Video interview software has made it easier than ever for companies to screen job candidates quickly and efficiently. By collecting short videos with someone’s detailed, nuanced responses to your questions, you gain a deeper understanding than any written statement could give.
These days, many video interview platforms have a strong focus on the recruitment process. For example, with our app — Vocal Video — it’s unbeatably easy to…
- Screen job seekers.
- Engage the most promising candidates.
- Learn more about your applicants.
- Speed up your hiring decisions.
But video interviewing software can be used to create different types of interviews too. For example, our clients have used Vocal Video to collect and share survey responses, gather customer and employee testimonials, and create shareable thought leadership videos to expand their audiences and build their brands.
So, as well as looking at virtual interviews in the hiring process, this post covers three additional use cases for video interviewing. We’ll also show you how easy it is to use Vocal Video to collect interviews individually or at scale, and compare some alternative tools.
Sign up here for your free Vocal Video account.
4 Effective Ways to Use Video Interview Software
Compared to written responses, video interviews are more authentic, more detailed, and can reveal more about the interviewee’s experience and personality.
What’s more, asynchronous (or one-way) interviews are convenient and cost-effective for you and your respondents. You set your questions, send a link to the video collector app that records the response, and then review the interviews later.
We’ll show you exactly how to set up your ideal interview experience with Vocal Video later. For now, let’s start by looking at four areas where video interview tools can gather valuable information for your business.
1. Video Interviews Speed Up Candidate Screening
Of all the areas where video interviewing has changed the landscape, talent acquisition is the most dramatic.
When companies ask job seekers to complete a video interview alongside — or even instead of — a traditional resume or cover letter, they gain…
- A wider pool of candidates, because people can record a video interview in their own time, regardless of their working hours, location, or time zone. This makes it more likely that the top candidates will be able to take part in the recruitment process.
- An easy way to screen candidates and identify top talent. Screening interviews also weed out the applicants who were never truly interested in the job because they simply won’t record a response.
- A deeper understanding of the candidate’s personality, which tells them more about how they’d fit into their existing team. As with video calls, asynchronous interviews pick up subtle cues of tone, body language, and enthusiasm that simply can’t be conveyed in a written application.
- A valuable resource to share with the recruitment team as a means of comparing candidates. Sharing video interview responses is also an easy way to bring the hiring manager into the process at an earlier stage.
- A useful point of reference for recruiters and candidates if they progress to a live or in-person interview on Skype or Zoom, especially when your interview platform provides transcriptions of the video responses.
Check out this video job interview, collected and edited 100% with Vocal Video, to see what’s possible.
As well as providing valuable candidate insights like these, video interview software streamlines a hiring team’s workflow, speeds up the recruitment process, and helps attract and retain top candidates all the way through the hiring funnel.
Read more: The Best Way to Recruit Employees: Use Free Video Software
There’s a massive focus on video interview software for recruitment because the benefits — especially for companies hiring online or remotely — are huge.
But, if you choose a more versatile tool, designed to collect all types of video interviews, you’ll have even more opportunities to help your company stand out from your competitors.
2. Video Interviews Provide Valuable Customer Insights
Just as video job interviews lend personality, authenticity, and credibility to the claims a candidate makes on their resume, video interviews with customers give you valuable insights into your audience’s pain points, preferences, and impression of your company.
For example, if you replace written survey forms with video surveys, you’ll get more detailed, personal responses than you ever could with 1-10 ratings or check-box forms. This helps you uncover valuable customer insights to inform your business development plans.
Plus, while displaying written reviews on your website can be reassuring, video reviews are far more authentic. They show potential customers a person they can relate to, making it easier for them to imagine enjoying the same benefits for themselves.
3. Video Interviews Tell Authentic Stories for Your Marketing Efforts
So far, we’ve talked about how video interviews can help your company get to know your users or applicants better. In contrast, testimonials shift the focus and show potential customers what makes your organization special.
Testimonials are authentic customer or employee stories where the speaker describes their experience of your company in their own words. These can be particularly helpful in…
- Recruitment marketing, where employee testimonials show how your company lives out the values they list on their website.
- Product marketing, for both B2B and B2C, where customer stories prove the claims you make about your offering are true.
- Non-profits, where volunteer, donor, or beneficiary testimonials can raise awareness and encourage more people to support your cause.
- Healthcare, where patient testimonials help people make decisions based on the overall experience of your practice.
4. Video Interviews for Thought Leadership
Asynchronous video software can also collect videos from influencers or thought leaders in your industry — and share them in a hassle-free format your audience wants to engage with.
These videos can form the backbone of a content series for your blog or social media pages, especially for sites like LinkedIn. They can also sit alongside long-form content, like white papers, interview write-ups, or event promotion pages (for example, as a speaker video to drive bookings for an upcoming conference).
In summary, the spontaneity, individuality, and human connection your respondents convey in a video interview are hard to beat. With a collection of interviews you can refer to on-demand, you’ll open up a range of benefits across your business.
Now, let’s find out just how easy it is to start using online interviews to connect with the people who want to know more about your business.
Vocal Video: The Best Video Interview Software for Any Use Case
Vocal Video is an end-to-end video interview platform that gives you all the tools you need to ask for, record, edit, and publish user-generated content like video interviews. With our intuitive, affordable app, it’s easier than ever to…
- Collect screening interviews and survey responses, even at scale
- Set up ongoing asynchronous interview collection to build a library of testimonials
- Get personalized videos from the individuals you want to hear from
You can get started in a few simple steps.
Create a Custom Video Collector
Your Vocal Video collector is the interface you’ll send to your potential respondents. When you set up a new collector, you choose the interview questions or prompts you want them to answer, add your company’s logo and colors for instant brand recognition, and generate a link to share.
You can build a video collector from scratch, but every Vocal Video pricing plan also includes 45 customizable, industry-specific template collectors, so you can start getting responses even faster.
For example…
Simply choose a template, open it in your Vocal Video dashboard, and tweak the questions to meet your needs.
When you’re happy with your collector and you’re ready to start the interview process, click on “Get Responses” to generate a URL to share.
Vocal Video collectors give your respondents a great user experience. They’re intuitive, they look great on any device, and your respondents can take as long as they want (including retakes) to record a response they’re happy with.
Get Automatically Edited Responses
Vocal Video uses a unique automatic editing process to stitch together your videos before they’re sent to your library.
This means every response your video collector gets will arrive ready to publish, with attention-grabbing elements like:
- Your logo and brand colors on the opening and closing slides.
- Overlays showing your respondent’s name and current role.
- Slides showing the questions they responded to, with eye-catching animated transitions between each question.
- Music from our library of royalty-free tracks.
- Automatically generated subtitles so you can follow along without sound.
You can see many of these features in action in these automatically edited videos from Vocal Video users at LivePerson:
With our suite of intuitive editing tools, you can adjust these video elements, create a highlight reel of collector responses, or, for testimonial marketing, choose pull quotes to create testimonial cards.
Plus, to help your team sort through the videos in your library, we include filters, star ratings, and commenting to help you discuss the responses you receive. This is particularly helpful for human resources or recruitment teams who want to identify candidates to invite to the next stage of interviews.
Host Videos on a Public Vocal Video Page
When you’re ready to publish your videos, we’ll create an ad-free Vocal Video page. You can set this page to be searchable, or simply share the link with other people in your organization. When you want to use video interviews to boost your SEO performance or spread the word about your business, this page is an invaluable resource.
As well as ad-free hosting, Vocal Video will automatically generate an embed code so you can add your videos and galleries seamlessly to any page of your company’s website.
Simply click “Share” followed by “Embed,” and then “Copy Embed Code” to pick up the snippet of HTML you’ll need to drop into your website.
Embeds are particularly useful for adding personality to the product, about us, or careers pages of your website.
For example, the team at Velocity Resource Group uses a gallery of employee testimonials, collected with Vocal Video, beside their values statement and application portal to encourage more people to become part of their team.
With all the features you need to build your interviews, share a user-friendly collector, and review your responses, Vocal Video is the only video interview tool you need to bring this impactful resource into more areas of your recruitment and marketing strategies.
Video Interview Software: 5 Options for Your Business
1. Vocal Video: The Best All-Round Video Interview Software
Vocal Video is the perfect tool for collecting one-way video interviews from job candidates, customers, clients, or your team.
Key Features
- Customizable video collector templates to get started fast.
- Automatic editing to create ready-to-share videos with no additional software.
- Your employer branding throughout the process.
- Tools to share and shortlist videos, for example, to highlight the best candidates in your screening process.
Pricing
- Free plan: For individuals looking to get started 100% free.
- Plus plan: For small teams with limited video collection, publishing, and sharing needs ($44/month).
- Pro plan: For teams and agencies that need advanced branding and features ($129/month).
- Enterprise plan: Custom enterprise pricing is available for organizations that want to scale with full support, governance, and security; contact our sales team to learn more.
Select your plan or contact sales here.
2. VidCruiter: Asynchronous and Live Video Interviews
Similar to platforms like HireVue and full-service recruitment software like iCIMS, VidCruiter combines pre-recorded and live interviews with an ATS (applicant tracking system).
There are several features and automations to choose from, so larger organizations can build a recruitment setup that meets their needs. It’s just worth bearing in mind that for teams with more basic requirements, you’ll likely end up paying far more for this platform than other video interview tools on the market.
Key Features
- Real-time and asynchronous video capability and features to digitize interviews conducted in person.
- Additional features like skills testing and assessments, reference checks, and interview compliance features.
- Career site software to build career pages.
Pricing
Potential customers are asked to fill out a pricing request form on VidCruiter’s website for more information on the hiring solutions they offer.
Software comparison sites suggest prices start at $5k per year.
3. Hireflix: One-Way Interview Software Designed for Recruitment
Based in Spain, Hireflix is an asynchronous video tool specifically designed for recruiters to record and share interviews. Being 100% asynchronous (like Vocal Video), this tool eliminates the need for interview scheduling and opens up the candidate pool.
Although Hireflix is built with recruiters in mind, they don’t include as many interview features as some other platforms, and there’s no ATS or CRM (though they include integrations with platforms like Lever, BambooHR, and Greenhouse).
Other screening platforms that focus on one-way rather than two-way interviews — like Spark Hire or Willo — have more additional features for interview analytics.
Key Features
- Asynchronous interviewing that promises a great candidate experience.
- Integrations with the other software your team uses.
Pricing
Hireflix offers a one month free trial after you choose from one of their plans:
- Small plan: For companies with less than 50 employees ($75/month).
- Medium plan: For companies with 50–250 employees ($150/month).
- Custom plan: For corporates, high volume processes, recruitment agencies, and other use-cases; contact their sales team to learn more.
4. VideoAsk: Remote Interviews with a Conversational Feel
Like Vocal Video, VideoAsk is set up to collect video interview responses to pre-set questions in a variety of settings. It’s been designed to replace the back-and-forth of an email chain with video messages, so companies can ask for more detail from their respondents or candidates.
Though the capacity for follow-up questions can be inviting, this can be a more time-consuming way to collect interviews. Especially during the recruitment process, where candidates may be fielding offers from multiple companies, these delays can pose a problem for some teams.
Key Features
- Designed for recruitment, sales, and marketing.
- Video forms to collect additional information from respondents.
- Video funnels to shape a user’s interaction with your business.
Pricing
- Start Plan: All the essentials you need to get the conversation started for free.
- Grow plan: $24/month if paid annually; $30/month if paid monthly.
- Brand plan: $40/month if paid annually; $50/month if paid monthly.
Read more about how VideoAsk compares to Vocal Video.
5. VideoPeel: Video Survey Solution
VideoPeel is another multi-use video collection platform with asynchronous interview functionality. On their website, they list use cases as diverse as customer research, polling, employee engagement, and using video collectors to interview candidates.
Like Vocal Video, customers use an interview guide and record their responses on any device, whenever they have time. But if you want to collect customer or employee testimonials to use for marketing, you might find that VideoPeel doesn’t have all the editing tools you want to use before you share your videos.
Key Features
- Customizable video surveys.
- Ready-made campaign templates.
- Tags and filters for the responses in a video library.
Pricing
VideoPeel offers a free 7-day trial, after which you can choose from one of their four plans:
- Basic plan: $4.99/month if paid annually; $9.99/month if paid monthly.
- Pro plan: $49/month if paid annually; $69/month if paid monthly.
- Premium plan: $249/month if paid annually; $399/month if paid monthly.
- Enterprise plan: Custom enterprise pricing available for growing businesses needing advanced features and collaboration; contact their sales team to learn more.
Find out how VideoPeel and Vocal Video stack up.
For Authentic Video Interviews and Unbeatable Ease of Use, Choose Vocal Video
Vocal Video gives you all the video interviewing features you need in one platform, and the templates you need to get started today. This is the easiest way to add pre-recorded video interviews to your hiring, customer feedback, and internal communications processes.
When you use Vocal Video, you can:
- Engage more potential candidates or respondents with your interview process.
- Parse responses to identify the most promising candidates or the most powerful customer stories.
- Share videos with your team in Vocal Video, and with an extensive list of integrations.
- Publish video interviews wherever they can boost your marketing efforts.
Start for free, upgrade when you’re ready. Sign up for your Vocal Video account and explore what video interviews can do for your business.