Business info - issue 144

01732 759725 magazine 31 RECRUITMENT When HireVue Founder Mark Newman was at college in Salt Lake City, he could see the offices of Goldman Sachs from his dormitory window. He longed to work for the bank but couldn’t get his foot in the door because Goldman Sachs didn’t recruit from his college. Instead, he founded virtual interviewing company HireVue with a mission to democratise the recruitment process. In the 15 years since, HireVue has grown to become a leading provider of virtual interviewing technology. It has interviewed nearly 15 million people in 180 countries and 37 languages and, before the COVID pandemic, was interviewing around 1 million people every 90 days. Best of all, Goldman Sachs now uses HireVue for all its campus recruiting. HireVue provides two types of video interview: on-demand interviews, where candidates record answers to pre-recorded questions in their own time and with as many takes as they need (or the recruiter allows); and live video interviews, which replicate the traditional job interview but over video, with everything recorded and integrated into a company’s HR system. On-demand video is generally the first stage of the interview process, after which shortlisted candidates are invited to take a live video interview. “In the recruiting lexicon, we refer to on-demand video as the ‘top of the funnel’,” explained HireVue CEO Kevin Parker. “It’s the very first part of the selection process; we enable people to interview very broadly and then select the very strongest candidates to move forward. The advantage is that you can interview a lot of people in a very short space of time and accelerate the process.” Parker adds that for recruiters and candidates alike, on-demand video removes a lot of the barriers inherent in traditional face-to-face recruitment, especially for organisations that are recruiting at scale or across a wide geographic area. “It has had a great impact in From a distance democratising the process and giving more people access to jobs. Today, about 80% of interviews take place outside normal work hours. As a recruiter, I don’t have to fuss with all the challenges of scheduling and logistics. I just send you a link and you can take an interview tonight, tomorrow, over the weekend.” Parker says that as well as opening up the field to more candidates, virtual interviews are fairer as they remove much of the bias inherent in the interviewing process. “In recruitment, we all believe the best way to hire people is through structured interviewing, asking everyone the same questions about work- related skills – tell me about the time you worked as a team and what your contribution was – things like that. But as human beings we are terrible at it. We bring so much unconscious bias into the process that we don’t ask every candidate exactly the same question in exactly the same way. I might find out we grew up in the same place and we will start having a conversation about that or I might like the colour of your shirt. The value of on demand structured interviewing is that every candidate gets the same experience, the same questions,” he said. Rapid growth Virtual interviewing has become an increasingly popular option for businesses in recent years, partly due to technological developments that have made it viable for more people. “Years ago, we used to ship webcams to people; if you didn’t have a webcam it was hard to take an interview.We haven’t shipped a webcam in years. Now, your Google phone, your iPhone, your tablet, your PC all have front- facing cameras,” said Parker. Today. About 40% of HireVue interviews are conducted via a smartphone, rising to 85% in parts of Asia. At the same time, a protracted period of low unemployment (pre- COVID) forced businesses to work harder to find suitable candidates and, as Parker put it, ‘open the aperture’ in new ways. “If my candidates can’t take time off work and I am only available 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, I immediately reduce the number of people who are eligible for the job. So, businesses are using on demand technology to get access to the broadest talent pool they possibly can, and that has driven uptake in recent years,” he said. James Goulding finds out why recruitment is the ideal candidate for virtualisation Kevin Parker, CEO HireVue Continued... As well as opening up the field to more candidates, virtual interviews are fairer as they remove much of the bias inherent in the interviewing process