I’ve never seen anything so impersonal and dehumanizing than a company asking a candidate to record a video before they even spend 5 minutes talking to them. Everyone hates it. There seems to be an expectation of fake enthusiasm, and many worry that it enables illegal discrimination. I’m trying to find a positive here, but this is just so dystopian and something I would never participate in just out of principle. Yikes.
How it's different then as from the candidate perspective your CV is not ever saw from bunch of companies and they don't even care what you wrote about yourself ?
This way you are sure you will get noticed, and you have ability to express and present yourself the best way you can
Updating a CV takes like 10 minutes. Are they looking for a Graphical Designer? I used PaintBrush! (I guess they will not hire me.) Are they looking for a programmer? I know a few languages with different level of ability, but I have no formal education in CS. Is a Math degree good enough?
A CV has a lot of information is a very short form and it's easy to maintain up to date.
Recording a video is much more work. I give talk in the university once or twice a year, with a friendly public of ~30 coworkers. I rehearsal it a few times, and it is as good as it is. Nobody will fire me. Now the talks are online, an the expected quality level is higher. Actually, nobody will fire me, but a bad recorded video looks very bad. I have to take the video like 5 times until it's good enough, but not as good as I'd like. If my job is in the line, I'll be even more nervous.
Some questions are very specific and each company will have their owns, so with your app I should make a new video.
Some questions are common, like "university degrees". Can I reuse the video? Do I have the same t-shirt for the other video o r it's in the laundry?
I went to a high school with a specialization in Chemistry. It's not a degree in the university, so I probably not mention it in a video for a bank, but I may mention it in a video for a factory. (I don't have enough knowledge to run a Chemistry factory, but I can't talk to the manager and understand better the problems.)
For one many countries have anti-discrimination laws that disallow including photos into a CV.
For me it's the asymetry in effort. If I interview with a company, I get to ask questions myself and get a feel for what working there might be like. When asked to record questions myself with no guarante someone ever looks at it beyond the initial 30sec, I would discard that as a waste of my time.
For example we, as a industry decided that whiteboard interviews about algorithm efficiency are a major red flag unless you are hired to solve those problems at your daily work.
If prerecorded interviews becomes a new industry standard among HR, I will go out of my way to find companys where I get to talk to real people at interviews.
Main idea is that instead of reading all the info someone wrote about themselves and that in many companies HR department will not even read,
You can set the question you would like to hear about the candidate and let them record an answers just for them, plus you will have ability to share it with other people in you department
The questions part comes after the CV usually.
What would be the difference in writing them instead?
The purpose of having a conversation is to interact with a person to get a sense how it is working at that company.
If this can't be done, I'd rather do it with text, at least I can copy-paste fast.
If you're using this for anything besides screening actors for a role, you're opening yourself up to a mountain of lawsuits. I can't imagine even semi-competent HR signing off on "let's have all our pre screening include the race, gender, age, and nationality of all our candidates!"