As firms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence-driven hiring platforms, many highly qualified candidates are finding themselves on the cutting room floor.
Your company requiring video submissions for a fucking application is the easiest “this company is batshit insane and there’s no possibility working for them could ever be worth it” red flag I’ve ever seen.
Yep. I literally told a company there was no legitimate legal reason they could possibly want this, and good luck with their search. What better way to practice racism, sexism, and ageism in the hiring process?
But purely on the premise of “you should take the time to record a video merely for the pleasure of maybe having us look at your application”, their expectations are way out of whack.
This isn’t like when Google put scavenger hunts or puzzles or whatever in ads and gave job offers to people who solved them. The people who got hired by those ads were following through out of curiosity/the fun of solving the problems, and that wasn’t the main/only way to get a job. It’s just a new absurd demand trying to push the threshold of what’s a legitimate ask.
I dunno what country you’re in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as “your application was not as strong as other candidates” but you need to be able to back that claim up if you’re challenged (and you can be challenged on it).
The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).
I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn’t worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say “you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry”.
If your selection criteria includes “they need to wear nice clothes” then you’re treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.
It’s perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role… but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I’m well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It’s not as bad as picking someone because they’re a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it’s still a bad policy.
Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.
Australia. It’s not clearly illegal but it’s dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.
Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.
The bank I’m with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it’s offensive they’ll be told to wear something else, but that’s a conversation I’d be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don’t like their response.
You’re hyper focusing on the dress part. There’s still the actual questions and overall sense of calm and comfort a person has in communicating on video, a skill that directly maps to this specific job.
I can’t imagine a front-of-house bank teller would need to have these skills. Maybe a question like, “tell me about a time a customer was unhappy and how you handled the situation?”. In which case, I imagine some people would like the chance to think about it at their leisure and record once or twice, and rewatch it before submitting to make sure they’re happy with it.
In the case of a single bank teller position with a dozen applicants, you’re right, a prerecorded video probably isn’t the most effective tool.
Imagine a company like Ally in the US, or idk, Commonwealth is the first one that comes to mind in Australia, hiring for a new video chat support function. 50 positions to fill with 1,000 applicants. Wouldn’t this tool maybe, possibly make a bit of sense? It directly maps to skills relevant to the position, and helps both candidates and hiring panels more efficiently work through the process without scheduling 1,000 x 30-minute interviews. Anyone who is uncomfortable being on video should consider one of the many non-video positions instead, like a traditional in-house bank teller position or a chat/phone support function with no video element.
I’ll give you another scenario. I have colleagues who recruit at university career fairs and professional org conferences and there has been a dramatic speedup in the process since I went through college grad and looking for a job 10-15 years ago. Candidates now expect interviews and answers same day or next. Any one company is limited in the number of people they can physically send to the fair. So in order to process the number of interested candidates in the timeframe they expect, we’ve relied on videoconf interviews with more hiring managers not physically present; candidates at the career fair booth jump on a tablet provided by the company and they go through a rapid 10 minute interview. As you can imagine, this can be a bit chaotic and high stress, so we’ve started giving the option for students to submit resumes a week or more in advance and the option for students to prerecord video of themselves answering set interview questions. The day of, they’re already in the system with an evaluation started, we can efficiently route them to the right person in the booth to talk about the types of jobs they’re interested in, and get them moving towards a potential offer that much quicker. I don’t have hard numbers, but anecdotally, there has been no shortage of students choosing to use the optional prerecorded video tool and almost all are using the optional resume presubmission instead of carrying paper copies around like I did.
See elsewhere in the thread for another scenario where this tool might be used effectively, high volume of international students applying for post grad positions when in-person interviews are not an option and scheduling live phone or video conference calls are difficult across time zones.
I’ll say it one more time so the folks in the back can hear. This is one tool to be used optionally for certain types of jobs and I think makes the most sense when there is a high volume of applicants and/or complex scheduling logistics. People also need to recognize that just like AI processing resumes, it’s already out there in use and it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
What legal reason(s) do you have for needing to see their appearance when making a decision on whether to hire them? You may have some, such as requiring a professional appearance. These need to be spelled out in the job requirements. It also opens the doors to claims of illegal discrimination, since this will be on full display. In the US, that includes race, age, and gender. Having a required video can also reveal protected classes like familial status and religion, depending on what’s in the background.
Whether an action is “Legal” is almost always dependent on context, and the lawyers/courts involved. A common tactic by racist nightclubs is to set a dress code, particularly on shoes. The argument is they aren’t refusing entry based on race, but on clothing. But the unauthorized shoes are the ones commonly worn by people of the race they’re discriminating against. Different courts have made different rulings on whether this (and similar actions) constitute racial discrimination.
By that logic, in-person interviews should also be illegal.
I go back to my comment somewhere in this thread about some symphony orchestras doing double blind auditions. If that is your position, then your issue is with general hiring practices, not with this video submissions in particular.
Yeah, I went through comments like this the last time I posted similar to reddit.
Like I said, I hate it from the candidate perspective. From the hiring manager perspective, I got over 200 resumes and that was after automated filtering and after a human HR person filtered them further. I am very open to your ideas for a more efficient way to filter through 200 perfectly acceptable resumes without conducting 2 months of back-to-back interviews. Automated application tools allow for a person to apply to 100 jobs quickly; hiring managers have to get comparable tools to deal with the volume, and this video filtering is at least one option in the toolbox.
To the people who are commenting it’s ripe for sexism/racism/ other isms. Yes, just like in-person or via videoconferencing interviews are opportunities for bias. At some point, one does have to interact with the candidate and their gender, race, etc will be apparent. One could argue for double blind “auditions” like major symphony orchestras are doing but the argument now goes way beyond just video submissions and to general interviewing practices.
To the people who say, “I would never do a prerecorded video session”. Fine. And as a hiring manager, I understand the potential of losing out on a fewqualified candidates. Again, this is a tool to further filter 200+ candidates so some candidates opting out is not the end of the world to me.
You should hate it as a manager. You’re filtering out every single quality candidate because only a deranged nut job would even consider such an unhinged request. Submitting a video, in and of itself, proves they are not worth hiring.
You don’t need to process every candidate. Just randomly take 5%, or 1%, or .001%, and do a real hiring process. Anything at all is better than requiring a video application.
I certainly wouldn’t select this tool for hiring for all jobs, it does filter on some skills that are directly related to the job I hire for. Customer facing. High levels of comfort with office software and videoconferencing. Showing some degree of preparation when giving the question or request in advance. Being able to put someone in front of a customer or government official and trust that they hold it together is important.
I don’t see value in it for a role that doesn’t require those sorts of communication skills. Some analyst or programmer who mostly works on their own projects and only interacts with their internal team? This isn’t the tool to use in hiring.
I don’t really get why people are up in arms at this stuff. I hate the idea of doing these type of interviews, sure. But my grad program had 3k applications, 1k video interviews, 300 in person interviews, and only 100 actual roles. How the fuck else do they expect people to handle the sheer size of applications in management/HR roles?
I have to assume most of the comments are from people who have never worked in positions that deal with this sort of thing on volumes of this scale.
One of my jobs in college was an admin assistant with the department that reviewed international candidates for post grad positions. Your experience makes 100% sense to me. Scheduling live interviews across the globe was an absolute nightmare. Video submissions would have been fantastic. Candidates could have recorded on their own time, not some ungodly early AM hour to accommodate the US hiring panel. And especially for the ones for whom English wasn’t their first language, it would have given them time to prepare and re-record as many times as necessary to get a submission they were satisfied with.
Holding the position that video interviews are fine but pre-recorded video is not is baffling to me. I get some would feel it’s a performance they would be uncomfortable with, but I mainly see it as an interaction that I as candidate can exert more control over versua a live video interview.
Holding the position that video interviews are fine but pre-recorded video is not is baffling to me
Yeah lol that’s because you don’t seem to have any empathy for the people you are hiring. Why is it important if you don’t care about it? Easy answer is it isn’t.
Candidates could have recorded on their own time, not some ungodly early AM hour to accommodate the US hiring panel. And especially for the ones for whom English wasn’t their first language, it would have given them time to prepare and re-record as many times as necessary to get a submission they were satisfied with.
What part of this makes me unempathetic? I am truly baffled by your position. When used correctly, this tool gives an applicant the control to put their best foot forward.
You are selecting for the people privileged enough to know how or spend the time figuring out how to record and send video. Even if someone has used teams every day for presentations, it’s easy to avoid using recording features when videoconferencing is all live.
If your workplace creates pre-recorded videos for office use, then sure I guess it’s a skill you can select for.
I’m also selecting for people privileged enough to have a college degree, sometimes even a post grad or doctorate. So yeah, being able to use software that the pandemic made pretty much necessary in this industry and in universities is something I’m ok with filtering on.
Others in this thread have used bank teller as a use case. It probably doesn’t make sense to use this sort of video tool for a bank teller hiring process because 1) tellers don’t work on video, they’re in person and 2) there’s going to be a handful of applicants and they are likely local so an in-person interview is less of a logistics challenge.
Your company requiring video submissions for a fucking application is the easiest “this company is batshit insane and there’s no possibility working for them could ever be worth it” red flag I’ve ever seen.
Yep. I literally told a company there was no legitimate legal reason they could possibly want this, and good luck with their search. What better way to practice racism, sexism, and ageism in the hiring process?
There’s also that.
But purely on the premise of “you should take the time to record a video merely for the pleasure of maybe having us look at your application”, their expectations are way out of whack.
This isn’t like when Google put scavenger hunts or puzzles or whatever in ads and gave job offers to people who solved them. The people who got hired by those ads were following through out of curiosity/the fun of solving the problems, and that wasn’t the main/only way to get a job. It’s just a new absurd demand trying to push the threshold of what’s a legitimate ask.
Legal?
I get that some people would decline, sure. But what do you think is illegal about it?
I dunno what country you’re in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as “your application was not as strong as other candidates” but you need to be able to back that claim up if you’re challenged (and you can be challenged on it).
The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).
I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn’t worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say “you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry”.
If your selection criteria includes “they need to wear nice clothes” then you’re treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.
It’s perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role… but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I’m well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It’s not as bad as picking someone because they’re a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it’s still a bad policy.
You consider applicants who show up to a bank/office type job interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt with a skeleton making a rude gesture?
Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.
Australia. It’s not clearly illegal but it’s dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.
Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.
The bank I’m with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it’s offensive they’ll be told to wear something else, but that’s a conversation I’d be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don’t like their response.
You’re hyper focusing on the dress part. There’s still the actual questions and overall sense of calm and comfort a person has in communicating on video, a skill that directly maps to this specific job.
I can’t imagine a front-of-house bank teller would need to have these skills. Maybe a question like, “tell me about a time a customer was unhappy and how you handled the situation?”. In which case, I imagine some people would like the chance to think about it at their leisure and record once or twice, and rewatch it before submitting to make sure they’re happy with it.
Being recorded and interacting with someone in person are hugely different. Even
First of all, a person would give nonverbal feedback.
Secondly, there is all manner of body language that could be used for emphasis that doesn’t make sense doing to a camera.
In the case of a single bank teller position with a dozen applicants, you’re right, a prerecorded video probably isn’t the most effective tool.
Imagine a company like Ally in the US, or idk, Commonwealth is the first one that comes to mind in Australia, hiring for a new video chat support function. 50 positions to fill with 1,000 applicants. Wouldn’t this tool maybe, possibly make a bit of sense? It directly maps to skills relevant to the position, and helps both candidates and hiring panels more efficiently work through the process without scheduling 1,000 x 30-minute interviews. Anyone who is uncomfortable being on video should consider one of the many non-video positions instead, like a traditional in-house bank teller position or a chat/phone support function with no video element.
I’ll give you another scenario. I have colleagues who recruit at university career fairs and professional org conferences and there has been a dramatic speedup in the process since I went through college grad and looking for a job 10-15 years ago. Candidates now expect interviews and answers same day or next. Any one company is limited in the number of people they can physically send to the fair. So in order to process the number of interested candidates in the timeframe they expect, we’ve relied on videoconf interviews with more hiring managers not physically present; candidates at the career fair booth jump on a tablet provided by the company and they go through a rapid 10 minute interview. As you can imagine, this can be a bit chaotic and high stress, so we’ve started giving the option for students to submit resumes a week or more in advance and the option for students to prerecord video of themselves answering set interview questions. The day of, they’re already in the system with an evaluation started, we can efficiently route them to the right person in the booth to talk about the types of jobs they’re interested in, and get them moving towards a potential offer that much quicker. I don’t have hard numbers, but anecdotally, there has been no shortage of students choosing to use the optional prerecorded video tool and almost all are using the optional resume presubmission instead of carrying paper copies around like I did.
See elsewhere in the thread for another scenario where this tool might be used effectively, high volume of international students applying for post grad positions when in-person interviews are not an option and scheduling live phone or video conference calls are difficult across time zones.
I’ll say it one more time so the folks in the back can hear. This is one tool to be used optionally for certain types of jobs and I think makes the most sense when there is a high volume of applicants and/or complex scheduling logistics. People also need to recognize that just like AI processing resumes, it’s already out there in use and it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
What legal reason(s) do you have for needing to see their appearance when making a decision on whether to hire them? You may have some, such as requiring a professional appearance. These need to be spelled out in the job requirements. It also opens the doors to claims of illegal discrimination, since this will be on full display. In the US, that includes race, age, and gender. Having a required video can also reveal protected classes like familial status and religion, depending on what’s in the background.
Whether an action is “Legal” is almost always dependent on context, and the lawyers/courts involved. A common tactic by racist nightclubs is to set a dress code, particularly on shoes. The argument is they aren’t refusing entry based on race, but on clothing. But the unauthorized shoes are the ones commonly worn by people of the race they’re discriminating against. Different courts have made different rulings on whether this (and similar actions) constitute racial discrimination.
By that logic, in-person interviews should also be illegal.
I go back to my comment somewhere in this thread about some symphony orchestras doing double blind auditions. If that is your position, then your issue is with general hiring practices, not with this video submissions in particular.
Yeah, I went through comments like this the last time I posted similar to reddit.
Like I said, I hate it from the candidate perspective. From the hiring manager perspective, I got over 200 resumes and that was after automated filtering and after a human HR person filtered them further. I am very open to your ideas for a more efficient way to filter through 200 perfectly acceptable resumes without conducting 2 months of back-to-back interviews. Automated application tools allow for a person to apply to 100 jobs quickly; hiring managers have to get comparable tools to deal with the volume, and this video filtering is at least one option in the toolbox.
To the people who are commenting it’s ripe for sexism/racism/ other isms. Yes, just like in-person or via videoconferencing interviews are opportunities for bias. At some point, one does have to interact with the candidate and their gender, race, etc will be apparent. One could argue for double blind “auditions” like major symphony orchestras are doing but the argument now goes way beyond just video submissions and to general interviewing practices.
To the people who say, “I would never do a prerecorded video session”. Fine. And as a hiring manager, I understand the potential of losing out on a fewqualified candidates. Again, this is a tool to further filter 200+ candidates so some candidates opting out is not the end of the world to me.
You should hate it as a manager. You’re filtering out every single quality candidate because only a deranged nut job would even consider such an unhinged request. Submitting a video, in and of itself, proves they are not worth hiring.
You don’t need to process every candidate. Just randomly take 5%, or 1%, or .001%, and do a real hiring process. Anything at all is better than requiring a video application.
It’s been working for me pretty well.
I certainly wouldn’t select this tool for hiring for all jobs, it does filter on some skills that are directly related to the job I hire for. Customer facing. High levels of comfort with office software and videoconferencing. Showing some degree of preparation when giving the question or request in advance. Being able to put someone in front of a customer or government official and trust that they hold it together is important.
I don’t see value in it for a role that doesn’t require those sorts of communication skills. Some analyst or programmer who mostly works on their own projects and only interacts with their internal team? This isn’t the tool to use in hiring.
I don’t really get why people are up in arms at this stuff. I hate the idea of doing these type of interviews, sure. But my grad program had 3k applications, 1k video interviews, 300 in person interviews, and only 100 actual roles. How the fuck else do they expect people to handle the sheer size of applications in management/HR roles?
I have to assume most of the comments are from people who have never worked in positions that deal with this sort of thing on volumes of this scale.
One of my jobs in college was an admin assistant with the department that reviewed international candidates for post grad positions. Your experience makes 100% sense to me. Scheduling live interviews across the globe was an absolute nightmare. Video submissions would have been fantastic. Candidates could have recorded on their own time, not some ungodly early AM hour to accommodate the US hiring panel. And especially for the ones for whom English wasn’t their first language, it would have given them time to prepare and re-record as many times as necessary to get a submission they were satisfied with.
Holding the position that video interviews are fine but pre-recorded video is not is baffling to me. I get some would feel it’s a performance they would be uncomfortable with, but I mainly see it as an interaction that I as candidate can exert more control over versua a live video interview.
Yeah lol that’s because you don’t seem to have any empathy for the people you are hiring. Why is it important if you don’t care about it? Easy answer is it isn’t.
What part of this makes me unempathetic? I am truly baffled by your position. When used correctly, this tool gives an applicant the control to put their best foot forward.
Not just that
You should do some introspection.
You are selecting for the people privileged enough to know how or spend the time figuring out how to record and send video. Even if someone has used teams every day for presentations, it’s easy to avoid using recording features when videoconferencing is all live.
If your workplace creates pre-recorded videos for office use, then sure I guess it’s a skill you can select for.
I’m also selecting for people privileged enough to have a college degree, sometimes even a post grad or doctorate. So yeah, being able to use software that the pandemic made pretty much necessary in this industry and in universities is something I’m ok with filtering on.
Others in this thread have used bank teller as a use case. It probably doesn’t make sense to use this sort of video tool for a bank teller hiring process because 1) tellers don’t work on video, they’re in person and 2) there’s going to be a handful of applicants and they are likely local so an in-person interview is less of a logistics challenge.