What Is An On-Demand Interview?

In today’s constantly changing world of recruitment and hiring trends, it can be incredibly difficult for recruitment and hiring teams to keep up to date with all of the new techniques and strategies that can help them improve their hiring process. But, some of these techniques are becoming an absolute necessity if you don’t want to lose your best talent to your competitors. One of these crucial interview process techniques that has become extremely popular over the past few years is the on-demand interview.

There are a number of ways that you can offer an on-demand interview — though, on-demand phone and video interview options are the most popular — in your hiring process. But, before we dive into these different types of on-demand interviews and why they are useful, we need to know what on-demand interviews are. So, what is an on-demand interview? Essentially, an on-demand interview is an asynchronous interviewing method where your candidates can answer pre-selected and recorded interview questions.

On-demand interviews are often also referred to as one-way or self-guided interviews. Whether you are opting for an on-demand phone screening interview or an on-demand video screening interview, both of these solutions can bring a lot of benefits to your hiring process. Both video and phone interview options eliminate the need for your recruiters to schedule and conduct interviews in real-time. This can be an incredible time-saver and lead to a much higher applicant processing rate which can allow you to more easily and effectively assess your candidates before they get a better offer from someone else. For example, with Qualifi’s on-demand phone screening interview platform you can screen candidates in just 3-5 minutes, increase your screening efficiency by up to 80%, and instantly invite your candidates to take your interview minutes after they apply for a position.

What Is An Asynchronous Interview?

Unlike a traditional interview, where there is a real-time conversation between the interviewer and the interviewee, an on-demand interview can be done at any time of the day — regardless of what normal work hours may be. In other words, an asynchronous interview is not done in real-time. Each part of the interview is done separately and then recorded. This makes it not only easier for the interviewers to review and assess interview responses, but it also makes the interview process more convenient for candidates as well.

Rather than needing to take time and make efforts to schedule, reschedule, and conduct interviews for every single candidate, with a one-way interview you can completely eliminate the need for these time-consuming and monotonous processes that take valuable time away from your recruiting team’s workday. This type of interview is often referred to as a one-way interview because only one person is taking part in the interview at one time.

Asynchronous interviews give both your recruiting team and your candidates a better use of their time as well as create an effective and more structured interview system that is self-guided and easy for both candidates and recruiters to use. This is why, with an on-demand interview solution, like Qualifi, many businesses are able to dramatically improve their hiring processes and bring a far more efficient and effective interviewing system for their candidates.

High-Volume Hiring

Meeting the demands of high-volume hiring is extremely difficult for even the most advanced and efficient recruiters when they are not using effective recruiting strategies such as on-demand interviews. This is because high-volume recruitment goals require recruiting teams to be able to find the most qualified candidates by the dozen (or even more) and without tools that can help recruiters quickly and efficiently sift through the hundreds of applications and interview responses. This is especially important when it comes to hiring for healthcare and other professional positions because you want to ensure that you are not missing out on the qualified talent (especially when there is a shortage of that talent) but you cannot spend days upon days manually flagging and reviewing (as well as scheduling and conducting) interviews for future consideration.

So, what do you need to be able to effectively and efficiently conduct the high-volume hiring you need for your business? Whether it is hospitality hiring, call center hiring, or hiring for more specialized fields — like healthcare or engineering — on-demand interviews can be an excellent solution. These interviews can be sent out to candidates as soon as they apply and because they are self-guided your candidates can take them at any time that works best for them. You can then review all of the interview responses at once and easily compare and assess the most promising interviews. Using a platform like Qualifi can help you to do this efficiently by using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to highlight the most qualified candidates so that you can focus on them rather than focusing your time on sifting through the hundreds of resumes and interviews that have come in.

Candidate Experience

As candidate experience becomes more and more of a focal point in the recruitment process it is important for recruiters to know how to take steps to cultivate a pleasant interview experience for all candidates — not just those who are the most qualified for a position. While you do not want to spend all of your time on these candidates as they will not be the ones that you want to hire for the position you are looking for, it is still important to offer an equal and good candidate experience to all candidates.

But, it is important that you do not work to create a pleasant candidate experience at the cost of your employees. Finding a solution that helps you to speed up your time-to-hire, give candidates a level playing field and quick responses, as well as lessen the load that your employees have to do each day can seem like a tall order but it can dramatically improve not only your quality of hires but also your employee retention. You can use automated or on-demand interviews to achieve all of these things and keep your candidates more engaged and interested in the hiring process without leading your employees to a fast and unpleasant burnout.

Mitigate Bias

As human beings, we all have biases — even if we are unaware of them. These unconscious biases are oftentimes the biases that can most seriously affect the hiring process because people do not notice them. When companies are trying to practice inclusive hiring the effects of unconscious bias can skew hiring decisions and undermine the entire principle of maintaining an inclusive and diverse workplace.

The common types of bias that recruiters may often be unaware of are gender, race or ethnicity, name, religious, generational, and sexual orientation biases. These are by no means a comprehensive list of biases that recruiters may unintentionally exhibit, but they are very common. To help mitigate these biases, you can use an asynchronous phone interview rather than a traditional interview or video interview. On-demand phone interviews can help to better mitigate biases because they prevent the recruiter from seeing the candidate and, with a platform like Qualifi, they can transcribe and highlight the most qualified candidates so that recruiters can focus on the qualifications rather than the candidate’s appearance or personal information.

On-Demand Interview Questions

It is no secret that on-demand interviews are becoming increasingly more popular and effective in recruiting efforts today, but it can be intimidating for many businesses to create a standardized interview that all candidates will take. Figuring out the right on-demand video interview questions or the right on-demand phone interview questions can seem difficult — after all, if everyone is taking the same interview, you will want to ensure that it is a good interview.

Luckily, though, in today’s society, it is easy to find examples and even templates for one-way video interview questions and answers or on-demand phone interview scripts online. Doing a simple Google search for “self-paced interview questions” can give you a number of ideas and sample scripts to use as inspiration for your own interview questions. Then, once you have come up with your interview script, you can record your questions and, using a platform like Qualifi, immediately begin sending interview invites out to your candidates as soon as they apply for a position.