By Kathleen Driscoll
BridgeTower Media Newswires
"We were inundated with applications for a new position recently and one of our team members suggested that we get into using AI in our hiring, including using a one-way video interview platform that can speed up the process of screening applicants. If we go that route, I'm concerned about the candidate's experience, that some highly qualified candidates might be offended by the lack of personal connection. And that doesn't include other issues like potential bias. I see some advantages to these tools on the hiring side, but I don't think I would want to interview for a job on a one-way platform. Any thoughts? What else should we be watching for?"
Whether you like it or not, the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process has arrived. Whether it's in résumé scanning and screening, targeted job postings, psychological assessments or one-way video platforms, the tools are being embraced in increasing numbers by the recruiting world.
Specifically, one-way video interviewing appears to be gaining popularity for recruiters as a huge time-saving strategy. Employers can choose to use it by itself or decide to have recorded answers evaluated by artificial intelligence. Some products like those promoted by HireVue, for example, can automatically evaluate the candidates' demeanor, enthusiasm, word selection and facial expressions against those of current employees and decide whether to recommend the candidates for the next round.
Recruiters and career coaches see tremendous advantages to one-way interviewing in terms of identifying a variety of candidates, handling high volume, and moving the hiring process forward efficiently.
"Besides the obvious advantages of being able to connect with a more populous and diverse candidate base remotely, it also allows you to reflect, review and even share candidate responses to other members of your hiring team," says Carol Parker Walsh, founder and principal of a career consulting firm, Carol Parker Walsh LLC.
"One-way interviewing can also greatly reduce the stress associated with face-to-face interviewing. Even the most qualified candidate can appear less so due to the high level of stress and nervousness associated with face-to-face interviewing," she says.
Some job candidates struggle to see the advantages.
"It felt kind of weird," one job candidate told me recently after logging in and completing her five-question one-way interview. "I don't really know how I did."
Another one, who dressed up in a dorm room to answer questions via one-way video, said that it left him cold. If the company didn't care enough to talk with him in person, he wasn't sure he cared to continue the process at all. "It felt like you were being treated like any other commodity input into their business. If they aren't willing to see you onscreen and interact with you personally, that's an indicator that you might not get the development, both personal and professional, that you're looking for in the job."
And that assumption becomes the problem, says Scott Wintrip, a global recruiting strategist and author of "High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant." Since the process eliminates the ability of a hiring manager to build rapport and ask questions in the moment, many good candidates will go elsewhere. "Talented people have many options, making those employers who depersonalize the process second and third prospects."
Cara Heilmann, chief executive officer of Ready Reset Go, a San Francisco career coaching firm and president of the International Association of Career Coaches, believes that most candidates dislike losing the ability to make a personal connection, even if it's just the first screening interview. "It isn't a great candidate experience," she says. "I've coached many people who had to complete one-way video interviews. Of the group, 99 percent had a very strong negative reaction to the experience."
One-way video is indeed transformative in expediting the process of finding talent, Heilmann says. "It could be a panacea for many recruitment woes. How exciting to leapfrog several steps in selection and candidate interviews. Yet top-notch talent acquisition professionals know that each step of the selection process serves a purpose. When is the process of one-way video interviewing a great idea?"
Heilmann urges companies to reconsider using one-way videos If "candidate experience" is important to them. "If you still feel strongly about moving forward, have every member of the leadership team be a candidate and experience it first-hand."
With the increasing popularity of one-way video interviews, some experts are calling for more attention to how these interviews are handled and how they are integrated into the hiring process.
Ben Eubanks, principal analyst with Lighthouse Research & Advisory, a Huntsville, Ala. firm promoting modern strategies in human capital management and author of a book, "Artificial Intelligence in HR," said his company interviewed job candidates about their experiences with one-way video interviews. "What we found was candidates who said, 'you know what? I don't mind it - If I'm allowed to show what I can do. I want to be able to show my best abilities.'"
So if the one-way interview contains actual situational/behavioral questions pertinent to the job, like, "How would you respond to this situation or how would you handle an irate customer?" that might provide more insight. "We want you to tell us how you would solve this kind of problem that you're going to be facing every day in this job," Eubanks says. "If people have a chance to actually show their skill, and show what they can do, they are more satisfied.'"
If companies are going with one-way video, the research shows that an additional component like an assessment is also important in the hiring process, Eubanks says. "If we're moving away from just humans, we want to look for two things, the video piece, but also we're looking for an assessment or a test that allows us to see someone's abilities, their skills, their cognitive functions, their behaviors. So, we can judge them accurately, not just based on how well they can rehearse for this 30-second video clip, but who they really are, what's under the hood and what they bring to the table."
When a video is paired with a well-developed assessment, a company can more accurately decide who to bring in for an in-person or live video interview, he says.
Another issue frequently raised with one-way video is bias. You might lose whatever bias might be present in a live face-to-face meeting, but other problems might arise with bias depending on what is built into the algorithm, like facial recognition or automatic ranking. "You might have someone answering the questions with all the correct words. They might be highly qualified for the job, but maybe they have an accent that makes it harder for the algorithm to understand them," Eubanks says.
While it's "super cool and cutting edge" to have applicants submit a video that is analyzed by an AI algorithm, these proprietary algorithms are a "black box and only as good as the data used to train them," says Jonathan Westover, managing partner and principal at a consulting firm, Human Capital Innovations LLC and a professor of organizational leadership at Utah Valley University.
On the surface, these algorithms seem like a way to remove human biases and make candidate selection more objective but that's not true. "When AI is used, the biases are just baked directly into the algorithm and you will never be able to fully uncover how the biases impacted the hiring decision," he says.
Companies need to find ways to build human redundancies into the process, including cross-checking scoring and ranking a subset of applicants and monitoring their own biases and checking for their influence on scoring and rankings, he says.
As one-way video and AI tools gain more popularity, company recruiters find themselves struggling to balance the need to improve recruiting and candidate experience at the same time. "A lot of companies are rethinking how their hiring processes work. They're looking for ways to make them more effective but also more efficient," Eubanks says.
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Contact Kathleen Driscoll with questions or comments by email at kadriscoll20@gmail.com.
Published: Wed, Dec 30, 2020
