When you need to find the perfect employee, it helps to be able to look further than your backyard. Formerly, when a regional or national head-hunt was necessary, telephone interviews were the most efficient option. Without the face-to-face element, though, it can be difficult to really get a solid grasp of the person you are speaking with, and interviewers typically find themselves unsatisfied with even the most promising candidates. Finally, all of that is beginning to change. Thanks to services like Skype and FaceTime, finding the perfect candidate has never been more feasible. Here, I’ll discuss four ways that video interviewing has improved the head-hunting process and how it will make your life as an employment recruiter easier.
No one is ever too far away.
Until recently, extending a candidate search to a regional or national level would be time-consuming and costly. Expensive placement firms could do some of the work for you, but you would still need to pay all of those fees on top of airfare and hotel costs. Thankfully, those days are gone. Video interviewing makes distance a non-issue. Using tools like LinkedIn, you can scout your candidates from all over the country (or the world!) and interview them with ease. Even if you prefer the personal touch of an in-person interview, you can always initiate the process through a preliminary video interview, filtering out those who are not good fits before investing in the expenses necessary to bring the best candidates to you.
You can have total control.
Let’s face it. When you’re on the prowl for employees, you’ve probably also got a lot of other things going on, too––a messy office, mountains of paperwork, ringing phones, and countless other little signs of craziness all around. Luckily for you, video interviewing lets your candidate bypass all of those things and enables you to show only what you want to be seen. You’re able to clear off a little space on your desk, take the phone off the hook, straighten the painting on the wall, fix your hair, and that’s all they see. Further, you are able to be more structured and consistent in the questions you ask with each interviewee because there are fewer elements of surprise.
Make the hiring process happen faster.
Scheduling in-person interviews can be a job in itself. Between trying to work around your meetings and all of your candidates’ other obligations, it can take weeks just to get one interview with a single prospect. If you opt for video interviews instead, you will find that it is much easier to get an interview scheduled sooner. More efficient scheduling means that you can interview more candidates in less time, finding the perfect fit much sooner.
Reduce employee turnover.
Being able to quickly interview a more vast pool of candidates enables you to see exactly what it is you are truly seeking in an employee. When you begin the recruitment process, you may think you’re looking for one thing, but then in the midst of interviewing you realize that your needs are actually a bit different than originally anticipated. By having a larger pool of candidates who you’ve interviewed, you are able to be more selective in your hiring, finding the best fit in the most efficient manner.  When you know that you have all of your needs met on the front end, you will be more likely to retain your new hires. And as we all know, having solid employee retention can save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
With reasons like these, there is really no reason not to implement video interviewing into your hiring process. By doing so, you’ll be able to save valuable resources—your time, money, and sanity—by streamlining the process. If nothing else, video interviewing can serve as a precursor to in-person meetings.
