As a staffing professional, you can’t exactly be a lone wolf. You have to connect with talented candidates, but more important, you have to work side-by-side with your clients to find the people they need. Collaboration isn’t always simple, especially when you need to act fast in order to lock down the best candidates.
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, on average it takes between 29 and 43 days to hire. This is way too long, especially for in-demand industries where the war on talent is raging.
For example, the technical sector is one industry where dragging your feet often means losing out on the best talent. With IT unemployment in the low single digits, the race for tech talent is about to get even more competitive. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2016 technical hiring will more than double all other industries.
IT isn’t the only industry fighting the war for talent, although it is perhaps the most dramatic. It’s obvious companies can’t afford to wait more than a month before hiring the right person.
So what’s the holdup? Collaboration in the recruiting process is often easier said than done. Collaborating with your internal team is hard enough, but when it comes to working together with clients, things can get really tricky.
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Using the Video Interview for Collaboration
Using video interviews is a great way to keep your clients updated with every step of the hiring process. Usually the interview process is pretty insular and is mainly performed by one or two people. This can mean a long interview process; talented candidates have to work their way through meetings with several people before getting that coveted job offer.
This can result in drop off as you lose talented people from your talent pipeline. The most sought after candidates are going to have a lot of options, and if your process seems too unwieldy, they’ll be more likely to consider an offer from your client’s competitors.
The video interview can make it easier to share information with your clients and internal team. Once you’ve gotten everyone on the same page, you can act quickly and decisively. You can jump the month-long wait and make an immediate offer to a great candidate. All job seekers want to be wanted, and the best and brightest will appreciate your client’s enthusiasm.
Here are four practical video interview collaboration tips to help you get everyone working towards hiring the best people:
1. Make your preliminary screen one-way. Hang up the phone! Preliminary phone screens are time-consuming and honestly not all that effective. Research by the Aberdeen Group has proved you can conduct 10 one-way video interview screens in the amount of time it takes to perform one phone screen.
In a one-way video interview, candidates answer your written questions on video. These video answers can then be viewed by your team anytime, anywhere. Best of all, these video answers can be easily shared with everyone in the process, making it easy to collaborate with your client from the beginning of the recruiting process.
2. Record live video interviews. A live video interview is a bit different from the one-way version since it all happens in real-time. It may seem like this would make it harder to share these interviews with your client companies. However, since some video interview platforms allow you to automatically record, you can still collaborate without losing that personal connection to the candidate.
This is great for when your team is spread out and can’t always make the interview. It’s also great for sharing the top candidates with your clients, so they can clearly see how talent reacts in real-time and evaluate those important nonverbal communication cues.
3. Share notes and impressions. Using a video interviewing platform means you can leave notes on your interviews, whether live or one-way. It also means your whole team can view and add to these notes, as well as give candidates a rating. Thanks to the highly sharable nature of video interviews, the best candidates can be easily passed along to clients so they’re involved every step of the way.
4. Go mobile. On the go? No problem, because video interviews can fit comfortably within your favorite mobile device. Candidates can record one-way video interview answers directly from their smartphones and staffing pros can watch whenever they have time. Being able to share and view great candidates on a mobile device means even the busiest team member or client can still carve out time to evaluate top talent.
Collaboration is essential if you want to find top talent for your clients before the competition. Video interviews make it easier to collaborate around great hires and find the best people.
What do you think? How do you use video interviews to collaborate? Share in the comments!
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[…] As a staffing professional, you can’t exactly be a lone wolf. You have to connect with talented candidates, but more important, you have to work side-by-side with your clients to find the people they need. […]