Insights
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.
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.
To reap the full range of benefits that virtual interviews have to offer, you will need to turn to dedicated virtual interviewing software platforms.
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.
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.
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.
There are dozens of video interview platforms you can use, and some of the highest-rated include:
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