The Video Interview: Tech Tips
Chances are, you’re either using video interview software or have thought about adding it to your HRTech stack. Now more than ever, companies are moving from phone screens or in-person first-round interviews, to automated video interviews in order to reduce time-to-fill and improve the quality of candidates.
Video in Everyday Life
While some people are sure to stay away from video interviewing, most people have become very accustomed to video in their lives through Facetime, Instagram, Skype, etc. This is how we communicate with friends and family. Interestingly, many times this communication is asynchronous where we are recording a video to be seen later on by someone – which is the typical format that video interviews take.
It’s no surprise that the stats around video usage on the internet are fairly staggering. People are using video more, retaining more knowledge through video than other mediums, engaging at higher rates with video than other content. The bottom line is that video is a part of our everyday lives, and is now becoming more commonplace in the employee lifecycle.
Video Interviewing ROI
Video interviewing has a few key components that relate to a hard return on investment. “Hard ROI” in this case means a number that your CFO can appreciate and that translates back into dollars and cents. Of course, this is the holy grail of many HRTech investments, and many times hard to calculate.
While video interview platforms can lead to an increase in the number of quality applicants and save tremendous time when recruiting, the main source of return is from decreasing the time to fill.
Specifically, time to fill decreases because we are able to screen more candidates without having to actually sit down with each 1:1 during the first stages of the interview process. This becomes much more time-efficient, which means you can save days or even weeks without the hassles of scheduling and then sitting through all of these phone screens.
Relating Time to Fill to Dollars and Cents
So, the question then becomes how do we tie decreases in time to fill to a dollar number.
The easiest way to think about this with sales hiring. Let’s say a salesperson on average books $1 million in new business each year. That means that on average they are bringing in around $2,700/day in new sales ($1 mm / 365 days in a year).
So, for each day that we can get that salesperson into our organization, that means we are going to do an extra $2,700 in revenues, all else equal. While it’s harder to do this calculation for non-revenue generating roles, an easy rule of thumb is to take a person’s salary, and multiply it by three in order to get their annual “value.” Then, divide that number by 365 to get their daily number.
Ok, so let’s say we have ten salespeople that we are able to get ramped up 1 day earlier each. That’s 10 people * 1 day = 10 days saved, at $2,700/day, that’s $27k. Not bad!
You can do this math out for the roles in your organization to understand how decreases in time to fill will impact your business, and thus how aggressively you should go after them with new tools, processes. Etc.
Are you calculating the ROI from video interview software in another way? Let us know in the comments!