Is Skype Harming Your Candidate Experience? Employers who seek to attract top talent are increasingly concerned with candidate experience. The candidate experience encompasses all of the steps along a candidate’s journey towards being hired. This includes initial application, communications in between, the interview, and ultimately an offer or a closed requisition. Many candidates have told us the biggest stumbling block employers have is the interview itself. As a video interviewing company, we’re big proponents of video interviewing. After all, this technology offers a world of benefits to both employers and candidates alike. The problem is that not all video interviews are created equal. In their zeal to adopt this new technology, some companies have instead turned towards personal chatware programs like Skype. Without knowing it, they could be hurting their candidate experience instead of helping it. Skype is Not Well Suited for a Great Candidate Experience Although Skype can be a useful personal chatware program, it’s not well suited for video interviewing. Consider that the candidate experience is frequently cited as candidate’s largest
deciding factor to join a company or not. For the following reasons, companies using Skype could be harming their candidate experience and losing the war for top talent: •
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There’s no employer branding. A large part of the candidate experience is introducing a candidate to the company’s employer brand. Candidates crave information and want to know what kind of company they’re interviewing with. They want to know more about the position, the team, the work environment. This is why it’s critical to shape the candidate experience with employer branding. Skype doesn’t offer any branding except Skype’s. Candidates logging on get a generic experience and don’t gain any visual insight into the company itself. The company using Skype to interview might be the largest in its space, but its impression may match that of a brand new struggling startup. Skype is unsecure. Video interviews often include sensitive information. Candidates often reveal highly sensitive personal and professional information that could be of use to competitors. This is why it’s so important that the interview environment is secure. A search online shows numerous programs which offer easy ways to “hack” into Skype calls. Numerous more sites offer information on how to hack into Skype without any additional software. Reading these sites, it appears quite easy for even a novice computer user to “hack” into a candidate’s Skype interview. There’s no customer service. Some people are just not all that technical. There are many people whose technical prowess hasn’t progressed beyond setting the coffee maker in the morning. So how do the technically unsure navigate the complicated Skype progress? The answer is they struggle. It’s essentially sink or swim. There’s nobody to help walk a candidate through the steps of logging in or initiating a Skype call. This could frustrate and even anger a candidate and cause them to overlook a good company. Skype doesn’t fill in the communication gaps. A huge part of the candidate experience is the communications which come from the employer. Many companies still leave candidates guessing with large gaps of no communication. Skype isn’t set up to work with existing HR or recruiting software to offer any kind of communication. Candidates start to get worried and apply elsewhere instead. The best candidates may soon start flocking to competitors with this kind of experience. No webcam, big problem. Although newer laptops and smart phones include built in webcams, there are still people who do not have any device with a webcam. Candidates should not be excluded from interviewing because they do not possess the newest technology or can’t afford it. GreenJobInterview solves this problem by shipping out a webcam candidates can keep long after their video interview.
Employers relying on Skype for interviews may be setting their candidates up for a poor candidate experience. Given these glaring problems, it behooves companies to start looking at video interview providers instead of personal chatware. It could mean the difference between attracting the most sought after candidates and the least sought after.