasted — yes, wasted — $10.5 million on recruiting clerks and managers.

Hire Better: Video Promotes the Rock Star

Video technology fosters meaningful person-to-person interaction in the hiring process. Organizations see and hear an actual candidate and listen to them answer questions.

And candidates are comfortable with video. According to the 2018 Nielsen Total Audience Report, adults in the U.S. are watching almost six hours of video per day. The growth of Instagram is largely video-driven. Think Google, YouTube, Skype, and more. In short: Video is widely-accepted.

Video is also crucial for controlling business costs. Multiple in-person interviews are expensive and often waste time and money. Using interview video technology saves time and money while preserving meaningful interactions in the pre-hire journey.

A video interview is engaging and personal for candidates. They can be themselves.

And as a recruiter, you have a more dynamic measure of the candidate, their personality, and their potential culture fit than you would have from a static piece of paper.

It’s Time To Evolve Recruiting Through Video

Video benefits your hiring process immensely. Your business can:

• Save time
• Save money
• Truth-test the resume
• See a candidate for who they are
• Understand who is more likely to be a cultural fit
• Be more human overall

It’s time to start seeing candidates as people and not just bullet points or LinkedIn profiles. That begins with increasing your use of video in the hiring process.

Organizations are increasingly investing in video as part of the hiring process. Sixty percent of hiring managers were fully using or beginning to use video in 2015, and that percentage has grown each year since. As it continues to arrive at scale, we can continue to humanize hiring.

Video can truly revamp and improve the hiring process when it is integrated with assessment technology — seamlessly dovetailing scientifically-valid questions with the more human element of video interviewing. Together, organizations can get answers that better relate to the job profile and better predict job success. We can put an end to the keyword search by replacing it with something better.

Authors

Greg Moran

Greg Moran is the CEO of OutMatch and has more than 20 years of human capital management, sales, and leadership experience. He is also the author of Building the Talent Edge: A Field Manager's Guide to Recruiting the Best and Hire, Fire, and the Walking Dead.