By John Jeffay, NoCamels -
How do you select the best candidate for a job when you have a stack of over 100 applications?
Face-to-face interviews simply aren’t practical at that scale, and resumes give you the hard facts, but miss out on the soft skills.
MyInterview says it is rethinking the “archaic” recruitment process and offering an effective solution for the 21st century: pre-recorded video interviews.
Candidates see a job advertised, click a link, and are asked to respond, in their own time, to a few carefully selected questions.
They record their answers on a smartphone or laptop – a process that typically takes no more than 10 minutes – and press send. Job done.
The employer receives their video answers, together with an automatically-generated transcript, can compare applicants in a matter of hours, rather than weeks, and get the vacancy filled.
“We were candidates ourselves and we founded the company based on the candidate experience,” says CEO Benjy Gillman.
“We found that the resume wasn’t an effective medium of communicating who we truly were as people, and that employees only really got to learn who we were much later on in the hiring process, at which point they had already rejected, or accepted candidates who either could have been a great fit or weren’t a good fit.”
The company was established in Tel Aviv in 2016 and says it handled more than seven million interviews for its 10,000 client companies in the last year alone.
They include Ocado, Facebook, the Australian government, Vodafone, Cambridge University, Six Flags, Rockstar Games, 7-Eleven and Chick-fil-A.
The process is quick, simple and straightforward for the candidates, so the drop-out rate – those who start but don’t finish – is very low, at under 10 percent.
“Candidates will see a job advertised, they’ll click apply and be taken to myInterview, they’ll see a video of a day in the life of the company, very TikTok-style,” says Gillman.
“Then they’ll click ‘I’m interested’, they’ll put in their name and their phone number and email address, then they’re essentially submitted as an application.
“We give them a qualification list, which includes a driver’s license or whatever the company needs, and if they’re reach the minimum level they’ll be asked to answer a few questions through video.
“If now isn’t a good time to do a video, and they want to do it later, they can do it later.”
MyInterview says its video technology speeds up the time from advertising a vacancy to filling it by 70 per cent.
“We understood that employers aren’t able to meet everybody face to face- it’s just a pure impossibility because of the quantity of applications that they receive,” Gillman tells NoCamels.
“But we felt that pre-recorded video was a scalable option that gives employers a much fuller picture of all of the soft surroundings of who we are as people.”
In some cases, like the hospitality, retail or healthcare sectors for example, the video interview represents the entire recruitment process. A bar owner likes the candidate’s answers and immediately offers them the job.
“We will often be the final stage in the process there,” says Gillman. “So as soon as they see that there’s a good fit our customers will be either sending an offer or asking them to come in to meet the team.
“In Israel specifically, there is such a shortage of people to be working in hospitality, cafes, restaurants, hotels, that these places will hire in a heartbeat.”
In other sectors the video interview will be the first stage, to be followed by a test, assessment or formal face-to-face interview, but either way it gives the employer a good indication of who they’re dealing with.
“A lot of application forms are incredibly time intensive,” says Gillman. “And people who are actively looking for work are generally applying for many jobs, so they have to complete many of these long application forms, which are very, very cumbersome and which don’t necessarily reflect their true character.
“We’re getting answers from them in a much more succinct and insightful way, and shortening the application process as well.”
MyInterview helps client companies devise the questions that will give them the best insight into the candidates. And it has deliberately designed the process to be as quick and easy as possible for the candidates to complete.
“We hope people feel comfortable and confident going through this. They’re at home, doing it in their own time, in the right frame of mind.”
“It’s a much better alternative to a phone screen – a surprise phone call from the employer in middle the day.
“Employers would reject most of the resumes and phone maybe the top 10 to 15 applicants, and then bring in four for a face-to-face interview.
“So what’s changed now is that candidates aren’t willing to go through that process and companies don’t have time to invest in it.
“Companies also realize that they’ve been missing out on great candidates, and that diversity inclusion was very much not taken into account in the old process.
“The new form of recruitment is a lot more standardized, it’s a lot more structured, and there’s a lot less room for subjectivity.”
He accepts that some candidates are still anxious about using video, but offers this reassurance: “As long as you’re coming across as yourself, then there’s nothing necessarily to be worried about. Employers will connect with somebody who’s more authentic than somebody who’s more rehearsed.”
There are other companies providing similar services, but Gillman says they’re the only one at “the top of the recruitment process” – meaning the video interview is the first, and sometimes the only stage of selection.
“We really focused on the user experience, to bring in a lot of candidates, instead of wasting a lot of time going through a number of processes.”
Future refinements at the company include using AI to pick up on key words and phrases from the transcripts of applicants’ videos.
