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5 Ways to Use Video in Your Recruiting & Hiring Process

Looking for ways to spice up your company’s recruiting brand? Check out this quick list of five ways to use videos in your recruiting and interviewing processes. Then, start converting more of your career site visitors into actual applicants, and eventually, new and engaged employees.

1 – Highlight Videos on Your Company’s Careers Portal

Use Video to Promote CityThis may be the most obvious and already widely used idea; however, it just might be one of the most effective for engaging your site visitors to stay on your pages longer. A wide variety of subject areas can be covered on the branded careers portal available through your applicant tracking system (ATS). Videos might focus on the following topics:

  • Testimonials given by current employees about why they enjoy working at the company
  • Highlights from various company events and charitable projects to demonstrate the company culture to potential applicants
  • Informational videos about the city or region in which your business resides – this is particularly helpful if you do a great deal of nationwide searches for candidates and relocate new employees to your area

2 – Make Your Confirmation Emails Memorable & Informational

These days it can be very difficult for even medium-sized businesses to personally respond to each individual that submits an employment application. As a result, its quite common for organizations to use their ATS to set up auto-generated email responses whenever a new application is received. These are critical as they confirm to the applicant that his/her submission was successful, and they can greatly reduce the number of phone calls received by applicants who want to check on the status of their application. However, even though personalization strings can be used in these email templates, how exciting is email text for the applicant who is anxious to learn more?
 Use Video in Application Confirmations
In your email message, why not embed or link to a video that your company has created to explain the steps involved in the hiring process:

  • In the intro, thank the applicant for his/her interest in your company.
  • Explain how long it might take to process all applications for the position and when responses are generally sent to inform applicants of next steps.
  • Describe the different interview phases that are usually involved in the hiring process – including time intervals between each phase as well as who is generally involved from the company.

Not only will applicants be impressed that you have created a video for this step, but they will come away from the experience with more information about what to expect — without additional effort from your recruiting staff.

3 – Embed Video in Job Descriptions in Your Applicant Tracking System

When adding a new job listing to your ATS, embed code from your video hosting website to feature relevant videos from right within your job description. In this scenario, videos focusing on your office or field environment, and/or interviews with other employees in the same position or department would be well received. ExactHire applicant tracking system even has a designated field allowing video embed code to be pasted in when adding a new job description.

R+L Truckload & Global Logistics in Fort Myers, Florida, is a big believer in incorporating video into the organization’s job listings. Many different employees have roles in the videos it has produced. Here’s how one of its videos appears within the ATS on a recent job description:
 Use Video in Job Descriptions | ExactHire
And, check out their video:

4 – Insert Safety Videos Into Employment Application & Survey Applicants

Embed Safety Video on ApplicationsIf certain positions available in your organization require heeding important safety procedures or following certain protocols, then consider the benefits associated with embedding a video for applicants to watch during their employment application submission. This can be a powerful way of better qualifying your applicants for a position that normally attracts a high volume of application submissions – especially if many of the submissions have traditionally been from people who aren’t qualified or truly engaged in the role.

A short video might discuss certain steps that are followed as a regular part of the job. In the application, ask applicants to watch the video and then answer a series of short questions about the video. Serious applicants who want to work for your organization will watch the video and then answer the questions correctly. Candidates who are just applying for anything and everything will hit the video speed bump and think twice about taking the time to finish. For those candidates who do answer the questions, utilize scoring and/or disqualification filters in your ATS to rank applicants based on the number of questions they answered correctly.

5 – Video Resources for Long Distance Interviewing

There are times when it isn’t practical or cost-effective to interview candidates in person. Luckily, a number of affordable (and in some cases free) tools are available to enable organizations to video conference with applicants. Companies that conduct nationwide searches for specific positions can especially benefit from the modern convenience of interviewing applicants on-screen. Applications such as Skype, Google Hangouts, FaceTime, and GoToMeeting are just a few that can meet this need.

Take it a step further and record the video interview to make it available to other managers who are unable to participate in the interviewing process. Or, reference the recorded session to remind yourself of interviewee answers when you are comparing final candidates and near making an offer.

Image Credit: Indianapolis at Night by Rob Annis

 

Unique Job Specific Screening Questions Part 2 – Nonprofit Leadership

For those of you who read my first Unique Job Specific Screening Questions blog, then you know that many of the deal-breaker and essay questions sampled in this piece are especially common to high-volume positions for which one may recruit frequently. But what about your organization’s leadership roles? While you may not be creating these types of job listings in your applicant tracking software very often, it is still critical to identify the make-it-or-break-it questions for these high-level positions, as well.

In this follow-up, we’ll focus on the nonprofit industry. Easy-to-assign screener questions are just one of the many benefits available to not-for-profits that use technology to go paperless. A special thank you goes to Bryan Orander, Founder and President at Indianapolis-based Charitable Advisors, for sharing some of his preferred job-specific screening questions for certain key leadership roles in the nonprofit arena.

Download our hiring process questions guide

First Executive Director Screening Questions

  1. Tell us about your experience working with a nonprofit board of directors to help them add meaningful value to the organization and the relationship you strive to create with the board.
  2. Tell us about your experience and success in building relationships for fund development that could apply to this position.
  3. Based on either your personal knowledge of our service area or your research, what do you see as some of the greatest opportunities in our service area?
  4. Tell us about how you have exhibited the skills that will be needed as the First Executive Director of this organization. Consider that you would be wearing many hats and expected to work frequently at the community visioning level; and, that you would be hands-on with people, projects and paperwork while you work to grow the organization and build a staff team.
  5. Tell us about your experience in engaging businesses and neighbors in efforts to benefit their community…ideally, in a multicultural setting.

President Screening Questions

  1. Describe what you feel are the essential components of successful fundraising.
  2. Describe your most significant accomplishment.
  3. Provide an example of how you have taken on a leadership role to make our community a better place to live.
  4. What role could or should our organization play in making our community a world class place to live, and what initial steps would you take to make that happen?

Executive Director/CEO Screening Questions

  1. What fundraising approaches would you see as most important to an organization like ours, and how have you used them successfully?
  2. Describe how you have successfully engaged board members in sharing your organization’s story and taking ownership for raising funds.
  3. The Executive Director/CEO will be leading the Board’s evaluation of the organization’s current name and brand identity. Tell us how you would approach conducting such an evaluation.

If you would like to share your own ideas for screening questions for leadership positions – in any industry – please comment on this blog. We can certainly all greatly benefit from our combined collective knowledge of hiring and selection tips. For more specific information about how to leverage job-specific screening questions in your own selection process, please contact ExactHire to learn about our applicant tracking software options.

Download our hiring process questions guide

Unique Job Specific Screening Questions

Around here, we sometimes call the unique job specific screening questions available in our applicant tracking software portal the “deal-breaker” questions. You may attach these questions to individual job postings in order to gather more objective information about applicants up front. In turn, the Screening Questions Reports allow you to quickly compare applicants’ answers to one another and change status codes on the fly. This saves a lot of time as you don’t need to view the entire applicant record if an applicant has already answered a deal-breaker question in such a way that he/she removes him/herself from consideration for a position by failing to meet basic requirements.

But job-specific screening questions are also a great place to feature thought-provoking essay-type questions so that you may better understand an applicant’s motivation, inspiration and passion.

Here are some questions worth noticing from both categories. Maybe you’ll feel inspired to use some of them in your own job listings…

Download our hiring process questions guide

Deal-Breaker Screening Questions

  1. What is the current expiration date of your [insert license/certification here]?
  2. How many years of experience do you have in [insert desired field/discipline]?
  3. Please list your salary history and minimum salary requirement.
  4. What is the maximum number of employees that you have supervised in a job?
  5. Are you experienced in administering performance evaluations?
  6. Have you ever terminated an employee?
  7. Do you have any experience using Excel for [insert desired activity…i.e. financial reporting]?
  8. The work schedule for this position is generally 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday. Will this schedule work for you?
  9. Do you have experience using a cash register and/or handling cash?
  10. Please mark all locations at which you are interested in applying.
  11. I am aware that the company may require a drug test as part of the hiring process. Y/N.
  12. Mark all languages in which you are either conversational or fluent.
  13. Do you have a valid CDL?
  14. Mark all the software applications in which you are proficient.
  15. What machine equipment are you able to operate?

Essay Screening Questions

  1. What do you feel is the most difficult part of customer service?
  2. Share a difficult issue you have had to confront with an employee and how you resolved it.
  3. Describe your level of experience with third party audits and/or governmental agencies.
  4. Think of a time when you knew a co-worker was taking shortcuts that you knew would impact quality negatively. What did you do?
  5. What volunteer work have you done that has prepared you for this position? Why do you feel it was of value?
  6. Imagine you were in a job where you had the opportunity to do what you do best every day. How are you spending most of your time? What results are you generating?
  7. What are your learning goals? What particular skills do you want to learn? What specific challenges do you want to experience?
  8. What is the most dangerous aspect of your current job? How do you manage the risk?
  9. What are some things you would like to avoid in a job?
  10. What is the best feedback you have ever received from a supervisor? What made it so good?
  11. Please list the top 3 things that are most important to you in considering new employment.
  12. In what kind of culture and environment do you do your best work?
  13. What really productive partnerships or mentors have you had? What was it about these relationships that made them work so well for you? What did you contribute to these relationships?
  14. What are your favorite screening questions to use when narrowing your field of applicants? Please let us know with your comments.
Download our hiring process questions guide

If you are interested in using job-specific screening questions in our applicant tracking software, please contact ExactHire to schedule a demo.

Image credit: Question! by Stefan Baudy (contact)