The job interview is a key element in the recruitment process to select the right candidates for the job. It is also one of the most time-consuming elements and one that will rapidly increase in volume over the next decade. So let’s have a look at the reasons why this trend is occurring and how we will be able to deal with this growing influx of interviews while keeping an eye on recruitment process efficiency.
There are 3 main (interlinked) reasons why we will do ever more job interviews in the next decade:
On first sight, the length of time that an employee is working for an employer is increasing according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, when you narrow down the data to employees between 25 and 34 years old, the average job tenure shrinks to three years. Employees between 20 and 24 years old even have an average job tenure of a mere 16 months. The millennial effect. This means that if your company stays the same size, you will have to hire ever more people in your organization, let alone when you are growing! In other words… more job interviews to come!
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is measuring the number of hours worked on average per year. Whereas in 1990, people in OECD countries worked an average of 1.880 hours a year, in 2013 there was an average of 1.770 hours worked per year for the 34 countries tracked. Although productivity / output per person is increasing, this long-term trend still means that in order to keep the same number of hours worked, we will need to hire ever more people in our teams.
The future of the job market lies in non-employee workers, including temporary workers, freelancers, contractors and free agents. According to the World Economic Forum in their Future of Jobs report, organizations are likely to have an ever-smaller pool of core full-time employees for fixed functions, backed up by colleagues in other countries and external consultants and contractors for specific projects. It is estimated that by 2020 more than 40% of the U.S. workforce will be independent. These people go from project to project, with a job interview at the start of each new project.
The good news is that the recruitment function will be ever more business critical to ensure that organizations can operate at their full capacity. All these trends combined also mean that it is time to gear up our hiring processes within the current recruitment function to deal with this influx of job interviews. Let’s take this opportunity to re-invent job interviews by using a more efficient, personalized and automated entry-point to the job interview. With the growing number of job interviews and increasing pressure on recruitment process efficiency, we can no longer afford inviting candidates to our most time-consuming part of the process only to find out in the job interview on-site that we were inviting them based on too little data.
Video interviews allow organizations to add personality to the CV prior to the job interview, enabling a faster hiring process while creating valuable predictive insights to make better hiring decisions. Whether it is an automated interview for pre-screening, a video pitch to gauge motivation, or a live video interview to quickly get to know each other, video will play an increasingly important role in recruitment. Happy hiring!
