Virtual Interviews- The Next Big Thing in the Hiring Industry

Finding the right candidate who is a good fit for your organisation can be a challenging task at the best of times. The success or failure of a business ultimately rests on the quality of people working for it. In the present day and age, when everyone is being pulled in many directions, all at once, ensuring that time and attention is afforded to hiring assumes even greater importance, and can have a significant impact on your financials.

Yet, it is essential to consider money and time while you are recruiting, even though it might be a “support” function for the “real” business. Hiring, firing and then re-hiring until you get the right talent is an expensive process. In the modern ultra-competitive environment, every little bit counts. It is the responsibility of every individual and every function of the business to constantly look for opportunities for the creation of value.

A “support” function, while perhaps not contributing to the revenue, normally creates value for the business by performing its activities in an economical and efficient manner and being constantly on the lookout for further economies and efficiencies.

Virtual interviews, made possible by advances in digital technology and the proliferation and plunging prices of smartphones and data bandwidth, promise to be just that kind of innovation, capable of delivering economies and efficiencies to a business. What’s more, they are agnostic to industry, function, level, and cost, meaning that every hiring organisation can potentially benefit from them.

A remedy to several ills
This technology has the ability to overcome many of the challenges inherent in traditional hiring processes. Resumes do not normally enable you to separate the good from the not-so-good, at least at the entry level. Another key limitation to the traditional way of doing things are logistics issues - having to co-ordinate the availability of the recruiter with the job seeker causes delays. There are interminable waits, especially for job seekers, resulting in a less than positive experience. Recruiter productivity gets limited by the number of people they can meet and assess. There is no record of the interaction for objective decision making. And these are just a handful of key issues among several.

Not only do they overcome many of these limitations, but virtual interviews, and their enabling technology, also allow a lot more to be done. For example, they provide a platform where job seekers can practice and hone their interview skills. They can try out assessments of various kinds, in a safe environment, and prepare themselves for job-related assessments.

What about the recruiting organisation? The technology helps them run a lean and efficient hiring machine that can do more with less, and at a faster pace too. They don’t need to view resumes and make imperfect choices. Candidate data is available at the press of a button and the drop of a filter. A recruiter can assess more than three times the number of candidates under the new system, in the same time.

The organisation knows exactly on what basis a hire/reject decision has been taken, and can enable objective assessments and feedback to recruiters. And all this achieved without anyone waiting or being delayed because planning and logistics issues.

Hiring has changed, and continues to change, with technology.

Social Media
Along with the conventional hiring methods, technology enables us to utilise various searches in social media. For instance, LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Twitter and Indeed, among other platforms, help a recruiter seek out candidates. Social networking helps you get a larger audience in less time than the traditional hiring methods allow. Moreover, you are not geographically limited either, given the ability of the talent seeker to search even internationally with the help of social connect.

According to research, it is revealed that 90 percent of HR uses social media to hire, with 73 percent of recruiters checking an aspirant’s social media account. What’s more, a full 43 percent of individuals use their smartphones to look for opportunities. A quarter of firms use Recruitment Software in the recruitment process, and over 40 percent of employers say that the quality of their applicants has improved as a result of social recruiting.

Nearly 73 percent of firms have effectively hired using social media platforms. It is estimated that more than 40 percent of discussions are conducted over video as part of the hiring procedure. Advances in Cloud Computing have helped in gathering information on the aspirant from different sources, and have made it easy to update and customise.

Personal touch is still important
The above advances notwithstanding, as with all innovations, one needs to tread this path with caution. The human touch cannot be dispensed with entirely. Technology needs to be used as an enabler and a creator of value in the process, and not just for the sake of employing technology.