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How to conduct a great virtual charity job interview
03 Sep 2020by Paul Rubens
Virtual interview platforms are the easy, safe, and quick choice for recruiting new charity staff remotely during COVID-19
Video calling and virtual meetings have become commonplace thanks to the COVID-19 lockdown and social distancing requirements. So it is not surprising that many organisations including charities are increasingly turning to these technologies to carry out virtual job interviews. A recent Gartner survey found that 86% of organizations are now conducting virtual interviews as part of their hiring process.
The most obvious benefit of a virtual interview is safety: candidates are not required to travel to interviews using public transport or come into contact with office staff and other candidates. But the more sophisticated virtual interview platforms offer many other benefits as well.
Simple virtual interview platforms
The simplest way for you to conduct a virtual interview for your charity while working remotely is to use basic video conferencing software such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, (both available through Charity Digital) or GoToMeeting.
Although these tools are not designed specifically for conducting interviews, they do allow you (and other charity colleagues in separate locations, if necessary) to carry out a live video interview with a candidate at a prearranged time. Most video conferencing software also allows you to share documents or slides, and to record the interview for later reviewing or to show to other charity staff if required.
Benefits: Low cost or free. Offer simple live virtual interview capabilities. Easy to use.
Dedicated virtual interviewing platforms
To reap the full range of benefits that virtual interviews have to offer, you will need to turn to dedicated virtual interviewing software platforms.
One-way interviewing
Perhaps the most important feature of dedicated virtual interview platforms is that they offer one-way or asynchronous interview capabilities. What this means is that you can send out a set of standardised interview questions to candidates, and they can then video themselves answering the questions on the platform at a time and place that suits them in the next few days.
This can be hugely beneficial because it enables you to conduct a large number of these interviews as a pre-screening round in a very time-efficient manner, before creating a shortlist of candidates that you can interview in person.
The reason that one-way interviews are so time-efficient is that in many cases when you watch the recording you will be able to tell within a few minutes whether a person is suitable for your organisations and therefore worth interviewing in person. At that point, you can stop watching and move on to the next video immediately. This enables you to get through a large number of first-round interviews in a short period of time and helps you avoid missing out on good candidates simply because of a lack of time.
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Candidate management
Dedicated platforms also help you organise the recruitment process by making it easy to evaluate candidates on various criteria and create shortlists for live interviews. They also automate the process of informing candidates if they have been unsuccessful or inviting them to a second round of interviews, reducing your workload and ensuring that good candidates are not left waiting to hear that they have been successful.
Live interviews with self-scheduling
These platforms also offer live video interviewing (similar to video conferencing software) for secondary interview rounds, but many have an advantage over the likes of Skype and Zoom in that they include self-service interview scheduling capabilities. This enables candidates to browse available interview slots and sign up for a convenient one, avoiding the need for you to play phone or email tag to try to nail down an interview time with all the people on your live interview shortlist.
Benefits: Time-efficient one-way virtual interviews, automated interview scheduling, candidate management, the ability to hire the right person and begin the virtual onboarding process.
Virtual interview platforms for charities
There are dozens of video interview platforms you can use, and some of the highest-rated include:
- MyInterview A good choice for charities starting with video interviews because it is very easy to get up and running. As a further bonus, MyInterview has an entry-level version which is free, as well as paid-for services for charities recruiting multiple job positions at once.
- VidCruiter This is a very fully featured product which includes interview scheduling and automated reference checking.
- Willo Another platform which offers a free basic service as well as a more complete paid-for version. Willo can be accessed on mobile devices as well as laptops and desktop computers, and the platform makes it easy to schedule follow-up interviews with promising candidates.
- Tazio This is a UK-based service which is fully GDPR compliant and offers a free 14-day trial. It includes asynchronous and live interviewing.
- SparkHire A very fully featured platform which is popular with SMBs. It offers integration with many popular Applicant Tracking Software (AST) products and allows unlimited interviews for a fixed monthly fee.
- RecRight This platform is known for its strong candidate support and includes its own AST.
- OutMatch As well as the standard video interview functionality, OutMatch includes machine learning-based candidate assessment and automated reference checking.
- HireVue Tailored to charities looking to recruit their own software developers, HireVue offers coding challenges and video-enabled live coding to put prospective developers through their paces.
Tips for conducting a great virtual charity job interview
- Many candidates will be unfamiliar with video interviews, so tell them what to expect. This includes the format of the interview, the software that will be used, the names of the interviewers, and even the dress code expected for the interview
- Standardise your interview format so that it is easy to review interview videos and compare like with like
- Provide a backup phone number the candidate can call in case the technology fails at their (or your) end
- If you are conducting the interview from home then get the system up and running and test it where you intend to do it from. This will allow you to ensure that your internet connection is fast enough, the lighting is adequate, and the location is quiet and somewhere you are unlikely to be interrupted by noises from outside
- Turn off the ringer on your mobile phone so that the interview does not get continually interrupted
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