In today’s article, we take a look at how high-volume recruiters in an international company that serves the IT infrastructure sector used virtual interviews to replace inefficient telephonic screening practices.
In previous articles, we’ve looked at virtual interviewing as an enhancement of existing video interview practices. In this case study, virtual interviews performed a more central role in the recruitment process, leading to substantial benefits for the client.
In our case study we will look at how TTS’s virtual interviewing product partner, HireVue, helped to change the way their client recruited and selected entry-level positions in a very fluid and challenging market.
The client challenge
The client, a leading cloud computing and IT infrastructure company operating in more than 150 countries globally, approached HireVue to help with their recruitment challenges.
The IT infrastructure sector is a multi-billion dollar industry that is highly competitive, because client companies are always on the lookout to cut costs and move to smaller and potentially cheaper alternatives.
In the center of this challenge is the role of the customer service technician. A large part of generating customer loyalty and retention falls on the shoulders of these young technicians. They are the front line of customer service and spend much of their time dealing with and resolving customer problems.
So, although it is generally regarded as an entry-level role, the client understood the importance of recruiting and selecting the correct talent, at scale, for this position.
A persistent challenge for the recruiters was dealing with high volumes of applicants. Unlike some roles in the IT industry, where technical expertise is scarce, potential candidates for the customer service technician role are often trained in-house, which makes it a high-volume intake role.
The client’s existing sifting practice used telephonic screening. However, given the massive volumes of potential hires who applied for the role, hiring managers and recruiters were spending ever-increasing amounts of time on screening and interviewing candidates.
In fact, analyses of time spent on recruitment revealed that the client’s leadership team and recruiters were collectively spending an average of 1,110 hours per quarter on recruiting for the customer service technician role! A massive cost in efficiency as well as opportunity.
The virtual interview solution
HireVue worked with the client to help them reduce time spent on screening candidates as well as improving the quality of potential recruits.
By implementing the HireVue virtual interviewing solution, the leadership and recruitment teams were able to do away with time-consuming telephonic screening interviews in favor of a more streamlines, on-brand virtual interviewing process.
The immediate benefit for recruiters was that candidates could now be seen (virtually) face-to-face, which was not possible in the old telephonic paradigm. It also empowered managers to feel more confident that they were allowing the right candidates through to selection stages.
The outcome: Virtual interviewing leads to ROI gains
Once HireVue’s solution was embedded in the client’s recruitment processes, follow-on analyses of time-to-hire and recruitment costs revealed massive benefits once virtual interviews replace telephonic screening:
- Because of the efficiency of virtual interviewing, combined with less time wasted on scheduling candidates for telephone calls or interviewing obviously unsuitable candidates, time-to-hire was reduced by 87% compared to previous practices.
- Not only were candidates now hired and onboarded more rapidly, but the leadership team and recruiters were spending less of their time on screening and interviewing. The average time spend on recruitment per quarter was reduced from 1,110 hours to only 140 hours.
- Since the recruitment and leadership teams were able to review candidates more rapidly, they were able to screen far more potential hires than before. The analysis revealed that 3 times more candidates could be reviewed using HireVue than the old telephonic screener.
- And because more candidates were being reviewed in a shorter span of time, the quality of potential hires improved dramatically, with hiring managers reporting greater trust in their hiring decision and a 100% improvement in new hire quality since implementing virtual interviews.
- Due to less time being spent on recruitment, hiring managers were able to focus more on their core role, which is to improve their customers outcomes through leading effective technical support teams.
The ROI of having leadership and recruitment teams spend less time doing candidate screening, combined with better quality hiring decisions, was substantial. The decision to replace telephonic screening with virtual interviews reaped real financial rewards for the client.
In the first year of implementing virtual interviewing through HireVue, the client’s analysis revealed that their recruitment ROI increased by 131%!
Final thoughts & conclusions
From the above case study, it is clear that virtual interviewing can dramatically improve outmoded and inefficient screening practices like telephonic or face-to-face interviewing.
In fact, such efficiencies not only translate into ROI gains for recruitment teams and hiring managers, but also improve the experience of candidates who apply to high-volume, entry-level roles.
Why?
Because a more efficient screening method leads to quicker time-to-hire and more rapid feedback on applications. So, both recruiters and candidates benefit from virtual interviewing efficiencies.
At TTS, we are committed to helping our clients make better talent decisions. As such, we review the world marketplace in assessment and virtual interview products for the very best providers. We are proud to be associated with best-of-breed providers like HireVue, who are leading the way in virtual interviewing and revolutionizing recruitment and hiring practices.
If you are interested in leveraging virtual interviewing for ROI gains, or if you are wondering how virtual interviews can replace your existing telephonic screening methods, why not connect with us at info@tts-talent.com?