Virtual interviews are unfair to candidates and generally bad practice.
Objects are categorized as soon as they are perceived. That’s what researchers found in a study posted to Psychological Science. This phenomenon is why first impressions are so hard to break, once someone thinks they have you figured out it becomes extremely hard to change their minds. The association for psychological science has found that people form their first impression of someone within 1/10th of a second. After seeing someone for a millisecond, people have cemented an impression of you based on physical appearance alone.
As a senior who is about graduating in just a few months, I am on the hunt for a job. Part of this process includes interviews. Interviews are one of those processes that has traditionally been conducted in person, however, today many of them are conducted online. My issue with this is that I connect with people much better in person than I do online, and anecdotally many of my peers agree with this. I feel that interviewers don’t perceive me as an individual when we meet virtually, they just perceive me as another talking head on their computer screen.
Not to toot my own horn, but I have good soft skills and general social skills. Unfortunately, some of these skills just don’t apply to virtual meeting spaces. When I’m in a zoom call, I focus on my own face, struggle to make eye contact, and don’t get to give the interviewer a firm handshake. Knowing that I will be forced to interview without these social crutches makes me even more nervous than I would typically get. All these factors influence the interviewers first impression of me and my performance in general in a detrimental way.
When classes were being held virtually due to Covid, I found myself zoning out at a higher rate. I think that this is because I didn’t get the opportunity to form an emotional connection with my professors, I didn’t get to make true eye contact with them, and none of them knew who I was. In my blog post How Much is a Picture Worth, I said “As humans, we emotionally connect with lived experiences in ways that just cannot be recreated by digital representations.”, and I think that this applies to virtual interviews too. Similarly to how I didn’t get to form emotional connections with my professors during Covid, interviewers don’t get to form an emotional connection with me through virtual interviews. To once again reference a prior blog post, I theorized that, “If you experience something, it becomes part of your reality; if you see something, it only becomes part of your memory.” When you interview in person, you give them your complete attention and they become a part of your immediate existence, cementing them in your reality for at least a short while. Online, interviewers don’t have to pay complete attention to you, meaning that you are just a fleeting thought in their memory. Career coach J.T. O’Donnell adds credibility to these concerns saying, “The interviewer can’t be as easily distracted when they are sitting across from a candidate. Recruiters are notorious for scheduling Zoom calls but not actually being on camera. They might as well be on the phone.”
One situation that frustrated me in my most recent interview occurred at the end, when they asked me if I had any questions for them. As a well-prepared interviewee, I had plenty of questions at the ready regarding company culture, job expectations, and her favorite part of working at the company. I could tell that the interviewer performed these interviews regularly, because her face went blank and she began regurgitating an obviously scripted answer. This threw me off – I was trying to learn more about the company, and she couldn’t give me a genuine answer that wasn’t scripted by corporate HR. How can I be certain that these weren’t genuine answers? Because she was literally reading off a script on her desk. She refused to meet my eyes through the screen and spoke like a robot while she recited the script she was told to say. Although she had been working in the company’s HR department for ten years, she could not even pretend to give authentic answers or relate to me personally.
Obviously, there are situations where virtual interviews cannot be avoided, like if you are trying to get a job across the country. I am moving to Oregon next fall, and find myself in this position. In my case virtual interviews are the only real opportunity for me to apply for a position thousands of miles away. However, large corporations should have standardized interview processes and coordination between branches, allowing me to interview in person at a nearby office. If they wanted to perform in-person interviews, they could. They choose not to because virtual interviews are far cheaper, faster, and easier for them.
WARNING – somewhat unrelated tangent about interviews below.
To build on that last point, most the perceived positive aspects of virtual interviews benefit the employer, not the employee. For starters, it allows them to interview many more employees. Companies are no longer harnessed by local talent; they can interview applicants from around the world and select the cream of the crop.
I say perceived benefits instead of benefits, because there in an increasing interest among companies to hire the right employees, and I believe that virtual interviews make doing this exponentially more difficult. How much are employers actually learning about these candidates in virtual interviews? Are virtual interviews accurate predictors of job performance? Companies spend thousands of dollars onboarding and training employees, hiring the wrong employee is an expensive mistake to make. Research is coming out that interviews in general are no longer strong predictors of job performance, more nuanced, task-based approaches have become the gold standard for candidate selection. Harvard Business Review states that interviews “demonstrate someone’s competence to answer questions, know theory, and prioritize information”, while some of these may be important, these traits don’t encompass the aspects of the job they are applying to perform. The article raises another interesting point – since people are biased in favor of themselves, interviewers are often searching for another version of themselves. This can be an issue because the person interviewing you may not be the ideal fit for the position that you are applying for, but may still perceive you negatively if you have different perspectives, attitudes, or personality.
Maurer, R. (2023, December 21). Majority of job seekers prefer In-Person interviews. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/majority-job-seekers-prefer-person-interviews
Tuff, G. (2022, September 28). When hiring, prioritize assignments over interviews. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/09/when-hiring-prioritize-assignments-over-interviews
Edited by ChatGPT3.5