Is the video trend about to go mainstream?

Jo Faragher

Video is becoming a growing area of interest for recruitment agencies and clients. Jo Faragher explains

Whether it’s laughing at cats breakdancing, or streaming a five-minute training session to learn a new skill, online video is becoming truly embedded into our personal and professional lives. Employers realise that people learn better and absorb more information through visual media, while applications such as Vine and Instagram are gaining ground in the workplace.

Recruitment is one area in particular where video can offer real advantages in terms of both cost and quality in the hiring process, and our changing attitudes have played a huge part in this. “The concept of using video as a screening tool for recruitment has been around for many years,” says Alistair Rennie, managing director of video recruitment specialist Foosle. “Its recent growth is not so much about improved technology, but much more about changing human behaviour. It’s quite simply how people are now happy to engage and interact.”

Research by analysts at Aberdeen Group supports this, showing the use of online video in recruitment went up by 320% between 2010 and 2011. It also found that candidates who had been chosen through video interviews tended to stay with their employer for longer, with an average retention rate of 95%.

The most obvious benefit to recruiters is in the time and money saved in screening candidates, especially where employers are looking for hard-to-source skills in a global market, so may not be able to ‘physically’ meet with a candidate. “It gives you the opportunity to see a candidate in action as you would if they were in the room, providing a far stronger insight into their personality and skillset than you would get from a cursory glance at a CV or even a telephone interview,” adds Rennie.

According to Nick Shaw, from talent management and measurement consultancy CEB, this is why video is becoming a growing area of interest for recruitment agencies and clients. “You can ask people to role play in real-time, they can do a presentation. Some send over a briefing document to the candidate asking them to prepare a scenario. It’s easy, and there are virtually no set-up costs,” he says.

Interviews can be done asynchronously (so the candidate responds to questions in their own time and records them on the video), so the team making the hiring decisions can view candidates’ responses when it suits them, rather than everyone having to be in the same room. 

Increasingly, an initial presentation over video could come to replace the traditional CV or covering letter, says James Hyde, one of the directors of Hello My Name is, a site where employers post job advertisements and candidates can upload a short CV by way of introduction. These short video profiles are known as ‘MeVies’.

“Sometimes someone can look good on paper, but you get to the formal interview and you know pretty quickly that they’re not right, but you still have to go through the process,” he says. “This gives you the opportunity to see a bit of the personality behind the CV before you even get to this stage. For example, do they come across as aggressive? Maybe they won’t fit with your culture.” 

Foosle and Hello My Name Is are just two of a growing band of companies offering technology to support the use of video in recruitment. Platforms like theirs help recruiters to collate applications and manage the interview process. But it’s also possible to make use of established applications such as FaceTime, Skype or Google Hangouts to ‘meet’ with candidates at little or no extra cost to your business, with all of these available over a smartphone. 

Critics of video recruitment claim it will favour confident candidates, and that it only really works with tech-savvy, Generation Y jobseekers who know their way around an iPhone. Hyde at HMNI concedes that younger people, as well as those in creative industries such as media and marketing, tend to be more suited to this type of recruitment than senior-level executives, but argues that candidates can revise their submissions, so less confident applicants actually have more of a chance to shine.

The efficiency benefits of using video – particularly as a first-round screening tool – are clear. But surely in order to make a reliable hiring decision you need to meet the candidate face-to-face?

Rennie says that video can be incorporated into the recruitment process “as much or as little as you like”. “The service is designed to complement your existing recruitment process, replacing a telephone interview with a video interview, for example,” he says. Come the second and further interviews, the hiring company would most likely meet with the candidate, but would have saved time in finding out if it was worth bringing them to this crucial stage. 

And the advantages video offers are not only for the hiring side. Video can also help candidates to get more out of the recruitment process, for example in showcasing the workplace culture at a potential future employer, or through videos with people they will be working with so they can see how they might fit in.

The recruitment industry is one beset by fads though, so is this just another innovation that generates a lot of discussion but ends up being little used? Ann Swain, CEO of recruitment company body APSCo, believes it won’t be long before we overcome any initial teething problems. “We have all had technology let us down at some point when it comes to video or audio conferencing, however, when we consider Moore’s Law and the new innovations and synergies emerging all the time, these problems will become less common,” she says.

Meanwhile, research by Matt Alder from Meta Shift, found that four-fifths of companies that have not implemented video technology yet have considered using it in the next year or so. So as long as it continues to deliver benefits for candidates and the companies who hire them, the video recruitment trend is likely to go mainstream before long.