How You Can Use Video Interviews to Combat Employee Engagement’s 17-Year Problem

Video interviewing is a tried-and-true technology for identifying the highest potential new employees. Less well known is its application for engaging current employees.

By catering to three out of the five things employees want most from their employer, the proper application of video interviewing technology can help solve a decades-old problem in employee engagement.

Employee Engagement’s Decades-Old Problem

Work has changed significantly over the past 17 years. Since 2000, we’ve seen workplaces continually transform in response to advancing technology (think smartphones) and shifting cultural norms (think LGBTQ acceptance). The ways we interact, collaborate, and organize ourselves have fundamentally changed.

What hasn’t changed? Employee engagement. 

Gallup started surveying employee engagement in the year 2000. It hasn’t budged since they started tracking it. No matter what year the survey is performed, the percentage of employees engaged at work never deviates more than a couple points from 33%. That sort of constant, unequivocal data is almost enough to argue that at-work disengagement is part of modern life.

What Do Employees Want?

Fortunately, there is no lack of data surrounding what engages employees. Surveys of American workers find that they consistently want 5 things:

• Higher Salary. 69% of employees who turnover cite “low salary” as a reason they leave. (Paychex, 2016)
• Career Growth. 33% of turned over employees list “lack of career growth” as the #1 reason they left a company. (Glassdoor, 2013) In the same survey, 27% said “salary & compensation” was the #1 reason.
• Better Health/Dental/Vision Benefits. 88% of job seekers said they would consider a lower paying job if it had better health, dental, and vision benefits. (Fractal, 2017)
• Flexible Hours. 88% of job seekers said they would consider a lower paying job if it offered more flexible hours. (Fractal, 2017)
• Culture & Values. Not including pay, Glassdoor found that a company's “culture and values” were the largest predictor of employee satisfaction. (Glassdoor, 2017)

Used properly, video interviewing can help you on three of the five. (It probably won’t do a whole lot for your employees’ health and dental benefits, nor will it give them more flexible hours.) 

What it can do is create a culture of empowerment by facilitating career growth and providing a path to a higher salary. 

Empower Employees the Same Way You Empower Candidates

The same aspects that make video interviewing a powerful technology for identifying candidates - insight into aptitude and potential, “on demand” convenience, and the structured interview experience - make it a great technology for facilitating internal talent mobility.

Customers at HireVue have found great success letting employees create internal “career profiles.” Career profiles usually consist of:

1. An employee’s up-to-date resume.
2. A general video interview.

In the general video interview, employees are asked to answer universally relevant questions like:

• What projects and accomplishments are you most proud of?
• Why do you work at [Company Name]?
• What sorts of roles are you looking to advance into?

The general video interview creates a venue for employees to speak to their accomplishments. Any time a relevant role is available, recruiters can direct them to the application (or that role’s specific OnDemand video interview). Basically, the career profile acts as a rich source of employee data for building a robust internal talent pipeline. 

“I’ve been at Paychex for 20 years. If you were just to look at my resume, you may not get a full scope of the projects and accomplishments I’ve encountered. But if I’m given a venue to record and speak to some of my accomplishments, I can sell myself - having that venue really helps engagement.” - Francine Miller, Talent Acquisition Manager, Paychex

Click here to see how Paychex empowers internal talent with video interviews (discussion starts around minute 27).

Your Best Talent Sticks Around

When it comes to internal mobility, many employees feel stuck. They don’t want to risk upsetting their current manager and upending any social capital they may have accrued over their tenure. They also don’t want to stay in their current role forever. Eventually this dissonance reaches a tipping point, and the employee just leaves the company (even if they love the organization otherwise). 

Creating an outlet for employees to generally speak to their skills and express interest in new opportunities bypasses this issue. If internal career profiles are the norm, employees can take better control of their career destiny without offending their current manager. And if career profiles are public, managers won’t be taken by surprise when their star performer expresses interest in another role. It may even spark a much-needed conversation. 

Bonus: Managers Can Collaborate on Internal Strategy

Internal mobility isn’t always vertical. Career profiles and their associated video interviews are shared across departments, so managers can also collaborate on internal strategy. 

For example: if a manager in Sales is blown away by the video interview in a Customer Service rep’s career profile, they can direct them to a sales role’s specific OnDemand video interview. If they prove to be a fit, the sales manager can talk with the employee’s immediate manager about potentially moving them into a sales role. 

Since OnDemand video interviews are structured, no employee gets preferential treatment, and managers can evaluate internal employees by the same standards. Because hiring decisions are based on a referenceable video record - not unreliable impressions or resume bullet-points - internal mobility becomes more strategic and intentional.

Children's Mercy Hospital is rolling out their "Interview-First" strategy for internal hiring.

See the Presentation

Watch their presentation from Digital Disruption to learn how one of the nation's best children's hospitals is keeping their best talent in-house.