History of Video Interviews: A Timeline for Virtual Hiring

Rapid Success for Video Hiring Companies!

Video interviewing may seem like a new fad for companies who want to seem modern and up-to-date with Millennials or Generation Z. There now exists two- and one-way video interviews for recruiters and candidates. The history of video interviews shows a clear trend toward speed and agility in the hiring process.

Video hiring was actually conceptualized over 15 years ago—and currently taking the HR industry by storm. CEO and founder of VidCruiter, Sean Fahey, will take us through where video interviewing started, what the status of the market is now, and where it could go in the future.

After the turn of the century, two video interviewing companies started testing the market waters: HireVue and Montage. Both have become successful in the industry, with significant challenges at the time.

“In both cases, there was a problem that no one had webcams,” Fahey said. In HireVue’s case, founder Mark Newman personally started shipping webcams out to applicants using the product from his university dorm room in 2010.

“That was the start of it. Hirevue and Montage invented pre-recorded video interviewing, where people record at home while hiring managers were doing something else.”

Pre-recorded was only one of the many types of video hiring software being developed at the time. GreenJobInterview started its foray into the live video interview business while InterviewStream worked with universities and career counselors to help people searching for jobs practice their skills for interviews.

Sean Fahey and the VidCruiter Story

When Fahey started VidCruiter in 2009, he was still new to all these other businesses in the market. However, he was encouraged about his business idea upon learning about them and inspired by the success each was having.

“When we started the company in 2009 with two part-time staffers, HireVue already had $600,000 in revenue,” Fahey said. “They were already way bigger than we were, we weren’t even close.”

The brilliant idea for VidCruiter came from someone asking Fahey if he could hire 200 people as quickly as possible with a five-year plan.

Sean thought the best, most efficient way of achieving his 30-day hiring goal would be to have a recruiter record video questions then have applicants type their response.

While that worked well, the idea to improve it with video responses came quickly after, which turned into the core of his successful business model for the recruitment industry.

Companies Reap the Benefits of Video Software

Many more players have joined the HR Tech market since its start, and there has been some consolidation with a few of those original video interviewing companies. The biggest change is how many major businesses have started realizing the value of video interviews. Yet, there’s still room for market growth.

“There’s probably 125,000 companies that could buy,” Fahey said. “There’s still a global demand for this product, it’s just about being found and educating the market.”

Customer education is among the biggest challenges Fahey has seen in the modern age of the video interviewing market. He says a lot of companies don’t understand the differences between free vs. paid video interview software.

“We spend lots of time educating the market,” because people assume these products are like Skype.

Potential customers think ‘Why would I pay for something that’s like Skype or Webex or Go To Meeting?’ They don’t understand there’s actually a pre-recorded component to this where people can record at home. People don’t realize that’s where the time-saving component comes in. ”Fahey said his hard-working team educates potential clients through articles, statistics, and different analogies. Once they understand what exactly video interviewing software can do, it’s easy to see how it can work for organizations of any size.

“An analogy I use in the consumer business is that we’re more like YouTube. With YouTube, you watch a video someone recorded at a different time. Now, imagine all those videos were interview responses you needed to evaluate to determine whether the person has the skills relevant to the job.”

VidCruiter is more secure and has more features than YouTube, and hearing that comparison helps people realize what exactly pre-recorded video interviewing is—and why it’s extraordinarily useful from a hiring perspective.

AI is the Future of the Video Recruitment Market

Companies are heading in different directions for the future of video interviewing. For example, HireVue has been researching and implementing AI for their video interviews. VidCruiter, however, is going in a different direction.

Fahey’s company has been researching and optimizing the entire recruiting funnel to help make every step more accurate and easier for both applicants and recruiters.

One way of doing that is by adding structure to every part of the interview process. As a recruiter, once you add additional features such as automated skills testing, you can get an overall score of the candidate, instead of just one for the video interviews.

This gives companies an entire recruitment management system all in one place, instead of trying to fit video interviewing into the complex system they currently use. Once that’s accomplished then perfected, that’s when Fahey said AI can get into the game to improve the overall candidate experience.

“The market isn’t ready to buy all that…but that’s where VidCruiter is going. The future of video interviewing is not just adding AI, it’s having that be a part of the overall recruitment cycle.”