The undeniable benefits of video interviewing - critics of VI are selling you snake oil

August 17th, 2021
Kevin Parker
Diversity & Inclusion,
Video Interviewing

The world of hiring was turned on its head during the pandemic, but economies are re-opening, businesses are hiring in droves, and the fight for great talent is back with a vengeance. And after the experience we’ve all just had, it has never been more clear that where a person works, and their ability to find work in the first place, is central to mental, physical, and emotional health. 

This is why we live and breathe the goal to democratize hiring, and when it comes to making hiring more equitable, we have the data to prove that our customers are achieving vast improvements in their processes by using video interviewing. 

For over 22 million interviews we’ve seen the extensive benefits of the on demand video interview, including:

  • The ability to deploy structured interviews at scale improving fairness for all candidates
  • Improving access to applicants outside the traditional 9-5 eliminating the scheduling challenges the can exclude large numbers of qualified candidate
  • Providing candidates with flexibility (like the ability to re-record answers) means many people, including neurodiverse and autistic applicants, report a preference for video interviews

Structured interviews: Fairness + credibility = improved consistency

At the heart of what makes a video interview less biased is the predictive power and fairness of the structured interview. Structured interviews focus on a candidate’s job-relevant knowledge, skills, abilities and work styles, rather than interviewer opinions or unconscious biases. Structured interviews can take place in person or over the phone, but they’re most successful at scale asynchronously and on-demand so that idle conversation doesn’t turn into bias. In one study, nearly half of unstructured interviews were found discriminatory in a recent case review, compared with just 13% of structured interviews.

A structured video interview can be augmented for even more fairness with anxiety-reducing features like the ability for applicants to turn off the front-facing camera, unlimited retries to perfect responses, and the ability to conduct the interview in a space where applicants feel at ease in their own environment.

After-hours applications help women and hourly workers 

In 17 out of the 24 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) women were most affected in the 2020 unemployment numbers, and the devastation of the “shecession” has continued into 2021 with unequal job gains, and a continued disparity in the burden of domestic care. After hours video interviews are critical when you consider the needs of women specifically, particularly those caring for children or aging parents.

And the flexibility of on-demand interviews to take place after-hours extends beyond women to people of all genders in the hourly workforce. With little access to paid time off, workers don’t have to forego their wages as they pursue a better-paying job. We’re seeing in our data that in spite of all of the talk of “labor shortages,” our customers who pay a living wage are still receiving tens of thousands of applications. People want to work, they just want to work for a meaningful wage.

Neurodiverse and autistic candidates prefer video interviews

We’re incredibly proud of our partnership with Integrate Autism Employment Advisors, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help companies identify, recruit, and retain qualified professionals on the autism spectrum. In product collaborations, their student cohorts report that many neurodiverse and autistic job seekers* actually prefer the experience of an on-demand video interview to an in-person experience. By using some best practices recommended by autistic candidates, for autistic candidates, the video interviewing process can be less stressful. 

And that positive feedback about video extends to neurotypical candidates as well: over 80% of candidates say they feel like HireVue interviews provide an effective and more fair hiring process. 

Structured video interviews are one of the best ways to improve fairness in hiring, and claiming a one-size-fits-all solution (as some vendors do) to such a vast problem would be reductive at best, and harmful at worst. That’s why we’ve built a platform with 24/7 technical support, clear paths for accommodations, and additional tools such as chat and assessments to open the aperture for previously underserved and overlooked candidates. Hiring is happening -  make sure it’s fairer than ever before.

*Just like neurotypical candidates, an autistic or neurodiverse person’s preferences for interviewing come down to their individual comfort.