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Can video interviews help you cut recruitment costs?

Jan Söderström

Jan Söderström

Jan Söderström

Video recruitment SaaS providers often advertise that including recorded video interviews in your recruitment process will save you a ton of money. 

But how exactly does it happen?

 

There are several ways to save money using recorded video interviews, some easier to measure than others. In most cases, video interviews provide the following benefits:

 

  1. Save time

  2. Reduce the risk (and cost) of a bad hire

  3. Enhance your employer brand

Save time

Let’s start by discussing the most obvious one: time-saving

 

Depending on your typical hiring process, you will save time on different phases of your recruitment process. In practice, you will spend less time per candidate, and end up interviewing fewer candidates.

 

According to our customers' estimates, using video interviews results in reducing the time-to-hire by about 50%.

 

Let us illustrate how video recruitment saves time:

 

You have published a new vacancy and received 50 applications. There are now two ways to go. The "traditional" process or the video recruitment process:

 

VideoRecruitmentSavesTime

 

Even though this is a simplified example, the impact is clear. 

 

You will be able to interview more candidates and spend less time on the most time-consuming phases of the recruiting funnel. This means that you will be equipped with more and better quality information earlier in the recruiting process, and this saves time in the next steps.

 

Using video interviews, you’ll have substantially more information about each candidate. Information that will help you make better hiring decisions.

 

Candidates who would otherwise be dropped off the process during the application screening can now be invited to a video interview since it's vastly scalable. One more invited person only adds a couple more minutes of screening time. These candidates may totally surprise you with their video answers and, without this opportunity, great employees could have been missed.

 

What is also noticeable in the example above is that the time savings exist even if we eliminate the phone screening altogether. This means that using video interviews can save time even when it's not replacing another method. 

Meet real people: Reduce the risk of hiring the wrong candidates 

Recorded video interviews will help you to identify the right-fit candidates for your organization.  As you receive additional information on your applicants through their video answers, you're more likely to hire the right person.

 

Hiring the wrong person can become very costly. Furthermore, it takes time for an employer to even realize if an employee is systematically not fulfilling their requirements.

 

At this point the employee has already become expensive, not to mention the opportunity cost of not hiring a more fitting candidate. 

 

What is important is that you find the best candidate for your organization. And, according to recruiters, the odds of finding that candidate are much better when relying on video interviews.

Enhance your employer brand

Candidates like using video interviews

 

According to our 2020 Candidate Survey, 82.4% of candidates were somewhat, or very satisfied with video interviews as a recruitment method. The benefits of an enhanced employer brand are difficult to measure but, in practice, they will present themselves as a larger number of high-quality candidates.

 

Being a modern recruiter and offering a better candidate experience will help you become a more attractive employer in the eyes of the public. Especially in the age of social media, as people are eager to tell about their experiences (both good, and bad ones). So make sure that the stories told about you are the previous kind, not the latter.

 

However, the video interview is only one phase of the whole recruiting process, and recruiting itself has only a limited impact on your employer brand. 

 

Read more: Why Is Employer Branding Important?

What can we learn?

Each recruiting process is unique. 

 

The time saved with video interviews depends on several factors; the amount of candidates recruiters usually screen, how much time they spend screening the candidates, and how many candidates they interview personally. Recorded video interviews provide the recruiters with an easy-to-use method that will make their jobs simpler by providing more information to ground their decisions on. This information will help recruiters make better decisions and provide candidates with better chances to prove their competence. 

 

If you are interested in learning more about how you can enhance your recruiting process, take a look at our free Modern Recruiter Handbook. It's a hands-on guide that explains the principles of lean recruiting and how to become a more effective recruiter.