With changing market dynamics, companies are becoming more competitive. The need to succeed and stay profitable has become a top priority for companies today. In addition, they are also realizing the importance of having a strong workforce, and hiring the right people. HR and Talent Acquisition departments, therefore, have transformed from administrative wings to powerful, strategic forces essential to enterprise success.
With this transformation, the expectations placed on HR departments have also increased manifold. They are tasked with hiring high-quality, relevant, and reliable employees that would propel companies to success.
HR professionals frequently face situations when teams or interviewers are short on bandwidth and cannot schedule interviews. Further, occasionally, an organization needs to hire someone with a new skill set but lacks the internal expertise to assess the applicant and conduct an interview. Companies may even wish to employ a bigger pool of applicants than the internal human resources may be able to provide.
Keeping all these factors in cognizance, and understanding the demands placed on them, hiring teams are not shying away from outsourcing their talent acquisition needs to professionals.
What is Interview-as-a-Service?
Traditionally, HR Departments carried the sole responsibility of candidate screening and interviews. However, with new business demands, HR departments have a lot on their plates – besides interviews are a time-consuming, resource-intensive process and require subject matter expertise.
HR Departments also tend to fall short of the expertise to effectively evaluate job candidates, leading to less-than-desirable hiring decisions.
This is where Interview-as-a-Service (IaaS) comes into play.
IaaS is an emerging service that allows HR departments to outsource their interviewing process to a specialized company. These companies employ experienced interviewers who are trained to effectively evaluate job candidates and provide valuable feedback to HR departments.
Essentially, IaaS aids in the quick and efficient screening of applicants based on their qualifications and skills that would make them suitable for further rounds of interviewing and determine organizational fitment.
IaaS speeds up and improves the effectiveness of the screening procedure overall.
Benefits of Interview-as-a-Service
- Optimal Utilization of HR Departments
With outsourced interviews, HR Departments can save a lot of time, capital, and resources that go into conducting interviews. They could, instead, focus on other important tasks, such as managing employee benefits or tracking performance. Interview-as-a-Service allows companies to hire more, in lesser time and for a lesser expenditure.
- Supporting Various Formats of Interviews
Interview-as-a-Service enables HR Departments to conduct interviews in a variety of formats and for various purposes – like pre-screening interviews, on-demand interviews, and even video conference interviews. This flexibility allows HR departments to tailor the interview process to the specific needs of their organization and the position being filled.
- Elimination of Bias
With outsourced interviews, the selection and evaluation processes are based on a specific criterion. This makes the hiring process impartial, open and concentrated on finding the best candidates. Human prejudice, whether conscious or unconscious, has no place in the hiring process. The interviewers are trained to ask objective, standardized questions and evaluate candidates based on specific criteria.
- Structured Processes
In order to further eliminate bias, companies providing interview as a service use structured interview formats, such as the behavioral interview or the situational interview, which are designed to elicit specific, job-related information from candidates. These questions and answers, by nature, are meant to assess the candidate fairly and against a common set of criteria.
- Improved Interview Processes
Interview-as-a-Service can also provide support to hiring teams that conduct interviews in-house. For instance, structured interview guides and templates, help ensure that interviews are conducted in a consistent and standardized manner. This can improve the quality and reliability of the data collected from the interview process, and ultimately help HR departments make more informed hiring decisions.
Enhancing Candidate Experiences, with IaaS
Overall, outsourcing the interview process gives HR Departments an opportunity to deliver better interview experiences to candidates. From professional, authoritative, and structured interviews, to hassle-free processes, and quicker decision-making, Interview-as-a-Service gives candidates a positive first impression of the company. With outsourced interviews, companies have stronger ways to win the talent war!
About COGBEE
COGBEE is an AI-enabled smart and collaborative candidate screening and engagement platform. Its intelligent screening mechanism enables talent acquisition teams to comprehensively conduct the recruiting process.
Spearheaded by leaders in providing technology-powered solutions in the Talent Acquisition Vertical, COGBEE has been beneficial to some of the leading business houses, including a few Fortune 500, ISVs, and other prominent enterprises across the globe.
