Conducting video interviews via HR Partner

Did you know our recruitment module is one of our most popular features in HR Partner?  Our customers have hosted thousands of job ads on our platform, and have processed around a hundred thousand applicants in our system over the past few years.

We are always looking at ways of improving your recruitment process, and one of the things that we have noticed lately is the prevalence of remote hiring.  This means that you frequently have applicants applying from halfway across the world, in a different timezone.  Also, in a lot of cases (and I include us here at HR Partner), our selection panel members all live in different timezones, so trying to get everyone together at the same time to perform those first interviews are always a tough maze to navigate.

Additionally, email and written applications are great, but to get the true personality of an applicant, nothing beats in person or moving video where you can better see their confidence, presentation and communication, and pick up on all non verbal and body language patterns as well.

Enter the era of async video interviews.  What is an 'async video'?  Well, it simply stands for 'asynchronous video', and it really means 'non real time video'.  What happens is that you or your team record a series of questions via video, send those questions to your applicants, and your applicants can send their responses back via video as well.

Now, we already do have a way for applicants to send or upload a video to you when responding to your job ads, but as we found out in our latest hiring ourselves, we tend to get videos as very large file uploads that clutter up our file storage, or else links to DropBox or Youtube channels etc.  Quite difficult to keep trace of them and it means keeping lots of browser tabs open.

We considered building our own video interview system within HR Partner, but then found out that there were other providers already out there solving this problem, so the easiest thing was to integrate with them.

We are working with two providers in particular, Canvass, whose integration is completed, and also ZipMessage, which is coming very soon.

About Canvass

Check our our help documentation on how to set up Canvass integration which is ready to go now.

Canvass has been designed specifically for candidate interviews.  You can set up a series of video OR text questions, and the applicant will be given a certain timeframe to think about the question and respond to them.  You can even set up an intro and an outro video to tell the applicant a bit more about your company or the position, and you can set up different interview questions for different jobs and link those to HR Partner.

You can even get each member of your selection panel to record a question for the applicant, giving them a chance to 'meet' your team as part of the process!

About ZipMessage

ZipMessage is another up and coming async conversation tool.  While being a more general purpose video meeting tool, we are working with their developers to make it fit a job interview process.

Please be aware that you will need a paid subscription to the above two mentioned services, however Canvass in particular has payment plans to suit your needs, whether you run continuous recruitment, or just every now and then, where you might need a 'candidate pack' of a certain number of interviews pre paid.

We are working on a few more integrations in Recruitment to make your hiring life easier, so we welcome any feedback on our early venture into async interviews.  Will they help you?  Let us know.