Disclaimer: This is a Guest Post by Process.St

When hiring new employees, companies are faced with a problem: it’s difficult to gauge much information about a candidate from a resume.

The standard resume is clinical and superficial. It can tell you about some of the person’s achievements or abilities without telling you about the person themselves.

One solution to this is to utilize video in the recruitment process (links to process.st). 

Video resumes can provide all the same information along with extra understanding of communication skills, professionalism, and personal skills.

However, many companies fall back on whatever they find easiest; missing out on the best solution. 

Our challenge therefore is: How do we build a system which can manage video resume submissions easily and effectively?

In this article, we’ll look at:

• Why video-first applications are the way forward
• How to explain this to the candidate
• How to build a hiring process with video
• Connect Ziggeo with Process Street to automate your hiring

Why video-first applications are the way forward

There are many advantages of video applications when hiring candidates. 

Primarily, these videos help you see the person behind the application. You can gauge how they present themselves, how they communicate, and whether they might be a good fit for the team they would be joining. 

All the information of a normal resume can be included in the video, yet now you get the added benefit of seeing their sense of humor or their ability to communicate a complex idea simply. 

Video also lets you recieve more information about the candidate. A 5 minute video can pass more information about their achievements, track record, and aspirations than a 1 page resume. 

Video resumes are also great for establishing company culture in the modern workspace. They not only help you bring to interview a range of candidates suited to the team, but normalize the process of communicating via video in a face to face manner. 

This is useful in all companies, but particularly essential for employers hiring remotely (links to process.st) - a massive, growing section of the workforce. 

Lastly, a video submission acts, in part, as an initial interview allowing the overall process to be expedited. It improves the efficacy of your candidate qualification, increasing the chances you’ll hire the best candidate available. 

Let the candidate know what information you're looking for

It’s important when designing this system to think about how to make the process easy for the applicant.

A good first step would be to include your own video of yourself explaining the role and expectations. This provides the candidate with all the information they might need and also provides your video as a kind of video-best-practices which they can follow if they’re new to video submissions. 

You can also provide written instructions for what the applicant should cover in their video on the application page. If you make these short and actionable then the candidate can use them as a cheat sheet while on the call. 

You want the candidate to be able to show themselves to you as best they can, so providing this extra guidance and assistance could help increase the quality of submissions.

One reason to provide clear guidance, as the Guardian mentions, is:

“There is no set rule for creating a video CV, whereas paper CVs tend to have a set format.”

The article also reminds employers to advise candidates to avoid reading from a script:

"The biggest mistake to avoid is having a script 'off camera' that you refer to while recording your video," says Fels. "It is really obvious if you look away from the camera to read notes."

Which makes sense, as the whole point of doing a video submission is to see and get to know the person, not just a script which could have been submitted as a document. 

Build a seamless hiring process with video

Let’s look at how the system will be constructed.

What Ziggeo is and how it works

Ziggeo is a video platform which lets you record and share videos in an easy and streamlined manner, giving an employer the tools to manage videos which have been submitted and shared with them. 

Ziggeo could be used for hiring, as we’re outlining, or for a whole range of other use cases.

What Process Street is and how it works

Process Street is a business process management platform which provides an easy way for people to follow company processes. It works by having process templates which are run as checklists (links to process.st). 

Process Street is used for recruitment by a range of companies, but can work for anything which requires a set process. Process Street provides a range of business process automation (links to process.st) capabilities tied to its actionable checklists.

What Zapier is and how it works

Zapier is a third-party automation platform which allows apps and webapps to talk to each other. Within its ecosystem of over 1,000 different apps, you can create automations - “zaps” - which form workflows. 

For example, you might check off a task in a Process Street checklist and that posts the content of that task into Slack for colleagues to view. 

How our video submission system will flow

The super-brief overview of our system is this: 

• Applicant records video with Ziggeo
• Zapier notifies Process Street
• Process Street runs a resume screening checklist and assigns it to the hiring manager
• That person then watches the video and scores/takes notes in the checklist
• They then decide whether to bring that person to interview or not

We’re going to use Process Street’s publicly available pre-made Human Resources Pre Employment Screening (links to process.st) checklist when we build our zap, but you can create your own checklists inside Process Street or modify existing pre-made ones.

Here’s a snapshot of the overview section of the template after I modified it for my use specifically for video resume submissions:

You could do the same with yours and tailor the process exactly to the needs of your organization!

Here’s the public Process Street checklist (links to process.st) which you can add into your Process Street account today for free.

How to connect Ziggeo with Process Street for video resume screening

What we’ll give you now is a step by step technical breakdown of how to build the zap. 

The end result is that a candidate goes to the application page of your website, records a video, and the hiring manager is automatically notified and presented with the set company process for reviewing the submission. 

Create a public application page from the hosted pages section 

With Ziggeo you can create single hosted pages for people to record and upload videos from. 

We’re going to use these hosted pages for this system as you can include submission fields for the candidate’s name and email address.

 You can have full access to the html of this page too, allowing you to make all the necessary customizations to keep the branding of the page in line with your company. 

This will then act as the submission page where you can include a video from yourself, some guidance tips for the candidate, and the Ziggeo video recorder. 

Connect your Zapier account with Ziggeo

In Zapier, you choose Ziggeo as the trigger app and it will prompt you to select an account to connect with.

The trigger should be: When a new video is created in Ziggeo

You only need to follow the on-screen instructions in the Zapier portal to set the zap up running. You can see what this looks like in the image below:

Connect Zapier with Process Street

Once your trigger is set up, you can connect Zapier with your Process Street account by following the instructions and generating an API key inside Process Street’s Settings and API tab in your Organization (links to process.st).

Then you select the action: Run checklist

This should bring you to the edit template screen where you can assign the checklist to the responsible person and other configurations. 

You can see some of the setup which I have built in the image below:

I’ve selected the template I want to run as a checklist, I’ve chosen to name that checklist with the name the candidate submits, I’ve chosen to put a due date for the checklist of 1 day after the video submission, and I’ve assigned the checklist to myself. 

There are other fields in the edit template section which you can fill in too so that you can make the smoothest possible integration. 

The final step is to check it works and then you’re done!

Create a smooth video application experience with Ziggeo and Process Street

By spending a short chunk of time building a system like this, you can greatly improve the efficacy of your hiring structures and improve the way you build your teams. 

All the data entry here is being automated, so you’ll save yourself or the hiring manager time as they complete the job. 

Not only will you be able to give yourself better outcomes, but you’ll have a smoother system in place to deliver them. 

What are you waiting for?

Start building your integrations today!