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Video Interviewing: Is It For You?

Written by Martian Logic | Apr 8, 2024 10:55:52 PM

Video interviewing is the 3rd dimension to resumes! It helps you unearth a candidate’s personality and emotional intelligence…  but without the expensive exercise of setting up interviews and sitting through them.

In fact, you can achieve almost the same thing in 45 seconds vs. 1.5 hours!

Huge potential, right? But is it for everyone? Does it make sense for you?

In this blog, I’m highlighting a few points and features, but I also explain how you can right now open a free-plan account in the Martian Logic platform and start testing video interviewing so you can make up your own mind if this is something for you.

 

Tip 1: Which Industry Does It Make Sense For?

To answer this question, allow me to start the conversation by using the following scenario:

Industry: Aged Care

Role: Registered Nurse

Video Question #1: One of the nurses has been rude to other staff and sitting down most of the time. What would you do?

Video Question #2: What would you do if you saw staff mistreating a resident?

Do you think that watching 30-second video answers to these questions, can shed significant light on assessing a candidate’s collaboration skills, soft skills, customer service skills and emotional intelligence?

This above example should get you started on the journey of ascertaining if Video Interviewing makes sense for you and therefore can they save you tons of money and time.

 

Tip 2: How Does It Save You Time?

Recorded Interviews

Video interviews are recorded interviews – not live interviews… that’s something else – see the next point!

What you want is having the answers already there for you – we’re not talking about all the organising hassle to secure a live face time chat.  You want to see recorded answers (video interviewing) sitting right next to the resume in your ATS and ready for you to want to watch it.   So as soon as you want to assess an application… you can instantly start playing video answers and understand the soft skills and emotional intelligence of the candidate.

Live Interviews

There are so many tools that you can use these days to have a face-time / conference call with a candidate!   You don’t need to buy one!  Also with live interviews… you still need lots of time to organise them and sit through them!  Especially if you have more than one person conducting the interview.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think that live interviews save recruiters time.  They might save candidates lots of time… but not the recruiters.

  1. A Video Interview (Pre-recorded interviews ready for you to play) would cost a recruiter:  45 seconds.
  2. A Face-time / Conference call interview would cost a recruiter:  1.5 hours.
  3. A face-to-face interview would cost a recruiter:  1.5 hours.

Tip 3: A Couple of Interesting Features

Configurable number of retries vs. a single raw cut

There are mixed opinions about this feature – should you let the candidates record as many takes as they want until they’re satisfied they’ve presented themselves and their answer in the best way possible?  Or should you give them a single or at most a limited number… of retries to ensure their answer is relatively speaking, more genuine and reflects their personality and belief?

We at Martian Logic think that it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect that an average candidate would feel comfortable enough to deliver and submit their answer in a single take!  You will end up losing lots of good candidates!

Configurable maximum recording time

I personally believe that the best approach here is to have many questions, but expect short answers. Specifically, I really just don’t think that you want to them to record more than 30 seconds.  And, I mean, are you really going to watch that much video time?  Many questions X  a few minutes for each question X many candidates = TOO MUCH TIME SPENT ON WATCHING VIDEOS!  It’s just not going to work!  You’ll end up finding it all too hard, and unwatched videos start to pile up!

Keep questions snappy to watch – 30 seconds should be more than enough for a question… and try to ask for up to 10 questions, each covering a different aspect of the soft skills and situational skills that you’re trying to discover.

Tip 4: Pricing Model – What’s The Real Damage?

Pay per interview?  Per job?  Per active job? or simply an unlimited-usage model?

Which pricing model is the right model for you?

My goodness… some providers make it absolutely impossible to work it out!  This means that you’re always open to going over the limit and get hit with expensive penalties – please watch out for that and analyse the pricing model really well before you commit!

How do you want to use it?  Do you want every application to have video recordings?  or do you want only a small proportion of the candidates who apply to be invited to complete video interviews?

During the application process

If you want your application form to contain one or more video questions… then you should consider the unlimited usage model.  Because any other model will end up costing you too much.  The unlimited-usage model will most likely be the most cost-effective model for you.

In Martian Logic we’ve deconstructed the video interviews capability and made it very agile and flexible for users to plug this capability i.e. gather and view video interviews… throughout the various stages 0f the recruitment process.  You can, for example, add 3 video questions on page 2 of the application form and 1 question on page 3 and of course mix them amongst the rest of the questions on your application form such as dropdowns, text and others.

At a later stage in the recruitment process

If you want to be more selective about it and only allow a candidate who progresses down the recruitment process to record a video interview, then your volume will be a lot less and perhaps the pack approach might be more cost-effective for you.

What’s the penalty when you go over the limit of your package?

Some providers have more than one limitation in the same package. For example, the number of jobs as well as the total number of interviews.  So that’s two conditions within the same package where if you go over any of them, you get hit with a massive rate hike that can see your bill skyrocketing.  They engineer their packages in such a way that there is a high chance you will go over your package limits.

 

Tip 5 – Test It For Yourself Right Now

If you’d like to find out if video interviewing makes sense for your company, then you’re welcome to start a free-plan account in our platform and have a play on your own time. The Martian Logic free plan gives you full access to the ‘video interview’ functionalities.  So, start an account today and you’re absolutely welcome to reach out to our support team if you need a hand discovering how to use it.