Video interview coming of age as recruitment tool

A new crop of UAE video-interview specialists claim to save recruiters time and money by screening job candidates via webcam rather than in an office meeting room.

Residents of the Arabian Gulf love YouTube – but will they embrace online video when it comes to recruitment?

The handful of video-interview specialists that have launched in the Middle East would certainly like to think so.

Services such as My Interview, Big Screen and Sonru claim to save recruiters time and money by screening job candidates via webcam, rather than in the office meeting room.

For UAE jobseekers, the emergence of such services means Skype skills become just as important as sharp suits as they look to make a virtually perfect impression on employers.

My Interview, launched by the UAE-based consultancy Urban Associates, allows employers to pose up to five questions to candidates, who record and send back video responses.

Rauf Mammadov, director and co-founder of Urban Associates, says it is only a matter of time before video interviewing goes mainstream in the Middle East.

“YouTube gets almost 258 million daily views from the Middle East. The question is, if there’s online viewing, why not have online interviewing?” he says.

Mr Mammadov says the product makes financial sense because it is 10 times quicker than conducting a face-to-face interview, so it cuts down on HR costs. Most real-life interviews are a waste of time, he says, because recruiters generally decide on a candidate’s suitability within minutes.

“If the answer is no, he will still have to spend a boring 45 minutes asking clichéd questions,” Mr Mammadov says.

My Interview, which claims to be the first video-interviewing platform to support Arabic, charges employers a minimum of $12 per candidate interview. Existing clients include a Dubai government department, and a major airline and bank based in the Gulf.

Mr Mammadov says the service could completely replace face-to-face interviews when it comes to finding some staff, especially juniors such as admin assistants or interns.

Yet that is where some rivals disagree.

Wilson Cochrane, chief executive and founder of the UK-headquartered Big Screen, says video interviews can never replace real-life meetings between employers and candidates.

“You still need to do stress testing in your interviews,” he said. “You can get 90 per cent of the way to hiring them [via video]; you could be happy about their physicality, language skills and presentation. But until you sit down with them and say ‘what would you do if …’ and you interrupt them, interviewing will always have a place.”

Where Big Screen comes in – as its name suggests – is in screening large numbers of candidates via video, before shortlisting them for real-life interviews. It allows companies to set up to seven questions for candidates; unlike with My Interview, candidates are given the chance to record, delete and re-record their responses before submitting them.

The company, which was formed in 2011, is conducting its global launch this month at the Careers UAE 2015 recruitment exhibition in Dubai.

“In the USA and UK, hiring managers are disappointed with who they interview 60 per cent of the time,” said Mr Cochrane. “A more shocking stat that we got from Dubai was that some of the line managers are finding it is closer to 80 per cent. And they’re crying out for a way of sorting the wheat from the chaff before they do the face-to-face interview.”

Video interviewing can save the largest companies “millions of dollars per year”, he added, partly by cutting the time spent on an initial interview to 15 minutes, compared to the typical hour for a face-to-face interaction.

“It’s not unusual for any organisation to be spending between $4,000 and $6,000 per hire in that screening and interviewing process,” said Mr Cochrane. “So if a company is hiring 1,000 employees in a year, that amounts to $4 million to $6m. Big Screen can reduce that cost by 35 to 55 per cent.”

Dave Watkins, sales director at Big Screen Middle East, said face-to-face hiring costs could be even higher in the UAE, because many firms rely on senior managers rather than HR for recruitment. “That’s when the cost of screening goes through the roof,” he said.

Despite the claimed financial advantages of video interviews, some experts say the technology has been slow to take off in the Middle East.

“We first launched video CVs close to a decade ago. The challenge with the technology is that both employers and jobseekers are still slow in adopting it,” said Rabea Ataya, chief executive of the recruitment site Bayt.com.

“So while I believe that video will play a larger role in recruiting, it will still take a significant amount of time before it reaches critical mass, and it will be used primarily as a pre-screening method for face-to-face interviews rather than a replacement of them.”

So the skateboarding dogs of YouTube may be ahead for now – but it could be only a matter of time before the video job interview catches up.