John Jonas (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, Ep.132) examines pros and cons of using video interviews when hiring, especially for Filipino candidates. He argues against using video interviews early because many Filipinos find them uncomfortable (worry about background noise, home appearance) and because video scheduling is time-consuming; instead he recommends weeding candidates via email/chat first, then using video calls later with top 2–3 candidates, and to prepare questions in advance. He also concedes video interviews are useful for quickly checking internet/computer capability, personal rapport, and spoken-English ability when relevant.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 132, the pros and Cons of Doing Video Interviews. So we're. We were about four days into our riding in France a month ago, and we rode into the medieval city of Provan, which was really, really interesting to me. You can see a picture of it here. We ride along the roads, and all of a sudden we're just riding into City Wall, where there's like a gate and ramparts and it's all still there. The city's built in the 1100s and it's still there. And, like, people live inside these city walls now. And it was really cool. And as I passed through, I wondered what life must have been like a thousand years ago where people's primary function was every day was just to survive. Like they. You had to get food. Obviously, life is very different today. They were not concerned about video interviews and probably really not concerned about interviewing because you knew everybody who was around you and you needed to hire someone. Well, you knew everybody that existed. So let's talk about video interviews, because I get asked about doing them with OFS all the time. So I don't usually do video interviews when I'm hiring someone. And here's. There's a bunch of reasons why. Number one, most Filipinos don't like it. They don't want to do a video interview. They are worried that you're not going to understand them. They're worried that you're going to hear the chickens clucking in the background, that you're going to see the house, that it's really small and maybe it's dirty, and there might be people walking in and out, or you're going to hear dogs barking. They don't want to do it. It's scary for them. That's one. Number two, video interviews take a long time. And frankly, I'm lazy. And when I'm hiring someone, taking a long time to do it just does not. Does not interest me. And I think there's faster ways of weeding out the good, weeding out the bad, and finding the good. Number three, it can put good applicants at a disadvantage when doing a video call is completely unrelated to the job that they're going to do. And whether they speak good English or not is completely irrelevant. I just need them to write good English. And you can get good written English without having good spoken English. And I've seen it lots of times. And so someone who's not confident in being on camera is. Might be the best candidate for the job. And yet they don't want to do a video interview, so they don't show up. So those are all reasons why I don't do it. And I'll just give you kind of an example of this. I have a developer on my team who, I spoke to him on the phone once years and years ago. It was impossible. I could not understand a word he said. And yet when we communicate through email, it's great. I've never. We've never had a problem like he's. His English is typed. English is great. It's perfect. And so I just decided, oh, yeah, this isn't. This is unnecessary for me. And. And it is. It's not helpful for them. They don't want to do it. So now, having said that, there are some advantages to doing a video interview and I understand why people do it. So number one, it's a quick test of whether they have good enough Internet and computer to handle a job. Like, doing a video interview is a really quick way to see, can your Internet handle this? Number two, a video call is really personal. Like, you get to see someone and you get a feeling for them really, really quickly doing a video interview. And number three, seeing how they do on a video call is a really good indicator of someone's English skills, especially if they're going to be doing voice anything, if they're going to be talking on the phone, if they're going to be setting appointments on the phone or they're going to be talking to customers. Whatever it is, doing a video interview is a really good way to determine that. However, in the hiring process, most people want to skip straight. Like, you get a bunch of applicants and you start scheduling interviews with them. And this is problematic for a number of reasons. I'm just going to cover a couple of them. Number one, doing video interviews takes a long time. And especially trying to schedule them and coordinate time zones and showing up and having people not show up takes a lot of time. And yes, you will filter people really quickly when you're doing it, but the amount of time it takes to filter the people is much longer than the way that I do it. It just takes longer. Maybe you're getting really good results that way, and so that's an advantage. So what I recommend you do is rather than try jumping straight to the video interview at the beginning, try and weed people out through email a little bit and then do the video interview later in the recruiting process. Number one, you're way more likely that people will show up once they feel more comfortable with you. They've communicated with you a couple times. They're way more likely to show up to the video interview. They'll be more relaxed. You'll get a better feeling of who they actually are rather than if it's your first interaction with them. Number two, doing five or ten video interviews takes a lot of time. If you do it with just your top two or three candidates, you're just going to spend a lot less time doing it and there's a lot less to go through. You have take fewer notes, you're going to spend fewer, less time coordinating. Do it with the top two or three, you'll have a much better experience. And then the third thing to doing this successfully is prepare your questions ahead of time. Don't just get on and not know what you're going to talk about. So prepare some questions. You may find the interview goes in various directions and that's totally fine. He doesn't have to go through your questions, but at least be prepared with something to talk about so that you, you have a way to drive the interview. In the end, let me just tell you most people's experience. So if the first thing you do is jump to a Skype interview or a video interview, zoom, whatever you try and schedule 10 of those 10, five of them just will drop out. They won't respond to you because they're too scared to do the video interview. Of those other five, they'll schedule with you, only two of them will show up. And the other three just won't show up because they were scared, but they wanted to schedule it in hopes that maybe you'd cancel it or something, I don't know. So now you're, you've successfully weeded out eight people. But those may have the two that showed up doesn't mean that they were the two best candidates out of the 10. They were just the two most willing to do a video interview. If it's at the end of the video, at the end of the interview process, like you've done a bunch of interviewing either through email or maybe through chat. Now you'll get two out of three people showing up. And now you have way better results for these interviews. So much less frustration, much higher success rate. If you do at the end of the interview process, the video Live call is a much more successful thing at the end.
