The Good And The Bad Of Video Conference Interviews

How to make it work for you

As the Covid-19 pandemic closed offices around the world, the practice of interviewing as we know it was forced to change. When the option to interview candidates in person was taken away, using video conferencing software to screen potential job seekers seemed like the obvious solution.

Even as many places begin to reopen, it’s hard to imagine video conferencing interviewing going away, especially as more companies recognize the viability to remote-only workplaces and realize the cost savings from not having to pay to travel candidates in for interviews. While those services simulate an in-person meeting, they are not the same thing. What’s more, the differences between face-to-face interaction and video conferencing have significant psychological costs.

The best HR departments will learn to recognize and mitigate the negative impacts of video conferencing while rethinking their processes to explore the new possibilities that the medium of video conferencing introduces.

Most professionals have probably done enough video conferencing by now to understand that the process feels very different from real life conversation. The social cues we’ve relied on all of our lives to help us know when someone is listening and engaged or when someone else in a conversation is about to talk are lost. Without them, there are frequently longer than normal gaps between people speaking or multiple people attempting to speak at the same time. These frustrations happen even under ideal internet conditions, but as anyone who has stared at a buffering screen knows, unreliable WIFI compounds the stress of any situation.

Having to ask for someone to repeat themselves multiple times because of a bad connection disrupts everyone’s engagement. The resulting conversations feel awkward and stilted.

Aside from the stunted audio input, video conferencing introduces uncanny visual inputs such as showing all participants on the screen in boxes as if they were in the opening credits of the Brady Bunch. In normal conversations, we use our gaze awareness to understand what others are looking at and paying attention to. Eye contact communicates engagement. During video conferencing, we lose these clues. People look at screens for input instead of looking at their camera. In addition, we have a real-time view of our own faces on the screen, which distracts us and increases our level of self-consciousness. This can have the effect of making us more prone to negative emotions and to being more judgmental. This state of mind can be detrimental to our judgment of candidates and candidates’ judgments of themselves.

All of this means that our brains need to work harder to process the information we’re taking in and control for the ways that video conferencing is making us feel. The resulting cognitive overload can leave us feeling fatigued, isolated and anxious. If we are not aware of what is causing these negative emotions, it is easy to see how one may attribute the cause of that state to the person they are interviewing. Indeed, there is evidence that video conferencing can put us in a state of finding the people we are speaking with less trustworthy.

HR professionals need to work to train themselves and their organizations to be aware of these potentially negative side effects of video conferencing and adjust for the bias they introduce into the equation. Train your people to recognize the impact that video conferencing can have on them, so that when they start feeling off, they work to distinguish what the candidate is saying from any bias caused by video conferencing.  

To mitigate some of the uncanny effects of video conferencing, interviewers should place the window with the candidate’s view on their screen as closely as possible to their camera so that they can watch the candidate while speaking but also appear to be making eye contact by looking at the camera. At the same time, encourage anyone interviewing candidates to optimize their setup to minimize distractions - turn off their self-view, settle into a comfortable spot where they can stay engaged and focused, and eat something beforehand so they can replace the mental calories video conferencing burns. If a team of people is interviewing, ensure that they coordinate beforehand to determine an order of how they are going to ask questions or develop a way to indicate that they would like to ask the next question.

This cooperation beforehand can help minimize some of the awkward pauses between when a candidate finishes talking and someone else replies.

From the perspective of the job candidate, the stress of video interviewing is compounded. They’re suffering all the negative effects that video conferencing has on your team while also being in the vulnerable position of interviewing for a job. On top of that, they may be feeling a bit as if their privacy is invaded.

Before the pandemic we would never invite ourselves into a candidate's home to conduct an interview, but that is essentially what we're doing when we’re conducting an interview over a video conferencing app. Not everyone has a quiet, tidy home office to conduct an interview from, and even for those that do, they may still have a part of their mind that is occupied with monitoring the presence of their children, pets, partners, etc. hoping that they can make it through the interview uninterrupted. At this point, your team probably knows the video conferencing software your company has chosen and you likely know what the inside of everyone’s apartment or house looks like. The same comfort cannot be assumed for the candidate, and all of this makes for an uncomfortable cocktail of stress and anxiety.

HR professionals should put as much or more care into preparing their interviewees for the experience as they do their interviewers. Develop a set of best practices for your team on how best to respect a candidate’s privacy and put them at ease. These should include guidelines on what to do if a person does not want to be on camera. If your interview process involves working through any assessments or anything else that might involve screen sharing, don’t put the candidate in the position of having to show their computer screen. Instead, make sure one of the interviewers is prepared to do so at the appropriate time.

Once these guidelines are developed, share them with the candidate prior to interviewing. Construct a virtual interview conferencing guide that details how your organization conducts video interviews and what exactly will be expected of them. This guide should include some of the tips provided to interviewers on how to mitigate the effects of video conferencing stress. It should also clearly lay out what your expectations are for being on camera. Let them know that being on camera helps with communication but you understand that there are circumstances that sometimes prevent that from being a comfortable option for everyone. You should also provide a contingency plan for any technical difficulties. This should include a plan to follow in cases like a poor internet connection or an outage of the video conferencing servers.

On the day of the interview, optimize the experience so that there is an adjustment time, especially for those who haven’t used your video conferencing service of choice before. In your guide, let them know that you will open up the room five minutes before the interview is scheduled to start and ensure you or someone from your team is there to assist the candidate in making sure their sound, microphone, and computer works. Any time that is leftover can be used to help the candidate settle in and get used to the environment before they begin the more formal part of the interview.

Above all else, you should set your candidate up for success in the same ways you set your own team up for success. Clearly communicating that you understand that this may be a stressful process for them and explaining how you intend to help alleviate some of that stress can also show the care your organization has for its employees and can work in your favor as a recruiting tool.

As we become more comfortable with video conferencing’s place in the workplace, we will surely find new ways to overcome some of its limitations, but smart HR professionals should already be thinking about how to use the differences inherent in video conferencing to their advantage. While most people now use the service as a drop-in replacement for an in-person conference, the fact that the entire thing is mediated by a computer can have some benefits. Some job fairs have already recognized this value as they’ve gone virtual and offer participating companies the chance to have a waiting room that presents videos and other recruiting information to help candidates learn about their organization in new ways.  

In time, more formal interaction could become part of the process, perhaps by replacing hypothetical behavioral questions by presenting video and audio of actual situations and having candidates answer questions about how they would react. As the medium evolves, the most successful organizations will be the ones that can innovate new processes that leverage the possibilities of video conferencing to create a unique interviewing experience.