According to research by Ladders.com, recruiters are so inundated with applications they spend an average of only six seconds evaluating a job candidate’s resume before deciding their fate. The average person spends as little time reading the name and number on a plumber’s business card. While six seconds might be plenty of time to evaluate and hire a contractor for a few hours, it hardly allows sound decisions to be made on a job candidate’s potential. Will you like working with this person? Will they like working for you? Can they do the job and will they like doing the job? A recruiter obviously cannot determine this from a glance, but they are wary of pushing an unsuitable candidate into a face-to-face interview where significantly more time might be wasted.
The in-person interview is the stage where the candidate can demonstrate their skills and enthusiasm, but not every candidate’s banter seduces the interviewer. Often, within five minutes, the hiring manager or recruiter, having already mentally passed on the candidate, is daydreaming about lunch. Unfortunately, courtesy dictates that the hiring manager spend an additional twenty to thirty minutes interviewing the candidate. Time is wasted not only interviewing the candidate but also in scheduling them. For these reasons, a recruiter hesitates to pull the trigger on a resume that doesn’t astound them, but they risk missing out on truly astounding candidates whose resumes did not make the six-second cut. We must too look at this from the candidate’s perspective. If employed, they have unnecessarily missed time from work.
Enter the video interview. In sixty seconds invite a candidate to showcase their personality, enthusiasm and knowledge prior to the face-to-face. Are they bubbly? Are they earnest? Are they bright or are they dull? Can you envision yourself working alongside this candidate? Can you see them working with your customers? If you answer “yes”, you now have greater assurance you won’t be wasting your time interviewing the candidate in-person. If you answer “no”, you have wasted no more than three minutes reviewing their interview and just as important, you won’t be wasting the candidate’s time. If you are unsure, share the candidate’s interview with colleagues for additional feedback and determine if the candidate is worthy of a face-to-face.
Is your waste bin full of crumpled balls of top talent who might go to work for your competitors? Can you afford not to take a three-minute chance on them?