The ethereal glow of the midnight moon nips at your heels as you try to outrun the Halloween horrors closing in. Your pace quickens as you hear the ache of a casket creaking open. Then another. And out from their shadowy depths floats a ghastly white sight...
Your resumes. Your old, unseen resumes.
They linger harmlessly in the air for a moment before lurching forward, closing in on your position. You head desperately for a rusty gate ahead, a sign hanging overhead with the words "Resume Graveyard" stretched across the top like the crooked grin of a Jack-O-Lantern. The exit is within reach when suddenly your foot catches a gnarled tree branch, sending you sprawling to the ground. Tattered sheets of paper engulf you...
"Reeead meeee," your neglected creations cry. "Reeead meeee."
And ... scene. Now that's how you introduce a new product.
Sure, it's probably not what you're used to, but then again, neither is SFX On-demand Interviewing. It's a bit hyperbolic (must be the Halloween spirit talking), but that doesn't make it any less true. I can assure you, the Resume Graveyard is very real.
Candidates sink hours of time and energy into perfecting their resumes, adding in every minor piece of work experience. But the average recruiter spends just 7.4 seconds reading them, and 92% say that soft skills are actually more important than technical skills in driving hires, anyway.
So here's a crazy idea: no more resumes (how happy would recruiters and candidates be, right?). But okay, at minimum, not only resumes. We built on-demand interviewing within our CRM to enhance the laborious process of resume reviewing and phone screening most recruiters have accepted as the industry standard.
What's on-demand interviewing?
Our virtual, streamlined video and audio interview module modernizes the screening process with a conversational user interface (UI) and helps recruiters meet talent sooner, at scale.
Think about it this way:
- What if you had a 10-minute audio introduction to every silver medalist in your CRM?
- Or a 15-min recorded video interview from your shortlist of engineers before sending them to a hiring manager for the initial phone call?
- Or an effective way to automate screening for the 15 interested students who came to your virtual campus event?
Yes, yes, and yes. It's a lot less scary for recruiters and hiring managers to qualify talent when they have video and audio responses built directly into the contact record. On-demand interviewing isn't a new concept, but ours is definitely a new approach. And, most importantly, it's part of the CRM.
Here's what this new platform does, and why it can bring your talent pipelines back from the grave.
It strengthens talent qualification
Serious question, when was the last time you read anything (besides this blog post, of course)? By 2022, video will make up 82% of all internet traffic, and a study showed that people retain 95% of a message when they watch it, compared to just 10% when they read it.
Translation: as a recruiter, you're going to learn and remember way more about a candidate by watching a short video than you will from reading a resume. This means qualifying candidates better and faster. Check this out:
- According to a LinkedIn survey, 77% of hiring managers agree it's hard to know what skills candidates possess without a skill assessment.
- And on the other side, 76% of professionals wish there was a way for employers to verify their skills so they stand out.
And here's the thing, on-demand interviewing isn't just proactive skill checking. It's also proactively building a better candidate profile for the future, all in one place.
The recordings live in the candidate's profile in the CRM and are easily rankable and sortable.
Once you create the assessment from a list of templates, you can send it via CRM workflows to targeted audiences, and each candidate can complete it on their own time. The interview then lives in the CRM and is rankable and sortable Ñ breathing life into your pipelines beyond the resume.
It saves time
Here's a real horror story: Recruiters spend 1,305 hours a year on the phone filtering through wrong fits and unqualified candidates. That's not exactly what I would call an economical use of time.
On-demand interviewing reduces this wasted effort, ensuring that recruiters are not only qualifying applicants pre-apply, but also qualifying pipelines. That, hopefully, means marketing more open jobs to the right people in your database and more qualified applicants. Candidates complete the interviews at their own convenience, and because the platform will auto-assign an initial score to the assessment based on keywords mentioned, it's easy to filter out candidates who don't match vital criteria (58% of hirers agree that skill assessments help pinpoint the right talent faster).
The old way of phone screening hundreds of people is very much like trying to find a needle in a haystack on-demand interviewing removes the haystack and leaves you with just a pile of needles (aka qualified candidates).
It makes recorded interviewing approachable
While we certainly live in a video-first world (especially now that remote work is so common in the COVID era), I can appreciate that some of you out there may be getting stress sweats while reading this.
I get it. For candidates who aren't tech-savvy, the concept of on-demand interviewing might feel unnatural and intimidating. Our design team created the UI with those people in mind, ensuring that the experience would be as comfortable and conversational as possible. It's simple and user-friendly, with a colorful palette that looks like your favorite app plus, the AI is built to retain the human element candidates are familiar with.
For people who typically panic over the thought of appearing on video, this paradigm shift may be uneasy at first. But video is the new normal in a post-COVID world, and the sooner you start implementing this new tech and making it feel as approachable as possible Ñ the quicker your talent will adapt. Plus...
It empowers better decisions
I can't tell you how many times I've applied for a job I was qualified for, but was kept up at night wondering if my resume ever saw the light of day and I'm not alone. Over 52% of people feel their skills are overlooked in the hiring process, and 24% say they struggle to get an interview for a job even though they possess 100% of the skills required.
Most of the time, all candidates can do is close their eyes, click "Apply," and hope the Resume Graveyard doesn't claim another victim. But with on-demand interviewing, candidates can dynamically engage in the screening process and feel empowered to let their traits and skills shine through early on.
Recruiters agree. 85% said skill assessments make the hiring process more fair. The option to audio screen and use keyword-based scoring (vs. scoring facial expressions or mannerisms) futhers the effort to reduce bias and pinpoint the right talent fits. Win, win.
Why care?
We need to change the narrative. Hiring managers already assess talent post-apply, and are getting smarter and smarter on how to do so. Why are we not assessing our talent database and pipelines before we ask them to apply? Well, now we are.
Resumes simply aren't the best way to analyze and understand potential hires. Plus, turnover and wrong fits cost businesses millions of dollars each year because teams are hiring too quickly or hiring on not enough information, filling pipelines off of static resumes that may or may not be read, or even accurate.
It's time to evolve, and leave the old process dead and buried. Right next to all those unread resumes.
