How Pre-Recorded Interviewing Promotes Diversity and Accessibility

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEI&A) hiring strategies require the right process and tools. Like any hiring tool, how you use it determines the level of impact your hiring has on diversity-identified groups (also known as protected groups). When properly used, pre-recorded interviewing, can significantly enhance the accessibility and inclusivity of the interview experience for protected groups.

Video interview software is ideal for diversity-focused hiring strategies because it enables the structured interview process. Combining a proven process with a modern tool like pre-recorded interviewing software helps reduce bias and discrimination in the candidate screening step.

Four Reasons Why Pre-Recorded Interviewing Supports Workplace Diversity

Structured pre-recorded video interviews are a fair and efficient way to increase diversity in your hiring process. Find out why.

Increases Inclusivity Through Accessibility

Pre-recorded interviewing expands the applicant pool by removing geography, time, and resource barriers.

This interview format also increases accessibility by eliminating barriers that phone and in-person cannot easily address. In the planning phase, the accessibility accommodations can be anticipated to ensure proper contextual evaluation prior to starting the process.

For example, you should prepare in advance for neurodiversity given that an estimated 15-20% of the world’s population exhibits some form of neurodivergence (National Cancer Institute). Make sure you know how to offer the following accessibility accommodations within the interview platform: granting multiple response attempts, allowing candidates to review their responses before submission, providing longer preparation time before answering, and asking specialized accessibility-vetted questions. Some or all of these accommodations ensure a more equitable experience than a traditional phone screen. 

For physical accessibility accommodations, pre-recorded interview software can potentially integrate with accessibility technologies that candidates are already using (screen readers, text readers, head pointers…etc). 

Some diversity-identified groups may have inhibitions to in-person screening. Having the flexibility to complete the interview where, when, and how the candidate wants can help make the process more comfortable for all candidates, especially those with accessibility needs. Using interview scheduling best practices can also create a more ideal interviewing process for protected groups.

Far More Structured Than Other Screening Formats

Structured interviews are generally accepted as one of the most powerful tools for creating an inclusive, non-discriminatory process. By keeping the questions competency-focused, these interviews mitigate some of the biases that adversely affect diversity-identified groups.

There is no interviewer in an asynchronous video interview so each question is asked identically unless specific accommodations are required for accessibility or cultural needs. Removing the recruiter from the interview equation makes the process more standardized than in-person or phone interviews ever could be.

Even if you give interviewers the best training and a script they are required to follow, in phone and in-person interviews the interviewer could still vary how they deliver the questions (inflection, volume, tone of voice, background noise, etc.). This may disproportionately affect protected groups. For example, neurodivergent candidates or candidates who may have accessibility-impacted challenges with auditory, cognitive, or cultural comprehension.

Regardless of the format, questions and their delivery to the candidate should be vetted for accessibility and cultural requirements by I/O psychologists. However, asynchronous interviews make it easy to deliver specialized questions or provide cultural or accessibility-designed content while still keeping the process structured.

If the candidate identifies a need for accommodation after the fact, specially-trained raters can rate the interview. This would not be possible if the candidate did a phone screen or in-person interview.

Allows You To Conduct Higher Quality Evaluations

Pre-recorded video interviews can improve the quality of the evaluation process and the quality of the data you can capture during the interview. There are several reasons for this.

Structured rating training for evaluators enables smoother and more efficient multi-rater assessments. Phone and in-person screening interviews do not offer these opportunities. 

Pre-recorded interviews are not limited by the rating capability of the person conducting the interview. The videos from each interview can be assessed from multiple perspectives and by raters with specific accessibility and culturally competent training and experience.

They also allow you to focus on rating competencies with precision. Evaluators can re-play candidate responses when needed to give candidates a better evaluation of their specific responses. Pre-recorded interviews mitigate multiple hiring biases, including hindsight bias, overconfidence bias, and more.

Embedded rating guides and mandatory rating fields ensure that ratings are completed at the time of the interview, reducing the risk of bias. These features also make it easier to train multiple raters to follow a consistent rating process than it would be to train one interviewer to conduct an identical interview process repeatedly. 

It’s worth mentioning that when you compare in-person interviews with pre-recorded interviews, you may just be trading one set of biases for another. Instead of wondering if candidates can answer the questions and present well, you might instead be asking yourself if they can answer the questions and hold themselves well over video.

Since you can’t eliminate bias entirely, it’s about choosing interview types that enable you to prevent it. In terms of preserving interview quality and mitigating bias, pre-recorded video interviewing is the best option for a few reasons. 

Raters can revisit the ratings and multiple raters can evaluate the responses so it’s easier to incorporate diverse perspectives and make well-informed decisions. With pre-recorded interviews, you can also analyze how good of a job the rater is doing at following the rating guide and scoring fairly. 

Synchronous phone and in-person interviews don’t allow you the luxury of reviewing interview responses because they are typically not recorded.

Supports Legal Defensibility

There are several reasons phone screens and in-person interviews don’t provide the same level of legal defensibility as structured pre-recorded video interviews. Video interview software documents the pre-recorded process, including capturing the rating data, the accommodation strategies and techniques used, and notes explaining the decision.

Suppose you ever did have to revisit a hiring decision because a candidate made an appeal. In that case, pre-recorded interviewing offers the opportunity to re-evaluate and provide evidence that your process is not discriminatory.

Capturing all interview data also creates a sense of accountability. When raters know their decisions can be scrutinized, it incentivizes them to be as accurate as possible in their ratings and notes.

Best Practices For Offering Inclusive Asynchronous Video Interviews

Simply implementing pre-recorded video interviewing alone isn’t enough. It’s crucial to incorporate inclusion and accessibility strategies into the hiring process from the start. Think about pre-recorded interviewing as a tool that will drive workplace diversity.

Consider these best practices to help you achieve your recruiting goals and make your process more welcoming and accommodating.

Supporting Research

Final Thoughts

Every candidate deserves a fair and consistent hiring process, and advancing hiring diversity starts with the screening process. With proper adherence to the process, pre-recorded video interviews provide specific advantages that improve accessibility and reduce bias far better than a phone or in-person screen ever could.

Overall, pre-recorded interviews are powerful tools that provide protected groups with an equitable opportunity to succeed and advance.