Video recruitment: Online perspectives and implications for employer branding

Video recruitment—the use of videos at any point in the recruitment process—has surged among organizations as a strategy for hiring talent and operating in their respective fields amid the pandemic. In particular, video interviews have become mainstream at the assessment stage of the recruitment funnel to keep hiring workers in a remote context of work. Among job video interviews, the asynchronous type especially raised interest and concerns online. This chapter offers a novel and essential approach to the study of video interviews through the theoretical exploration of the crossover between HRM, marketing, and information technology, with the goal of uncovering several ways that employer branding can be ameliorated in a world wherein video recruitment prevails. This chapter investigates and compares online perspectives of video recruitment from both the employer and the worker standpoints to advance ways employer branding can be improved across the recruitment funnel by employers that use video interviews in remote hiring. This is especially beneficial considering talent’s increased bargaining power and mobility in the labor market and the relatively intense competition to attract and employ talent, as well as the fact that daily behaviors and practices are now developing the new paradigm of recruitment. In other words, this chapter can equip employers with the knowledge necessary to adapt their decision-making regarding video recruitment and employer branding in the digital age, thereby positively affecting talent attraction. This can also benefit potential hires’ experience with video recruitment and enhance their opinion of video interviews, which could lead to a better employer–worker match. In addition, this study underscores the key role and responsibility of video interview service providers in video recruitment. Service providers act as intermediaries between organizations and job applicants in the video recruitment process; thus, they influence both recruiters’ and job applicants’ experience with video recruitment. This chapter first explores and conflates extant literature on video interviews, recruitment, employer branding, and digital marketing to lay the groundwork for empirical research. The methodological section then elaborates on the data collected from comments generated by individual users in a dedicated LinkedIn news thread about asynchronous video interviews and a service provider’s website content. Next, the empirical research findings are presented to stress the viewpoints of recruiters and the online pool of potential hires. Finally, the focus is shifted to the implications of these viewpoints as follows: (1) implications for organizations in their adoption, deployment, and use of video interviews in remote recruitment, (2) implications for employer branding, and (3) implications for the pool of potential and current workers. The chapter closes by discussing future research avenues on video recruitment and employer branding in the digital age.showless