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Ever since the world shifted to remote work and back again, the argument of video vs. phone interviews has plagued recruiters. It is not an argument recruiting teams can just ignore. Virtual recruitment is here to stay with 70% of employers, according to a survey by LinkedIn. As such, recruiters need the best interview tools they can get to hire as effectively as possible — including on-demand interviews. These are asynchronous interviews that can either come in phone or video format.
However, regardless of the format, virtual interviews allow recruiting teams to interview potentially hundreds of candidates overnight without ever having to schedule an interview. This innovative approach allows recruiters to automate most of the interview stage of the hiring process, the longest part of the hiring cycle.
To put it into numbers, virtual interviews increase screening efficiency by 80%. As such, this interviewing style is increasingly becoming more of a necessity to remain competitive in today’s labor market.
And of course, when choosing the format for your on-demand interviews, you want the best for your business. That brings us back to the debate of video vs. phone interviews. Which is right for your business?
To answer that question, we’ll need to look at some key factors. These include whether the format can handle high-volume hiring, create consistency, and is widely accessible. So, let’s take a look at how they compare.
While both phone and video interviews allow you to add consistency and human connection to your automated hiring process, there are numerous benefits of phone interviews over video interviews.
The first of these benefits we will discuss is the capacity for phone interviews to mitigate bias. Phone interviews eliminate the potential for visual biases to affect a recruiter's decisions. What’s more, an audio format ensures that a candidate’s personality shines through during the interview and the candidate is still able to organically share their experience.
Another benefit of phone interviews over video interviews is the phone interview’s ability to handle high-volume hiring through review speed. High–volume recruiting requires recruiters to fill many open roles in a relatively short period of time. It is a task that’s nearly impossible to achieve when you work with tools that bog down review time.
Phone interviews once again beat out video interviews. On-demand phone interviews with Qualifi allow recruiters to send out invites, simultaneously gather responses, and then listen to the audio responses in a playlist. Without a visual component, your recruiters’ hands are free to perform other essentialxtasks while quickly reviewing candidates. Plus, with Qualifi, these responses can be filtered by relevant keywords to address the best potential candidates first.
And these are only some of the advantages of telephone interviews. In the following, we will continue the discussion by reviewing the advantages phone interviews bring in terms of accessibility, improving the candidate experience, and hastening the time to hire.
Along the way, we will also discuss why each of these qualities is essential to the modern recruiting process.
☑️ Mitigate Bias
☑️ Accessibility
☑️ Human Connection
☑️ Consistency
☑️ Fast Reviews
☑️ High-Volume Hiring
❌ Mitigate Bias
❌ Accessibility
☑️ Human Connection
☑️ Consistency
❌ Fast Reviews
❌ High-Volume Hiring
When you’re looking for the best talent available, you need your interview process to be accessible as possible to everyone. In terms of accessibility, phone on-demand phone interviews stand head and shoulders over video interviews.
Unlike video interviews, on-demand phone interviews do not require any form of special equipment or even an internet connection. As long as your candidate has a cell phone, something 97% of Americans own, they’ll have access to your interview process.
When you interview with video, your candidate needs several things to make it possible. These include a computer with a microphone and webcam. Then there’s the space where they interview. Your ideal candidate may not have access to a professional space to conduct a video interview, affecting recruiter bias and potentially costing you a high-quality hire. None of these is a problem when you interview via phone.
Virtual phone interviews remove most of the technological barriers that come with remote hiring. Plus, they offer a way to widen your candidate pool while improving the candidate experience.
A positive candidate experience is essential in finding and retaining the best talent available. As such, more and more companies are looking for virtual interview solutions to improve their hiring process. Virtual phone interviews, in particular, grant candidates a great deal of flexibility and consistency.
Recruiting the best talent is more than making a faster hire. It takes understanding what candidates want and expect out of the hiring process. From what we learned during the Covid pandemic and the Great Resignation, we know that employees expect their employers to be responsive. That expectation naturally extends to the hiring process. After all, the hiring process is the first place a candidate will interact with a potential employer.
With on-demand phone interviews, you get a consistent candidate experience, even more so than video interviews. Consistency is essential in ensuring that every candidate gets the same opportunity. On-demand interviews allow recruiters to record their questions and deliver them in the same manner to every candidate.
Plus, the flexibility of on-demand phone interviews extends to both candidates and recruiters. Neither will ever have to schedule around the other for the screening, and each can conduct their side of the interview at a time of their convenience. Qualifi’s research has found that the flexibility to interview outside of typical business hours brings in 75.5% more interviews than traditional methods. Between this consistency and flexibility, virtual phone interviews are simply the superior option. However, there is yet another benefit to discuss.
When you’re looking to automate the tedium out of your hiring process, it’s always with the overarching goal of improving your time-to-hire. According to Zippia, approximately 51% of hiring managers have found that interview scheduling software provides a faster time-to-hire. Of course, incorporating on-demand interviews alongside this software increases this number drastically.
Adopting these means to improve the time-to-hire is becoming increasingly essential to remain competitive in the labor market. According to Forbes, the best talent is off the market within 10 days. Time is not on the recruiter’s side.
For the fastest time-to-hire, you should look to phone interviews. Virtual interviews promote multitasking, allowing a recruiter to focus on multiple tasks while they listen to each interview as if it was a podcast. It is this quality of the virtual interview that allows recruiters to review more candidates faster. Faster reviewing means a candidate will hear from a recruiter sooner, resulting in a better candidate experience while reaching the best talent before your competitors.
To see the benefits of on-demand phone interviews over video firsthand, schedule a demo of Qualifi.
