Screening for the right candidate for your vacancy is time consuming and costly. You spend hours narrowing down applicants, then you spend some of your precious time choosing your top picks, only to find the candidate sitting in front of you bears no resemblance to the paper version. What a waste of your time. Where did you go wrong? How can you ensure the candidates are who they say they are?

That’s where video CVs come into play. However, just like video interviews, video CVs have their inherent weaknesses from an employer’s perspective:

1. Fear of Discrimination

Discrimination concerns have discouraged applicants from sending photos and personal information with their CV. Employers are at risk of conducting a potentially discriminatory hiring process accepting video CVs when utilised inappropriately.

2. Photogenic

Not everyone is a Hollywood star in front of a camera. Video CVs and video interviews might be disproportionately more favorable towards candidates who present better in front of a camera.

3. Time-consuming

Experienced hiring managers spend 20 to 30 seconds on each paper CV, and various tools exist to help us screen for the keywords and skill sets we search for. It could be more time consuming going through each video.

City Sail has recently released its machine-run video analysis, which allows hiring managers to screen through hundreds of video profiles to filter down to the top 10 candidates with a cultural and personality fit within hours, rather than the days or weeks that it usually takes.

It also uses artificial intelligence to read facial expressions on candidates’ video profiles automatically, picking up on all the signs and making sure you get unbiased, independent and consistent analysis of the potential and/or current employees’ characteristics.

In addition to the characteristics intelligence analysis, video CVs also bring you these advantages:

• Diversity

Multiple benefits have been widely recorded in improving a firm’s diversity, including breeding innovation, performance uplift, greater financial returns, increased execution efficiency, broader range of services, and higher employee adaptability.  

But achieving diversity is not as easy as it sounds. Diversity does not only encompass race, gender, age, ethnicity, education, background, but more importantly should also embrace characteristics, personality, organisational behaviour, and cognitive style etc.

Many firms now set a target ratio at the recruitment stage to ensure the diversity of the candidate slate – however this is not so easy to achieve with paper CVs.

This is where video CVs can assist us. They not only provide the basic information on candidates, but they also highlight the candidates’ characteristics to help us ensure diversity.

• Analysis

When we interview candidates for jobs, we bring our personal preferences, our past experiences into the picture, and we often subconsciously choose people who are like us but who might not necessarily be right for the job.

The judgement is subconsciously biased, which varies from person to person on a day to day basis.

Machine-run video profiles analysis developed by City Sail enables an independent unbiased read of candidates’ confidence level, passion level, curiosity level (to name a few features) across all candidates with the same benchmark applied.

This is not to say it replaces the hiring manager’s interviews, but this process provides independent and unbiased insights during the screening stage as a cross validation and reference.

• Control

We all have had experience selecting 20 candidates to interview from a mountain of paper CVs. The candidates selected then have one shot over a 30-minute interview to prove themselves. The odds are that there are candidates who have been overlooked during our 30-second skimming through their paper CVs or over an interview where certain candidates did not perform at their best. 

With video CVs, candidates have more control over how their applications are handled, as they now have more than one chance to convince the person doing the screening of their skills and qualities.

The process will boost a more fair and equal opportunity play, and allow the candidates to present who they are.

• Showcase

Furthermore, candidates can showcase their previous work, their language skills, or even dance moves, babysitting a child, servicing a customer over a clip during the CV screening stage, which would otherwise only be partially tested until interviews.

For those shy of camera, showcasing their previous work instead of speaking into the camera without ease would be a better option.

To learn more about video CVs and how City Sail runs the characteristics intelligence through video profiles, please visit www.citysail.co.uk or contact [email protected].