The Video Interviewing Tipping Point
Over the last 10-15 years the use of video in recruiting has changed dramatically. Initially it was used just for recruitment marketing to promote professionally recorded videos focused on a company’s culture, day in the life of employees, and on the products the company sold. The recruitment videos were downloaded to players on your computer and eventually you could watch them. Fortunately companies like YouTube and Vimeo created quicker and easier ways to view the videos inside your browser without downloading all the contents.
As broadband became more available to consumers at home and 4G networks grew, technologies like Skype and FaceTime enabled peer-to-peer live streams. While this made overseas calls and connecting with distant relatives easy, there were often complaints from managers on how it worked specifically for interviewing. New startups emerged as video interviewing solutions, and they focused exclusively on this use case and invested millions into infrastructure and development. Three main issues still plagued the space:
1) Live video interviewing depended on the employer and the candidate both having a quality connection
2) Companies still had to overcome hurdles with their compliance departments concerning how to handle video, especially if there were recordings
3) The costs associated with hosting video and streaming live video were not cheap
Today, live video feeds are pretty good. They aren’t perfect, but they work well enough that the benefits are outweighing the potential frustrations for the occasion when the feed doesn’t have enough bandwidth to work well.
Companies are now also starting to warm up to pre-recorded video interviews. From a use case, it is a great way for companies to reduce or sometimes eliminate phone screens. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I would rather have candidate video responses forwarded to me instead of just their resume and profile. Compliance departments have gone back and forth on the implications of storing images, but with every professional social network profile showing a candidate’s photo, the tide has turned.
Very few things move fast in enterprises unless there is a proven ROI. Over the past couple of years, new video platforms as a service have emerged, and the price of storage has dropped dramatically. While video interviewing ROI was previously good, there is now an opportunity to make it incredible.
Enter RECSOLU
One of the things companies love most about RECSOLU is how we listen to our customers, truly understand the problems we have solved, and how we brainstorm with our clients to solve their new pain points. We started to hear about enterprises interested in video interviewing a couple years ago when we first integrated with another vendor. We saw how the RECSOLU platform was used for every aspect of scheduling the video interview, including the communication process to both candidates and hiring managers. It was simple… Very Simple!
As we investigated all the costs and resources needed to build a video solution, it just did not make sense a few years ago. We instead spent our energy and resources to develop the most widely used mobile recruiting solution and an events management tool that simplifies all the complexities of event-based recruiting.
There were a couple notable changes in the industry that made us reconsider:
1) Platforms as a Service became not just prevalent but extremely robust and reliable
2) The cost of data storage and streaming dropped dramatically
Utilizing the latest technology and platforms as a service, we built our video interviewing solution into existing recruiter workflows that are used daily in RECSOLU. This enables us to provide a seamless experience to all of our clients while being able to pass back the savings directly. RECSOLU can now deliver high-quality, low-cost video interviewing to any employer ready to modernize their interview model!