what’s the deal with one-way recorded video interviews?

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

Over the past year, I’ve been applying for jobs and have been invited for some interviews. I’ve noticed that a few of the places that I’ve applied to responded to my application by requesting a pre-recorded video interview.

I’m really put off by this practice. I would need to find the time to review the questions, write out sufficiently detailed answers to each question, then find a place to film myself answering each question. It feels imbalanced to expect this much effort to create what is basically a detailed video essay, when I haven’t even been given the chance to have an actual conversation with a person from the company. What if I have questions about the position that I want answered before making an informed decision?

I was curious about your opinion on the increased use of pre-recorded video interviews.

I hate them.

People who like them argue that they eliminate the back-and-forth of scheduling since candidates can do it at whatever time is convenient for them, and hiring managers can watch at their convenience.

But it’s unreasonable to ask candidates to invest that kind of time in answering questions without having the opportunity to ask questions of their own to determine if they’re even interested in the job. If an employer needs specific information about candidates before they can do a first culling of their applicant pool, they can ask people to address those things in their cover letter or as part of their application.

Moreover, for the vast majority of jobs, you don’t need to see people’s faces at this stage, not to mention race, age, and other protected characteristics that are well established to lead to unconscious bias, even in people who don’t intend it. And yes, you’re going to see those things at some point in the process, but there’s lots of evidence that the later in the process that happens, the better your chances of negating some of that bias.

One-way video interviews also put a higher burden on most candidates, who need to find a quiet place where they won’t be interrupted, worry about whether they and their setting look professional enough, and deal with the awkwardness of being filmed in a one-way conversation where they don’t know exactly what they’re being judged on beyond the content of their answers … again, all before they’ve had a real conversation that would allow them to ask their own questions.

From the hiring manager’s side, it’s also ridiculously inefficient; it takes much longer to watch videos of people answering questions — particularly the number of them you’re looking at this early in the screening process — than it does to sort through traditional applications.

If the job requires the ability to speak off the cuff in a polished and persuasive manner, then by all means build an assessment for that into your hiring process — but one-way video interviews are frequently used for jobs where that’s not in any way an important qualification, which leads to decisions about who to move forward and who to reject being based on the wrong things.

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