What are Automated Interviews?
Learn how virtual interviews can automate your recruiting system.
.png){kind=icon}
One of the most important things for your continued success is bringing on new hires as a business. Without bringing in new employees, a company cannot expect to continue functioning — let alone keep growing. But, hiring new employees, at least with traditional hiring processes, takes a lot of time and energy that could be used in another area of the business. Luckily, with the continued technological advances in our society, there are actually highly efficient ways to screen hundreds of employees quickly and completely avoid a lot of the more time-consuming and repetitive tasks of the hiring process. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use an automated phone interview to screen your candidates.
How does an automated phone interview work and why is it better than a traditional interview? Essentially, an automated phone interview is an interview where the candidate will respond to your pre-recorded interview or screening questions. The candidate’s response will then be recorded and transcribed so that your hiring team can easily view their response along with all of the other candidates’ responses. An automated phone interview is also referred to as a virtual phone interview, is very easy to do and can be given to many different applicants at the same time because you do not have to worry about finding a time that works for both your hiring team and the candidate.
Using an on-demand phone interview platform, like Qualifi, helps you to easily and efficiently interview hundreds of candidates at once and then review 7 times more candidates per day than traditional phone or in-person interviews. This is because, with the platform, you can easily screen candidates using keywords so that you can focus more closely on the candidates who are best qualified and most likely to be a good fit for your business first. This allows you to focus on your most likely hires first before moving on to other candidates who may not be as qualified. In other words, Qualifi’s platform gives your business a phone interview cheat sheet that helps you to screen candidates quickly with less bias and increase your screening efficiency by 80%.
There are two main types of automated interviews. These are automated video interviews and automated phone interviews. Both of these interview types have their advantages, but in the long run, automated phone interviews come out on top as the better option for most businesses. Here, we will delve into why that is.
There are many interview platform options available on the market today, both video and phone interview platforms, and many of these platforms will claim to be the best or one of the best interview platforms. While this certainly may be the case, it is important to note what type of interview platform the company is offering. For example, there are open source video interview software platforms, pre-recorded video interview software, automated phone interview software, and more in both paid and free versions. Whether the interview platform in question is a video interview software free of charge or it is a paid version, there are a few unfortunate disadvantages that come with opting for a video interview software. First, video interviews require that the candidate focuses on things outside of their qualification and experience, such as what they are wearing, if they are in a clean and professional-looking space, their internet speed and quality, as well as their camera quality. In a video interview, you can see the candidate — and while many businesses may think this is a good thing, it is often actually is not. The unfortunate truth is that everyone has biases — whether conscious or unconscious — that can dramatically affect hiring decisions.
So even if you are using the best video interview software, you are still going to be creating more hoops for your candidates to jump through and increasing the risk of biased decisions than if you were using a phone interview software. In an on-demand phone interview, you cannot see the candidate. Therefore, you can more easily mitigate your biases and focus instead on the skills, accomplishments, and experiences that the candidate is highlighting for you.
With all of the new types of interviewing people today — from in-person interviews to automated interviews — it can be difficult to determine the best interview method for your business. Many businesses find the idea of doing automated interviews to be daunting because it takes them out of their comfort zone of traditional in-person interviews. However, as a business grows and as more and more positions are offered with hybrid or remote work opportunities, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find time and space to interview prospective employees in person. Additionally, the traditional interview process takes a long time and a lot of energy to complete, so for many businesses automated interview questions have saved the day.
The incredible thing about automated interviewing is that it is essentially a virtual interview. In other words, the candidate can do the interview on their own — on their own time and in their own space. Because of this, candidates are more likely to want to complete the interview because it does not require them to pack up and go to a location, worry about getting lost, or worry about spilling something on themselves in their best clothes. Automated phone interviews also help to mitigate unconscious biases that can affect hiring decisions and allow both the candidate and the hiring team to focus on whether or not a candidate‘s experience and skills match the need of the position rather than their appearance.
Since there are several different interview methods that are continually rising in popularity today, it can be difficult to keep them all straight — especially if you have not implemented any type of automated interview in your business. So, what is this fascination with pre-recorded video interview questions and answers? Put simply, the idea of automated interviewing is that it helps save time and energy in your hiring process and helps you to make hiring decisions quicker and more efficiently. Because automated interview processes are becoming more and more common in businesses throughout the world, you can easily find inspiration by doing a simple web search for “automated video interview example” if you’re looking to implement this type of interview into your hiring process.
Unfortunately, as you may notice when looking through video interview examples, candidates can feel less confident and seem less qualified simply because they are worried about their appearance in the video and their surroundings. You may also notice that you may experience unconscious biases that impact your willingness to hire an individual based on their appearance or even their surroundings. So, no matter how good the sample video interview questions and answers are because you can see the candidate as they are interviewing it can be difficult to know for certain if your decisions are actually based solely on their skills and experience or not. This is why automated phone interviews can be much more effective and help you level the playing field for all candidates by eliminating the temptation to give in to biases.
While automated video interviews are not as effective as automated phone interviews, you can still gain a lot of valuable information by using virtual video interview questions and answers as inspiration for your screening questions in an automated phone interview. Phone interviews are essentially a more effective version of a video interview because they offer the ability to focus exclusively on a candidate’s answers rather than their appearance or surroundings and they are more accessible to candidates as well. But, since both types of automated interviews use pre-recording to capture the questions you want to be asked, you can still gain a lot of inspiration from specifically pre-recorded video interview questions or even pre-recorded video interview examples if you want examples of answers too.
These pre-recorded video interview questions and answers can be great inspiration for your automated phone interview questions (and desired answers). You can also use a video interview questions and answers PDF to get more ideas of good screening and interview questions to include in your phone interviews. Then once you have figured out what questions you want to ask, simply use an on-demand phone interview platform, like Qualifi, to record and send out your interview invites to hundreds of candidates as soon as they apply and get started on your new and streamlined hiring process!
The world of recruiting and hiring is always changing, advancing, and evolving with the new technologies and trends that come with time. Because of this, it can be incredibly difficult, as a recruiter or hiring professional, to keep on top of all of the current best practices and trends that come to the job market.
Related Content:
There are always new hiring demands and hiring strategies that businesses are needing to keep up with in order to not overwork themselves while still getting the highly qualified candidates that they need to fill positions in their teams. This essentially means that a lot of times, hiring and recruiting teams often have to bear the heaviest burdens when it comes to dealing with company changes and shifts in the job markets. Because of this, it is essential that your recruiters and hiring professionals are equipped with the best tools so that they can easily cope with these changes without burning themselves out or not being able to get enough new hires. One of the most effective tools that they can have today is a software solution that allows them to have an automated interview process.
There are a number of automated interviewing tools — such as on-demand phone interviews — that businesses of all sizes and industries can use to better optimize and streamline their hiring processes. It can be challenging, however, to find the right automated interviewing process tool if you are unsure where to begin, even with the variety of pre-recorded interview examples available online for inspiration. In truth, there are many different types of automated interviews and some may work better for your business than others, but, when it comes to helping you offer unbiased, consistent, and easy-to-take automated interviews, a virtual phone interview can be an excellent choice.
So, what is a virtual phone interview, and what is a virtual video interview? Essentially both of these are virtual interviews where the candidate answers the pre-recorded interview questions over the phone. These answers are then recorded and viewed and evaluated later on by the hiring and recruiting teams to determine whether or not the candidate is qualified for the position. These interviews are taken asynchronously so more than one candidate can interview at the same time — which helps to greatly speed up your time-to-hire — and they are much easier to review because every single candidate is answering the same interview script.
One of the most influential trends that the job market is seeing today is a push toward automated hiring and recruitment processes. Whether it be automation in talent acquisition or something more specific like automated candidate screening, many businesses are beginning to opt for automated solutions to help them solve their slow time-to-hire and increase the overall efficiency and productivity of their hiring and recruiting teams. Automation is a big part of the answer to the question ‘how is recruiting changing” today and there are numerous recruitment automation ideas on the market today that businesses can use to optimize and streamline their recruiting processes and focus their attention on more qualified and better fitting candidates for their positions that need filling.
There are plenty of articles detailing the trends and current practices of recruitment best practices that praise automation as “automation in recruitment: a new frontier of recruiting strategies.” The truth is, whether or not you want to use automation technologies in your recruiting process, they are becoming increasingly more popular and if you are the only business amongst your competitors that is not using an automated hiring system, competitive advantage is likely going to be with your competitors, not you.
Because of this, it is increasingly important that businesses of any size or industry view automating the candidate interview process as a tool that they can use to better the productivity of their hiring teams while lessening the number of monotonous tasks — such as scheduling and conducting interviews — that their hiring professionals need to make each day. This is why many businesses are using an on-demand interview platform, like Qualifi, to easily optimize their screening processes. With Qualifi’s platform, you can easily pre-record your interview questions, determine your interview script, send out invitations to your asynchronous, virtual screening interview, review and compare your candidates’ responses, and determine which candidates you want to move forward with. This type of automated screening interview process allows your team to not only interview way more candidates each day but also reduces the amount of time that it takes to screen each candidate to only a few minutes. This means that your recruiting and hiring teams no longer have to spend valuable time conducting interviews for candidates who are not qualified for your positions and can redirect that time and energy towards building better relationships with the candidates that will actually be a good fit for your company and the open position.
As automated recruiting and interview software solutions become more and more popular, an increasing number of automated phone interview software solutions are becoming available for businesses to use to better optimize and streamline their hiring processes. Of the numerous interview scheduling software and other interview software solutions available, there are two extremely popular types of automated interviews that businesses are using in today’s constantly changing job market. These two types of automated interview platforms are virtual video and virtual phone interview solutions.
Now, both virtual phone and virtual video interview software solutions can be a tremendous step up from traditional interviewing methods. Why is this? Well, put simply, traditional interviewing methods take critical time out of your recruiting team’s workday and require them to spend hours of their week scheduling and conducting the same interview over and over again. And the unfortunate truth is that these traditional interviews often result in your recruiting team wasting hours of their time speaking with candidates who are not qualified or a good fit for your company rather than spending their time focusing on the candidates who will actually be a good addition to your business. One of the major downsides of this split attention is that your high-quality candidates are likely going to be picked up by one of your competitors because your time-to-hire is taking too long and they have lost interest in the position.
So, how do virtual interviews help solve this issue? Virtual interviews — also called on-demand interviews — over the phone or with a video stream allow candidates to take their screening interviews remotely and asynchronously. This means that your recruiting team doesn’t need to spend time scheduling interviews or even conducting them because all of the interview questions are pre-recorded. With one of the best interview platforms, like Qualifi, you can easily send out invitations to your interview and be confident that every single candidate is getting the same questions, opportunities, and unbiased space to share with you their qualifications, skills, and experience so that you can make the best hiring decisions based on solely what your candidates are bringing to the plate.
Many businesses find themselves wondering the same question whenever there is a new trend or recruiting strategy that gets put into blog posts or statistics. This question is how is recruiting changing? Recruiting teams often have the toughest time trying to keep up with the shifting trends and competitive market, and one of the largest trends in today’s market is automation in talent acquisition.
Whether your business has already implemented automated processes for your recruitment process or not, there is an increase in the number of recruitment automation technologies, platforms, and software solutions that businesses can use to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their recruiting processes — all while reducing the time-to-hire and taking some of the repetitive, monotonous tasks off of your recruiting team’s plate. The truth is, when it comes to going from a traditional recruitment process to an automated one, you could be using the best recruiting automation software or not and you’d still be able to see a tremendous shift in the productivity and efficiency of your recruiting team. Automation allows your teams to focus their efforts on what is most important — building quality relationships with only the best-qualified candidates and funneling them quickly through the hiring process before they can get picked up by one of your competitors.
