Recently, TTS’s best-of-breed asynchronous video interviewing product partner, Recright, showed how its video interviews helped a global company streamline inefficiencies in their recruitment processes as well as improve their hit rate for successful candidates.
Recright’s client, NKT, is a global provider of high-quality power cable technology, with offices and production sites in more than 15 countries. Since 1891, NKT has offered customers everything they need for their cable projects. The company’s current strategic objective is to connect to a greener world by enabling sustainable energy transmission. As a company driving the green energy transition, NKT has been growing extremely fast and needed to find and hire many new people to meet its extended business goals.
NKT partnered with Recright to achieve a more efficient recruitment process and to reduce unconscious bias in hiring. The company first implemented Recright as a six-month pilot in Sweden, and now continues to use the tool in Sweden and Denmark. NKT is also in the process of rolling out Recright in other countries in which it operates.
Challenges with traditional recruitment methods
Before using Recright, NKT used few digital tools in its recruiting process. This manual approach, well known to many organizations, required a lot of time from recruiters and hiring managers:
- Recruiters first reviewed candidates’ CVs, either alone or together with the hiring manager.
- They then prepared a long list of candidates to discuss with the hiring manager, and together, based solely on CVs, tried to cut down to a short list of around five candidates.
- Recruiters scheduled 30-minute phone interviews with the five shortlisted candidates and took notes either in a Word document or on paper.
- They then reviewed their notes and summarized the five phone calls during a follow-up meeting with the hiring manager.
- Recruiters decided together with the hiring manager what top three candidates to invite to an in-depth interview.
Recruiters at NKT recall the tedious work required to screen candidates:
“With phone interviews, it wasn’t easy to pinpoint the best candidates for the role. We needed to write a lot to be able to remember and differentiate between the five candidates.”
Video interviews as a new paradigm
Given the above inefficiencies, NKT welcomed the innovative approach that Recright represented.
By replacing phone interviews with asynchronous video interviewing, NKT saved time in several steps of the hiring process.
As one recruiter at NKT put it:
“Reading a lot of resumes is probably not the most motivating task in a recruitment process. But when looking at a video, it feels like you’re speaking to someone and it gives you a much better understanding of the candidate.”
Implementing video interviews provided by Recright saved recruiters a lot of time. Recright increased the possibility of only interviewing the right candidates at the end, thus increasing hit rates for better, stronger candidates.
NKT’s screening process now looks like this:
- Recruiters, and sometimes hiring managers, review candidates’ CVs.
- Recruiters record their video questions and invite candidates to record their answers, also on video.
- Recruiters and hiring managers review candidates’ video answers on their own time, add comments, score candidates’ answers, and review each other’s comments and scores: all within the Recright platform.
- Based on the videos, recruiters and hiring managers decide who they want to invite for an in-depth interview.
NKT still conducts phone interviews for certain roles when it makes sense. For example, if there are only a couple candidates for a role, the recruiter will phone both candidates and invite them for an in-depth interview.
Benefits of using Recright video interviewing
Time and bias reduction
NKT experienced two main benefits once they changed their interviewing process.
- Time savings. Due to the asynchronous nature of the Recright video interviews, as well as its innovative platform, interviews could be completed far more rapidly, and time-to-hire delays were significantly reduced.
It is worth noting that much of traditional, synchronous interviewing’s disadvantages originates in the need to coordinate multiple diaries, the time lost due to diary clashes, and the inevitable delays incurred due to availability challenges. Asynchronous systems like Recright almost completely overcome such limitations. - Bias reduction. Because hiring managers were now engaged in rating interview responses earlier in the process, along with recruiters, the bias of any one rater was reduced significantly. This is especially relevant in interviews that are conducted by multi-member panels, often chaired by a senior manager or hiring manager.
By having each rater complete their own rating of the candidate within the Recright platform, undue influence from authoritative figures and the common flaw of “groupthink” can be overcome. In addition, using a common rating scale and criteria is enforced more easily, further reducing potential biased or flawed ratings.
Improving employer brand and the candidate experience
With talent attraction as a major challenge for NKT, Recright helped to better position NKT as a digital and innovative company.
As one recruiter summated:
“Recright helps us show that we are a forefront technology company—it makes that visible in the recruitment process. We use innovative digital tools in our recruitment because we want to ensure unbiased recruitment. With Recright, we also get the opportunity to work with employer branding, as managers can also record videos to better explain what NKT is doing and what the role can offer.”
While it might be difficult to get HR to record video questions, NKT encouraged its team to do so. The reasoning is that if candidates were asked to record videos, recruiters should do so as well. To overcome candidate hesitation at recording themselves on video, NKT recruiters explained the benefit of marketing oneself beyond what CVs are capable of.
In addition, to ensure candidates feel comfortable sending in their video answers, NKT allows candidates to re-record their videos as many times as they wish.
Final thoughts
NKT now uses several digital tools, including Recright, to make its recruitment process more efficient. In doing so, it has helped the organization and especially its recruitment function to cultivate a digital mindset.
By using Recright video interviewing, NKT has been able to get to know their initial candidates a bit better before the first real interview. It increased their hit rate, decreased the number of interviews required, and involved the manager at a much earlier stage of the recruitment process.
Because of the online platform, many manual and inefficient processes like telephonic scheduling were also eliminated.
If you are interested in how TTS and its global partners like Recright can help streamline your recruitment and talent selection processes with innovative products like asynchronous video interviews, connect with us at info@tts-talent.com
Source
Recright (2023). NKT increases its hiring efficiency and hit rate with video interviews.