Free vs. Paid: Should You Pay for a Video Interview Platform for Recruiting?

With organizations everywhere looking to streamline efficiency, improve the quality of hires and enhance the applicant experience, video interviews are becoming increasingly popular among recruiter circles. Organizations ranging from SMB’s to large corporations are exploring how this relatively new technology could revolutionize the way they screen, interview and hire top talent. However, with the introduction of any new operational concept typically comes a barrage of objections.

One of the most common questions we get on product demonstrations as a leading vendor in the video recruiting space is the infamous: “isn’t this just like Skype?” The truth is, it’s a completely valid question. When it comes down to it, both services offer a platform that connects users via webcam. But are they one in the same? The answer is no, and here’s why.

There are a few reasons recruiters should consider a dedicated video interviewing platform like VidCruiter rather than utilizing free services such as Skype, FaceTime or Google Hangouts when it comes to talent acquisition.

A Few Reasons Why Video Calls Don’t Stack Up to a Dedicated Video Interviewing Platform

1. The Ability to Record Live Interviews

With video interviewing platforms, you can have all your live interviews recorded, saved and stored in the cloud. This allows hiring teams to review interviews as needed and share videos and/or candidate profiles with other hiring managers to gather their input.

2. Improved Collaboration

The ability to share video interviews and candidate profiles with other hiring managers improves collaboration within your team significantly. Not only does this allow you to easily get a second opinion on any candidate, but the entire process becomes more fair and objective when you have multiple people scoring and rating answers.
Which brings me to my next point:

3. Establish a Fair, Objective and Standardized Interview Process

Easily enforce a standardized structured interview process across the entire company with custom guides, rating scales and recruiter questionnaires. This ensures all candidates are evaluated on a fair and level playing field and makes identifying front-runners much easier because decisions are made based on concrete data.

4. Better Employer Branding

Strong employer branding is essential to creating a positive candidate experience. While free services like Skype offer no branding opportunities, video hiring platforms offer various options to promote your brand and set yourself apart as an attractive place to work. Upload your company logo, add a color scheme, record video questions or include a promotional video to showcase your company culture.

5. Enhanced Candidate Experience

It’s safe to say that the candidate experience is significantly enhanced by leveraging a platform built for recruiting. The automation of tasks like interview scheduling, applicant updates, reminders and rejection emails make for a seamless and professional applicant experience. Not to mention, Skype requires its users to create an account with login credentials in order to access the platform which can lead to applicants being turned off and dropping out of the race all together. With a dedicated video interviewing platform like VidCruiter, simplicity and ease of use are key, therefore no software downloads or accounts are required from applicants in order to complete applications or interviews.

Nowadays, a positive candidate experience has a significant impact on an applicant’s decision to accept a job offer or not. A negative experience on the other hand can have disastrous effects, not only on the recruitment process, but on the company’s reputation as a whole. Organizations should beware of the high costs associated to a negative candidate experience.

Likelihood to Take Actions After Negative Candidate Experience

Source: Software Advice

6. Time-Saving Asynchronous Video Interviews

One-way video interviewing is a relatively new concept in recruiting but it’s completely revolutionizing the way companies screen candidates. This tool enables recruiters to qualify and disqualify applicants much faster in the early stages of the process by only spending time reviewing and scoring video answers rather than conducting individual telephone interviews with each applicant. By automating the telephone interview process, hiring teams can speed up time-to-fill by up to 75%.

7. Integration with Existing Systems

A dedicated video interviewing platform often offers various levels of integration with your company’s current HR management tools, which helps improve the user experience on both the employer’s and the candidate’s side of things.

8. 24/7 Support for Both Recruiters and Applicants

Last but not least, possibly the most important benefit of investing in a dedicated video interviewing platform is the white-glove service that comes with it. Most (if not all) leading video interviewing companies on the market today provide a dedicated account manager along with 24/7 client & applicant support for its users. It’s important to note however that this level of service may not always be included in the contract price for all vendors. Therefore, this is a good question to ask on product demonstrations when shopping around.

On the other hand, if you’re conducting video interviews on a free service like Skype, Google Hangouts or FaceTime and something goes wrong, you are essentially left high and dry with no avenues for support. This can severely impact the natural progression of the recruitment process and create unnecessary delays and massive applicant drop-offs.

Recruiting Feature Comparison: Video Chat vs. Video Conferencing vs. Video Recruiting

Source: Software Advice

How to Know When It’s Time to Migrate to a Paid Video Interviewing Platform

While Skype is an amazing way to stay in touch with friends and family who live far away, it was never intended to be used for recruiting. Software Advice’s Brian Westfall explains: “The added features found in dedicated video recruiting platforms aren’t just bells and whistles. They’re necessary time and money savers in the war for talent.” Dedicated video interviewing solutions streamline your hiring team’s productivity and help make better use the resources involved in the hiring process.

Of course, if your company only hires a few people each year, this type of solution might not be for you. For example, if your company hires modestly throughout the year and, once in a blue moon, you are required to do a video interview because an applicant is located too far away or is simply unable to physically attend the interview. By all means, in this instance, a Skype interview can be a convenient alternative to travel. However, when it comes to companies who deal with higher recruitment volumes and more complex hiring processes, hiring teams should consider looking into recruitment software that was designed with that exact purpose in mind.