The Internet is great, opening up our businesses to the entire globe, but it does have its downfalls. Sometimes, you just don’t know who you’re dealing with or what you’re going to get.
While that may not be a big deal when ordering bed sheets, you don’t want to mess around when it comes to hiring employees for your business.
Created in 2007, Sonru is an automated video interviewing software that allows a potential candidate to record their video interview at their own time, letting them put their best face forward, and letting recruiters have a large pool of interviews at their disposal, when it’s time to hire.
Sonru’s Saundra Wade took a moment to tell us about the software/service.
Can you introduce us to Sonru?
Sonru is a company that offers a video interviewing solution that streamlines the recruiting process. Our HQ is in Wexford, Ireland, but we have offices around the globe in Singapore, UK, Europe, Australia, UAE and the US.
Sonru was founded in 2007 by our CEO, Ed Hendrick.
The idea of making the interview process simple and cost-effective came to Hendrick during his own job-hunting days.
He spent countless hours traveling from his home to various locations around the country for interviews that frequently lasted less than half an hour.
The name Sonru comes from the Irish phrase “Bí le Sonru,” which means to stand out. Our video interviewing solution enables candidates to do just that, and go beyond the CV.
Can you give us an overview of what Sonru does, and who is it meant for?
Sonru’s video interviewing solution is meant for recruiters and hiring managers, with the key goal to streamline the recruiting process.
Typically recruiters will sift through loads of CVs for each job, and then the next stage is to coordinate a phone screening with selected candidates. This takes a lot of time and effort to coordinate, and requires both the candidate and recruiter to connect at the same time.
Using Sonru, a recruiter can create a series of questions and send an invite to multiple candidates to complete their video interview by a certain deadline.
All candidates get the same questions, so it’s a level playing field and a fairer process. The candidate records their video interview at their own time, on a laptop or mobile device like an iPad or Android.
Once completed, a recruiter can quickly review the candidate videos and quickly create a shortlist of who to bring in for a face-to-face interview. They can also share videos with hiring managers, who can add comments and ratings.
This process saves huge amounts of time - in many cases recruiting time for roles can be reduced up to 50% over traditional phone screening methods - and brings the best candidates forward in the hiring process.
Sonru allows candidates to showcase their personalities. How does Sonru accomplish this, and why is this important, in this day and age?
It’s very difficult to get a sense of a candidate’s personality over the phone or from their CV.
A video interview lets you see the candidate, their body language, how they react to certain questions; it really lets them come alive.
By letting candidates showcase their personalities, Sonru gives you get a sense of a candidate’s overall fit for a role, and how they would fit into your company culture. It’s important to get a sense of this early in the process, as it avoids a lot of wasted time.
Similarly, Sonru allows recruiters to streamline their selection process. What are some ways Sonru facilitates this streamlining? How much time does a recruitment company stand to save, per month, using your services?
Simply not having to have two people connected at the same time saves a lot of hours in a week, as well as the level of effort required to coordinate a phone screen.
Candidates can complete their interviews on a mobile device using the Sonru Record app, and recruiters can quickly screen candidates in minutes on their desktop, laptop or mobile also using the Sonru Player app. They can really do it anywhere; we’ve had customers reviewing candidate video interviews on the train in to work.
In general, recruit time can be reduced up to 50% and first round screening time can be over 80%. You can imagine the time it would take to set up, say, 10 phone screens for candidates for a job. With Sonru, that can be done in minutes.
You translate that to the hours that a recruiter is spending on early-stage screening using phone interviews versus video, and the ROI is quickly evident.
It also avoids wasted time for hiring managers. Bringing them in earlier in the recruitment process makes it more collaborative, and by sharing the videos with hiring managers, they can be really sure that the people they bring in for a face-to-face interview are ones they want to meet with, and are of the highest quality.
You wrote a post recently about what is in store for video interviewing in 2015. What are some new developments in the field of video interviewing? Do you expect video interviewing to continue to catch on?
We certainly think so.
Video interviewing is definitely becoming more and more popular around the globe; we’ve seen phenomenal growth at Sonru since we started in 2007. It’s gone beyond the early adoption phase to where it’s more mainstream now. In recent surveys, we’ve seen 93% of candidates say they preferred a video interview over a phone interview, which says a lot.
I think the growth of mobile devices is key; in the last number of years we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of candidates completing a Sonru video interview on a mobile device. With the development of smart watches, you may see video interviews being done on those too.
Sonru has the lowest bandwidth requirements in the industry for video, so you’ll see video interviewing giving greater reach to recruiters to candidates around the world, and interviews being completed anytime and anywhere.