What do you do when you need to aggressively grow a market and educate your HR customers about your innovative product that is bound to disrupt the way they have always practiced their profession, but yield better outcomes?
HireVue gave a compelling demonstration on how to do it at last week’s Digital Disruption Conference in Park City, Utah. I became immersed in HireVue’s approach to educating talent acquisition professionals using artificial intelligence (AI) to assess job candidates.
In case you didn’t know, HireVue provides Live and OnDemand video candidate interviewing solutions and Coordinate for scheduling interviews. HireVue is now expanding the use of its video solution to address pre-hire assessments, coaching, and onboarding.
In particular, HireVue’s Assessment solution uses technology to gather thousands of data points — possibly 25,000 data points — from candidates’ video-recorded responses, word choices, expressions, emotions, and intonation. HireVue’s proprietary algorithm uses these data points, along with the organization’s own past performance and hiring data, to predict the candidate(s) who will be the best fit for the position. What is surprising is that to accomplish this, each candidate only needs to answer five or six questions. Traditional assessments tend to utilize many more questions and take much more time to complete.
Sounds like hocus pocus, but it isn’t. I-O psychologists have been interpreting assessment data and predicting success for a long time. What’s new is the way HireVue gathers the data from the video interviews. To date, HireVue has recorded about 4 million video interviews, and expects to have 5 million by year’s end. That means HireVue has accumulated millions of data points to help determine benchmarks for a variety of positions, in many different industries.
To showcase the benefits of its solution, HireVue conducted conference sessions with clients, who described how video interviewing and video assessments have improved their outcomes for time-to-hire, reduced attrition, reduction of bias, quality of hire, and candidate experience.
HireVue leaders also led multiple sessions describing their technology in broad terms. They:
- Showed how this technology is better than regular one-on-one interviews
- Explained the impact on the hiring process/workflows
- And explained how, in some cases, the recruiter position would be restructured to concentrate on candidate attraction, communications, and other responsibilities. This change would differ by organization depending on the hiring workflow, position sought, and other criteria.
Attendees listened and asked questions relevant to their own situations, such as a healthcare organization asking whether they could use the same video assessment for both an RN position and a case manager position, where a common requirement is to be an RN. Understandably, the answer required some further evaluation. This type of question shows the complexity of the decision to use video assessments.
The benefits of video assessments seem to be great, in particular around shortening time-to-hire, providing consistency and structure for interviewing/assessing, and in increasing quality of hire. Indeed, there are many organizations where time-to-hire is crucial, where there are lost sales/opportunities for every day a position remains vacant.
Some of the challenges relate to how organizations currently assess their candidates, and whether they are going to continue to use the same protocols, or use HireVue video assessments in conjunction with, or instead of, their current assessments. It seems HireVue already has an eye out for that, and is developing its Assessment platform for use with other assessment providers.
I look forward to seeing how all this innovation plays out. Well done, HireVue.
–Daria Friedman, Principal Analyst, Talent Acquisition, Brandon Hall Group