In defense of one-way interviews

Asynchronous interviews do more good than harm.

There’s an old article I came across recently in Forbes from Liz Ryan as I was Googling around. The title is “The Horrible Truth About One-Way Interviews.” You can read the full piece here.

As the co-founder of a software company that recently launched an audio-only one-way interview offering, I was naturally intrigued.

I’m not naive about the fact some candidates dislike virtual interviews. I’ve read the threads on /r/recruitinghell. But I think what’s really happening here is that asynchronous interviews are taking the blame because there's just a lot of general frustration with modern hiring practices.

As one part of our initial validation process when building Truffle, we interviewed 200 jobseekers about virtual interviews and 85% were very comfortable, comfortable, or fine with the format. Phew.

Still, it struck me that there’s some misunderstanding about their purpose and why they’re particularly helpful for candidates and hiring teams, especially in 2024.

With a lot of knowledgeable folks (like Hung Lee of Recruiting Brainfood) predicting AI voice-based screening tools becoming the biggest single recruitment technology breakthrough next year, it seems key to set the record straight.

Here I revisit the arguments against one-way interviews (using quotes from the Forbes article) and dispel a few myths along the way.

One-way interviews don’t actually save time

Video interviews don't save a company any time compared to telephone interviews or live interviews, except for transportation time (your time investment, not theirs) in the case of live interviews. If they want to hear your answers to the one-way video interview questions, they still have to watch your interview video.

The first argument that the author makes is one-way interviews don’t save time since hiring teams need to review responses and candidates need to sit down and record them.

I agree! Watching recorded videos is not faster than a phone call or Zoom. But here’s the twist: audio-only does save time.

Candidates can quickly record their answers using just their phones without worrying about lighting or background setups. No need for retakes because there's no visual pressure.

For hiring teams, the audio, the transcript, and an AI-powered summary, metrics and analysis are easier and quicker to review than an entire video. You can listen on the go, multitask, and get through more candidates in less time.

One-way interviews create bias

It's a horrifying thought but we must think it anyway: what if video interviews have something to do with screening people out because of their appearance, their age or some other attribute that videotape makes plain?

The second argument is that one-way video interviews open the door to unconscious biases based on a candidate’s appearance, age, gender, etc.

Once again, I agree with the author. Bias, in all its different shapes and forms, is a real problem in hiring.

I once arrived at an interview as a recent university graduate in a suit and tie. The problem? I was interviewing at a start-up where the uniform was clearly black t-shirts and jeans.

I didn’t get the memo (or the job). I’ll never know if looking like I was on my way to a wedding meant my chances were greatly diminished, but I’m sure it didn’t help.

The reality is whether you’re interviewing someone in-person or on Zoom, we all have our biases. Once again, this is where audio-only interview formats are better for initial screening since they allow you to focus solely on the substance of a response.

One-way interviews devalue candidates

If they screen people out using one-way video interviews, they don't have to meet as many people face to face. They don't have to forge a relationship or waste time with pleasantries. To put it bluntly, they don't have to know you.

One of the biggest complaints about one-way interviews is that they make candidates feel like faceless numbers in a sea of applications, instead of real people who could add something special to a team.

But let’s be real: in today’s job market, where companies are drowning in resumes, giving every candidate personal attention just isn’t possible anymore.

Take the example in the screenshot—over 1,000 people applied for one job, and only eight made it to the next round.

It’s not that the other 992 applicants weren’t good; recruiters just don’t have the time or energy to go through every application with a fine-toothed comb. With that kind of volume, there’s only so much bandwidth to work with, and great candidates can easily get lost in the shuffle.

That’s why one-way interviews can be candidate-friendly. They let companies scale up their screening process without losing the chance to actually see what candidates are all about beyond a static resume. Instead of screening eight candidates, you can screen many multiples of that without breaking a sweat. It’s a hell of a lot better than making snap judgments based on a six-second resume review.

Instead of being judged on a single glance at your work history, you get a real shot to show off your skills, personality, and fit for the company.

One-way interviews are costly & complicated

They are making their job more complicated than it needs to be, costing their companies money.

The author isn’t wrong. A lot of one-way interview platforms cost a small fortune and their pricing model (monthly or annual subscriptions) doesn’t fit the needs of SMBs. (Hiring intelligence is historically a category that focuses on large enterprises and certainly not small businesses with only a handful of hires per year.)

One of our bets at Truffle is that simple pay-as-you-go or very low monthly subscription pricing will attract companies with diverse / unpredictable hiring needs. It’s something we’re solving for.

The decision SMBs make on the technology side is whether they should transition from Google Forms and Airtable to an ATS and then on the people side whether they should hire an external recruiter for important one-offs or hire an internal recruiter to drive a more regular hiring process. All of these are significant investments.

For the record, they’re often necessary investments to sustain growth at a certain point, but we often see that companies move too soon and too aggressively here (it’s partly why recruiters were laid off at such dizzying rates post-pandemic).

The cost of one-way interviews, even our expensive competition 😉, is relative to the time you save and the additional resources you free up.

As for being complicated, that’s simply not true. Most one-way interview platforms are easy to set-up. We’re confident that even the least tech-savvy individual can create a Truffle interview to send out to as many people you’d like in about five minutes.

The obstacle is the way

Hiring is an emotional, uncertain endeavor for jobseekers. For a company that is hiring, it’s time-consuming, complex, and, for a smaller business, usually pivotal to future success.

It’s why companies are slow to innovate their hiring practices and candidates decry new developments. The stakes are extremely high for both parties.

But as candidate pools grow larger and more global in nature, the need for scalable, efficient, and fair hiring processes becomes unavoidable. And for candidates who may not feel like they have the picture perfect resume, an interview of any kind can help them break away from the pack.

The future of recruitment will be about striking the right balance—using tools like AI and one-way interviews to handle volume and complexity while ensuring that candidates feel valued.