With our mentioning in Time, the question always arises as to how video in the hiring process can lead to major discrimination problems. Unless you are involved with video resumes where you as a company or provider have no control over the content, distribution or anything like that associated with the video resume, you can have safeguards in place to actually improve your compliance. Video interviews, like those offered by HireVue, offer companies a way to keep control of the interview process and at the same time reap the benefits of video in your hiring process.
Over the last three years we have been vetted, screened and asked questions by our customers both very big and very small about how we work within EEOC and OFCCP compliance. When those words come into play there is always the HR shiver of worry. After going through the rounds with numerous customers, we have found that there are main things that HireVue offers in helping our clients with their compliance:
1) Standardized Interviews – A HireVue is completely standardized across your position as all candidates are asked the same questions. Clients build the interviews themselves so it is very easy for HR to have a hand in helping create the right HireVue with the right questions and eliminate the variability found with most interviewing scenarios.
2) Elimination of the sports team and fishing trip talk – Whether you are friend, a salesman or in our case a candidate, everyone has gone into someone’s office seen a picture on a wall from a vacation, a trophy, a sports team shrine, something that starts a conversation. The “Oh wow that’s quite the fish, where did you catch that” conversation is the first thing many people do when going into an interview. As a recruiter looking for feedback, after spending 30 minutes with a candidate your manager comes up to you and says “they were great, bring them in for round 2″ when you ask about their skills the manager says “oh yeah, they have them” when in reality all they talked about was the Broncos, fishing in Key West, vacationing in Mexico or their favorite animal (me when I worked at my zoo job in college).
3) Proactivity in your compliance – What happens when you get audited by legal or you get a letter from the great EEOC or OFCCP notifying you of a complaint? What are you to do? What happens when a certain manager is singled out for being inappropriate or for not hiring the right people? Usually that means a lot of sifting through old records and files trying to piece together everything going on, determine who is right in the “he said, she said” war and trying to go back through time to figure everything out. What if on a regular basis, you could go into your interviews and see what the manager’s all see? What if you could compare and evaluate candidates on the same level as your managers by being able to readily compare and contrast candidates against each other? We have found that when you are able to evaluate candidates through a dashboard like the HireVue Evaluator, you can easily determine (even without specific knowledge of function) who the best candidate is for the position. Does a certain manager always advance people based on certain discriminatory characteristics? What if you could catch that quickly, easily and before there’s a problem and have discussion with your colleague? What’s that worth to your organization?
A number of legal related bloggers have weighed in on the topic -
George’s Employment Blawg
HR Tests
And always reliable ERE Discussion groups here and here (login may be required)
A company can get sued for anything. If someone blatantly discriminates, it will happen with paper resumes, video resumes, video interviews, video conferencing, in person interviews, anywhere. The key is being able to be proactive in fighting discrimination, incorporate safeguards into your process to try to limit discrimination and promote a corporate culture that is intolerant of discrimination.
HireVue helps.
Since moving on from 
