Are Video Interviews Replacing Traditional Interviews?

Sep 17, 2019

Video interviews seem to be the hottest trend in recruiting these days, loved by tech-savvy millennials, on-the-road job seekers and HR professionals alike. They save so much time and money, some wonder if they are replacing traditional interviews.


Could video interviews replace in-person interviews? They could, but they shouldn’t. Why? It’s important to keep the human aspect of human resources. Technology should never entirely remove people from the hiring equation.

However, video interviews definitely serve a worthwhile purpose. They enhance traditional interviews, making in-person interviews more worth your time. How? Video interviews effectively refine the candidate pool while allowing top talent to rise to the top.

How to Refine Your Candidate Pool with Video Interviews

Consider video interviews your trusted advisor in recruitment refinement. Pre-recorded (also known as one-way) interviews are particularly valuable in the early hiring stages. The reality is, many people who apply for a job are not fit for the advertised position. Recruiters spend a considerable amount of time weeding those individuals out, but video interviews can fast-track that process.

No More Phone Interviews

Telephone interview fatigue is a real phenomenon among recruiters. Trying to set up a mutually convenient time to conduct a preliminary interview often involves plenty of phone tag and/or long email threads.

This problem is magnified when many stakeholders are involved in the hiring process, or if candidates in different time zones are being considered. Even after going through the effort of scheduling that initial phone interview, sometimes candidates don’t even answer the phone at the arranged time. Needless to say, phone interviews can be exhausting, especially since they involve asking the same questions repeatedly.

That’s why pre-recorded video interviews pre-recorded video interviews are such a powerful tool. There’s no need for recruiters and applicants to be physically together in the same room in order for an informative interview to take place. Instead, candidates are sent a link to record the answers to a list of pre-determined interview questions whenever it’s convenient for them. Recruiters can watch the recorded answers on their own time, allowing them to focus on other HR priorities while eliminating no-shows and monotonous question asking.

Unbiased Interview Questions

One of the other benefits of using video interviewing in your hiring process is the option to incorporate digital structured interview questions. A hiring methodology backed by science, structured interviews ask the same questions in the same order to all applicants. This type of interview greatly increases the predictive validity of a successful hire while minimizing bias and pre-employment discrimination, which is often subconscious.
Structured video interviews take this recruitment best practice one step further by digitizing and automating it and applying pre-defined, uniform scoring criteria so candidates are evaluated objectively. This ensures a fair, standardized interview experience for all, and protects recruiters and the companies they work for against costly legal fees from unfair hiring practices. It also helps refine your candidate pool by filtering out unqualified applicants early on.

Greater Collaboration Among the Hiring Team

Video interviews facilitate collaboration in ways traditional interviews simply cannot. Whether it’s a pre-recorded or live video interview, technology allows everyone involved in the hiring process to make better informed assessments before the final in-person interviews.

Pre-recorded video interviews can be easily shared with everyone involved in the hiring process, allowing recruiters to seek other people’s opinions to achieve a more rounded assessment of applicants. If everyone watches a recorded video interview and four out of five people think the candidate isn’t worth their salt, don’t bother interviewing them in-person.

In live video interviews, hiring teams can chat privately, asking questions and making observations about candidate responses in real-time. This, of course, is impossible to do during in-person interviews, where people cannot voice their opinions until after the interview concludes.

Video Interviews Make In-Person Interviews More Worthwhile

Video interviewing helps hiring teams refine their candidate pool by asking intelligent questions in a time effective manner without sacrificing teamwork and collaboration. By introducing video interviews in the preliminary hiring stage, you can be confident that only applicants with the most potential are invited for an in-person interview. These people have already been vetted and identified as the most promising candidates, making those traditional interviews a better use of everyone’s time.

Jessica Newman
Jessica Newman

Jessica Newman
Jessica Newman is a skilled wordsmith, an innovative marketer, and a passionate entrepreneur. She’s the Chief Content Creator at The Word Wiz and staff writer at VidCruiter.