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When your organization has many job openings to fill, you need to be as efficient as possible with applicant screening and interviewing. That’s why many companies are leveraging video tools to screen and interview candidates to save time and travel costs.
Use Applicant Tracking Software to Identify Candidates for Interviews
Software for analyzing candidate skills was one of the first steps of digitizing the candidate selection process. It has been followed by analyzing the social media profiles and other online activities of applicants. Another important development is using the software to develop a pre-screened applicant pool. This could be a pool of candidates you already assessed and perhaps even interviewed in the past. As recruiting professional Dr. John Sullivan explains, “Having a pre-qualified applicant pipeline makes it easier to fill a vacancy quickly.”
Set Up a Pre-Recorded Interview for Potential Candidates
Perhaps your recruiting software has sorted through the 500 applications for a job opening and narrowed the qualified candidate list down to 50 individuals. That is still a lot of interviewing to do. One way to get around the time demand for interviews is to set up a pre-recorded interview session. You and your hiring team record the questions, and the candidate answers them within a specified time frame. Each candidate gets the same set of questions. Your applicant tracking software analyzes their answers, and you can watch the recordings as it fits into your schedule. According to James O’Brien of Forbes Magazine, hiring managers who “focus on the online conversation can find some of the best talent.”
Put Technology to Work for Advancing the Interview Process
After a candidate passes the pre-recorded interview, you may want to do another video interview but in real time. Many organizations use a panel of managers and human resources staffers to conduct both video interviews and in-person interviews. In some cases, the interviews could take too long, disrupting your schedule or interfering with the next candidate who is waiting to be interviewed. Eric Siu, a contributor at Entrepreneur Magazine, offers two strategies to speed things along. The first is to use Google Drive to share interview notes between panelists about a candidate. The second strategy for advancing the interviewing process is to set up an alert that triggers a call to your phone. If the interviewee cannot explain his or her strengths in the set amount of time, this gets you out of the interview and allows you to move on to the next candidate.
