Recruitment is becoming a different ball game altogether. With the dawn of the digital era, processes that traditionally required physical effort are fast being replaced by digital innovations. While the introduction of technology at the workplace might appear extremely beneficial at first glance, in reality, it has generated rather mixed emotions.
Some have cited the acceleration, ease and efficiency of workflows as obvious advantages of digital technologies, while others have been far more skeptical, pointing to the vast number of employees who are losing their jobs to artificial intelligence and other digital alternatives. Still others lament the impersonal and insulating implications of a technological apocalypse.
While a superficial assessment might reveal this to be true, rather interestingly, there have been various avenues where technology has been employed to in fact add that extra personal touch and humanize previously objective procedures.
Recruitment efforts, for example, have clearly benefited in this regard. With a range of technological fixes now at their disposal, recruiters have been reconceptualizing recruitment processes. Where phone interviews and written tests would once do the trick, recruiters have found digital solutions that constitute a more appealing and efficient alternative.
Video assessments have been one of the many digital innovations that recruiters have introduced to the recruitment scene. These video assessments seek to transform the recruitment cycle into one that is not only more efficient, shorter and convenient, but one that’s more human too- that doesn’t treat a candidate as a resume on a piece of paper, but in fact an individual with multiple facets and layers to their being.
How, you might ask have video assessments humanized recruitment processes?
1. Going Beyond the Resume
Let’s get this out of the way first: You simply cannot limit your perception of a candidate to the narrow parameters of their one-page resume. Students with brilliant resumes will often underwhelm you upon interaction whilst many students with resumes that you’d brush aside as unsatisfactory will mesmerize you in person.
That’s because a resume can never do justice to the rich, dynamic and multifaceted nature of individuals. By concentrating solely on a handful of achievements and credentials listed on their resume, you’re failing to consider multiple other dimensions to who they really are.
Alternatively, with video interviews, you’re giving candidates a chance to present themselves in their entirety and make up for a mediocre resume. You’re allowing them to display other aspects of their personality, which might be one of their strongest suits but just can’t be adequately reflected in their resume.
2. The Chance for Richer Insights
We’ve already established that video assessments offer candidates a more liberal opportunity to present themselves and communicate who they really are. This is an obvious advantage for the recruiter as well, since they have more aspects to assess the candidate on. But how exactly?
With video assessments, a candidate’s soft skills will be on display, which obviously can’t be gauged from a resume but are in most cases, just as relevant to their performance as their core competencies.
Here are cues that you can pay attention to during an interview: How are they communicating? Are they using important keywords? What is their posture like? What are their facial expressions? Are they looking into the camera or away from it?
These cues might seem trivial, but they can speak volumes about a candidate’s comfort with technology, their confidence level, motivation and their compatibility with the company’s culture.
3. Greater Ease and Comfort for the Candidate
Video Assessments can be taken anywhere, any time. By giving candidates the freedom to pick a time and place of their choosing, you’re essentially conveying that you value their comfort and peace of mind and are dedicated to making the entire process convenient and accessible for them.
With a video assessment, candidates feel empowered not only because they’re getting to pick the time and place by themselves, but also because they have the luxury to think through the questions and even orient themselves with the format beforehand through a practice exam. Never before has a candidate been able to exert so much control over an assessment stage.
This way, the candidate has everything working in their favor for them to bring their A game, which actually works just as well for the recruiter because this way, they get to receive a far better quality of responses to base their decisions on.
Evalufy, a powerful video assessment platform has designed a video assessment format that ensures the provision of the various features listed above. By reducing manual effort and capturing revealing insights missing in other methods, Evalufy allows the recruiter to screen candidates faster and ultimately cut down the time it takes to make a hiring decision. This serves not only the recruiter, but the candidates too, who have been proven to have an inclination for shorter and faster hiring cycles.
Truth is, assessment stages will reveal as much to you about the candidate as they will reveal to the candidate about you. A team that can offer a process that bypasses the tense, anxiety-ridden atmosphere of traditional interviews and eliminates the logistical hurdles associated with it will obviously fare higher on the candidate’s list.
4. Removal of Human Bias
Video Assessments also humanize recruiting by leveling the field for all candidates. By being assigned the same questions, the same time limit, and the same degree of autonomy, you’re precluding the possibility of anyone gaining an unfair advantage over another. Human bias is also significantly removed when you set pre- defined benchmarks against which your candidates will be intuitively scored.
Additionally, video assessment algorithms, trained to make evaluations in the same manner as a recruiter, can also automatically assess candidates, again removing human prejudice or bias from the equation.
While the impact of technology in the workplace remains debatable and is in fact a double-edged sword, the benefits to be gained from its implementation, especially in the sphere of recruitment, are indisputable.
As recruiters increasingly realize that the candidate experience needs to form the heart of their recruiting strategy, humanizing the whole process is emerging as one of their greatest priorities. Technology and recruitment are becoming inextricably linked, and the sooner recruiters adjust to this synergy, the more well-positioned they will be to secure top talent!
