Now that webcams bring video capability to anyone with a computer, the in-person interview may soon go the way of the fax machine. Several online services offer tools to use live and recorded video for prescreening candidates and for conducting job interviews. In the time you’d normally spend doing one in-person interview, you can appraise, rate, and cull a slew of prospects.
Here are five video interviewing platforms to help you find your next superstar employee.
Interview4
Hire-Intelligence’s video platform, Interview4, lets you conduct either live, recordable interviews, or virtual ones, in which candidates sign onto the platform at their convenience and record video responses to questions that you’ve entered into the system. You can configure the questions so that candidates get only one chance to answer, or you can let them record a response as many times as they wish. The platform also offers branding and customization features, such as the option to let hiring-team members rate a candidate.
The service runs about $15 per interview, but Hire-Intelligence offers volume discounts depending on usage. According to Hire-Intelligence cofounder Jim Robinson, enterprises can pay $10,000 per month, while small businesses can buy a bundle of interviews for hundreds of dollars.
“Larger companies are hiring all the time. Smaller companies hire intermittently, so it’s a whole different dynamic in terms of how they approach it and what they have to do to hire people. We try to accommodate both those scenarios,” Robinson says.
To see what the service is like from a candidate’s perspective, go to Interview4.me, where you can play around with the tool and practice answering common interview questions.
Montage
This stand-alone video interviewing platform offers both live and on-demand video interviewing, and can be integrated with applicant tracking software. It’s used by large organizations such as Disney and Samsung, as well as by executive search firms and other small companies.
Montage Interview lets users conduct live, one-on-one or panel interviews. According to Montage president and CEO Kurt Heikkinen, Montage Interview uses 80 percent less bandwidth than Skype and can accommodate an unlimited number of participants in a meeting.
Montage View lets candidates record responses to interview questions on their own schedule. The employer can configure each question to give candidates a varying number of opportunities to rerecord—with, say, unlimited chances to rerecord responses to some questions but no rerecording on others. You can also brand the experience with a private-labeled online “foyer,” where you can show prospects a welcoming video and offer them information about the job and your company.
“One of the things that we know through experience is the candidate experience is paramount, it’s critical,” says Heikkinen. “They simply click on a link, there are no downloads, and then they are welcomed by the client. It’s a virtual experience that mirrors as much as possible the physical experience.”
Heikkinen says Montage might cost a small company around $750 a month, whereas a huge enterprise might pay tens of thousands of dollars a month.
InterviewStream
Steve Throneberry, chief revenue officer for InterviewStream, likens the service to “a toaster, not the whole kitchen.” It’s designed strictly for conducting video interviews and not for broader recruiting functions, but it can be integrated with other applicant-tracking software. InterviewStream boasts customers such as Johnson & Johnson and Dell, and charges big companies in excess of $10,000 a month to use its platform. However, it also offers monthly subscriptions that are as low as $150 a month for one user, making the platform accessible to small businesses as well.
Throneberry says interviews recorded by candidates on their own time typically include four to seven questions, each with a 1- to 2-minute response length. The hiring company sets the number of opportunities to rerecord.
In addition to prerecorded interviews that can be branded to reflect a company’s image, InterviewStream offers three kinds of live, recordable interviews: a regular InterviewStream live session in which a handful of people can meet online with a candidate; a Zoom meeting for up to 20 participants; and a one-on-one, browser-based (WebRTC) session in HD video.
Jobvite
Jobvite Video is currently being used in beta with select customers and will be launching to the public in January. CEO Dan Finnigan says Jobvite is distinctive for its entire suite of integrated recruiting software tools, including applicant tracking, recruiter CRM, and social recruiting software. Video interviewing is the newest addition to the lineup.
“Up until this point, anyone who’s done video interviewing has had to buy a separate product offered by a separate vendor and hope that it can integrate it in some fashion with their applicant tracking software,” Finnegan says. “We felt it wasn’t a separate recruiting platform—you don’t want to schedule interviews in your applicant tracking software and then have interviews scheduled on your video recruiting platform. You want one recruiting platform.”
With Jobvite you can configure branded welcome pages, set expirations on your invitations, and compare candidates side-by-side. You can also decide whether to allow candidates to rehearse responses. Once they’ve finished recording, you click the job requisition and an individual’s name to see the person’s résumé and LinkedIn profile, along with other information that Jobvite gathers about the person, as well as the video interview.
Jobvite does not offer live, recordable interviews.
Jobvite charges customers a monthly fee to use its recruiting software, based on how many employees they have. It bills the smallest companies around $4 per employee, and that amount drops as the size of the company increases. Pricing for Jobvite Video has not yet been announced.
Zoom
Zoom is a videoconferencing platform and isn’t built specifically for holding interviews. But it’s inexpensive and it lets you save video of a meeting as an .mp4 file that you can share with others or upload to YouTube, Vimeo, and Dropbox.
According to Nick Chong, head of product marketing for Zoom, screen sharing is a popular feature when people use the platform to conduct interviews. “It’s not just about telling me what you’ve done,” he says. “It’s show me what you’ve done. Show me a website you’ve built.”
It’s also a solid choice if you need to introduce a candidate to many people—other team members, for example—in real time. For $10 a month (or no charge, if you can keep your meeting to less than 40 minutes), it lets you include up to 25 participants. Zoom supports HD video and audio and works on mobile devices, in case some of your team members are on the road.
You can see why video interviewing is a boon to busy recruiters and hiring managers. It accomplishes almost everything an in-person interview can, but with much greater time flexibility, plus the ability to pass interviews around for group feedback. Now you can save your precious in-person opportunities for the real stars.