Upgrade your interviewing process to select the best candidates.

Interviews are becoming increasingly critical. Why?

For one, talent has become a lot more crucial for companies to stay relevant in a cut-throat competitive economy. While candidates' attributes like domain knowledge, experience and educational qualifications are important; intrinsic values like integrity, behaviour, ability to learn, adapt to the work culture and communication are just as important, if not more. As the last lap of the hiring marathon, the goal of interviews is to identify and select a candidate whose skill sets and behaviours match ones that are needed for a particular role and whose personality, interests and values are in sync with the culture and mission of the organisation. Studies report that HR teams fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Can interviewing be an ad hoc process?
Not any longer.

A lack of time spent on planning and the inability to provide adequate attention to the hiring process is resulting in poor decisions and increased turnover within organisations. To find an ideal candidate, HR teams must be well informed on how to conduct interviews effectively. Prevalent unstructured formats ad hoc styles of interviewing are leading to bad hires with an ever-increasing rate of attrition. Bad hires drain the organisation's time, resources, energy and adversely impact the employers' brand, a vital parameter for candidates to accept the offer. HR managers have confessed that to fill the job vacancies swiftly, the interview process tends to be unplanned. The interviewer often asks different questions to each candidate. Interviewees are then marked based on the interviewers' 'gut-feeling' about the interaction, which is not filtered for personal biases. It is equally challenging for HR teams to synchronise the interview time between the interviewers and candidates leading to unconditional delays in filling the job. Over, and above this, most interviews are conducted on the phone or free video-calling software like Skype, to bring in agility, convenience, cost-efficiency, and reduce time to travel. But year after year, hiring teams and their organisations are affected by the poor quality of hires.

Phone Interviews: These sound convenient, but the truth couldn't be further from this. Just scheduling the interview can range from a couple of hours to a few weeks if the candidate lives in another time zone, causing bad candidate experiences. They can be time-intensive too. Also, phone interviews do not let interviewers glean insights from candidates' body language, mannerisms, appearance, non-verbal clues and their overall personality.

In-Person Interviews: In-person interviews are held face-to-face. Although they give the interviewer a good idea about the candidate's personality, they are time-consuming, hard to schedule, and often require the candidate to travel to the interviewer's location. There can also be unintended biases that can cloud the assessor's judgement. Even an unfamiliar environment of the organisation can be intimidating for the candidate.

Video interviewing or digital interviewing: These can be better than phone or face-to-face interviews. But leveraging free video calling software does not allow HR to scrutinise candidates closely, and are proving to be counterproductive. Interview frauds when using. Skype/Google Hangouts are a thriving business for well established 'interview mafia gangs' who offer interview lip-sync service and answer the interview call on their behalf. On-ground reality indicates 1 in 14 job interview candidates use impersonators in digital interviews, and only 50% of them are eventually detected and sacked. Group Interviews: Here, HR Teams interview a group of candidates at the same time. This allows the candidates to stand out amidst the competition. However, these can be hard to administer. Some candidates can put on a facade to stand out, while the more introverted candidates can lose interest despite being right for the job.

Hiring Bootcamps: Often conducted by companies that recruit graduates, these are used for mass recruitment. But such a drive has huge logistical requirements and isn't the most effective form of hiring under high-pressure circumstances.
A large number of candidates can also make it hard to select the right ones, and multiple sessions can put off some candidates. Making them wait for long hours, and not awarding them dedicated attention, spending less than 5-10 minutes with each candidate, are not the practices that'll help you hire the best candidate. On the contrary, these will tarnish your employer brand, making it difficult to attract talent. Hiring teams can lose efficiency, time, resources and most importantly, the most qualified candidates by using conventional interviewing methods that may sound rational at the onset. Therefore, an agile platform that allows for seamless video interviewing with inbuilt scheduling, recording and other relevant features is the need of the hour. What if we told you that the results aimed for by all these conventional methods of interviewing could be achieved while eliminating their shortcoming? Yes, it is possible, and the solution is highly agile, seamlessly integrated and is also available for 'on-the-go' use.

Next-generation hiring-

Experience EasyTalent's video interviewing, where assessors can interview candidates without the hassles of scheduling. Geography is not a limitation anymore as video interviews give increased flexibility to candidates allowing them to record their answers to questions set by assessors. There's no surprise that recruiters that are ahead of the curve already prefer video interviews, especially while hiring millennials – 92%.

With EasyTalent's video interviews, you can conduct recorded one-way, two-way video interviews and panel interviews which are always accessible for scrutiny. Therefore, when candidates' integrity is doubtful, they can be reviewed by HR teams to detect impersonation and lip-syncing. EasyTalent also allows Aadhaar authentication and face recognition (where the candidate's face is matched with the photo in their Aadhaar card) before the video interview. EasyTalent also sensitises your hiring managers to the fact that today's talent is evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them. Quality of questions asked is critical - spending time on questions like "tell us about yourself" does not really help in evidence-based decision making. Drafting, sequencing questions, and probing are both a science and an art that your hiring managers need to master.

And don't worry if they haven't!

EasyTalent's interview question banks allow you to ask relevant questions. These not only help candidates showcase their fitness for the job role, but also empowers organisations to deliver a great hiring experience.

Potential employees experience the organisational culture first-hand with every round of video interviewing. Therefore, every individual connected with the hiring process becomes an organisational ambassador, and every candidate interaction demonstrates the right values. Find out more about our hiring solutions. Please write to us today.