Video Assessment Interviews: How to Successfully Gauge a Candidate’s Personality

The most effective way to evaluate someone’s personality is by using an assessment. However, if you would like to also evaluate a candidate’s personality during the interview process, you can achieve this with a video assessment interview.

Do resumes tell you if candidates can do a job well? Maybe.

But do they truly demonstrate intangible skills? Like soft skills and personality traits? Most likely not.

The truth is, you might be impressed by a candidate’s qualifications, but are they actually qualified for the job?

Without the appropriate assessment tools, it is similar to being stuck with an older cell phone. In this day and age, it’s time to move beyond intuition and outdated methods when it comes to assessing candidates. Let’s use science and artificial intelligence instead. A strong duo that is surely helping employers hire the right candidates.

Video assessment interviews powered by artificial intelligence have helped companies find top talent. They now have the ability to assess and recruit more candidates and a more diverse talent pool.

Here are ways to gauge a candidate’s personality through fair and secure video assessment interviews.

Unravel personality at a glance

Sometimes it’s hard to find someone with the right cultural fit and soft skills. This is why video assessment interviews offer insights that cannot be gauged from paper alone.

Personality assessments are known to show how people behave and how well they do their jobs. This means they will help you assess whether or not a candidate is suited for the job. How? Through the Five-Factor Model, which has been proven through science.

Since the 1990s, the Five-Factor Model has been used to explain personality traits, choose good employees, predict job satisfaction, foresee career success, and choose good leaders.

Our video interviewing software is a great example. EVA-SSESS provides a Five-Factor Model report for each candidate after their video assessment interview. This report will tell you more about the candidate’s personality, such as how they learn, how they communicate, how they perform in sales, how good they are at programming, and how they deal with customers. This will help you improve the selection process, improve your talent decisions, and speed up the talent search.

Adopt a question-based personality assessment test

What can you do to improve your accuracy when assessing personality during a video assessment interview? Of course, by asking the right questions.

There are two main types of questions that are asked during an interview: situational questions and past-behavior questions. Research has established that:

General job knowledge is measured using situational questions. Meanwhile, past-behavior questions seem to measure some personality characteristics.

If you want to know someone’s personality, you need to ask questions about their behavior at work. For example, “I would like you to share with me a time when you had a work-related disagreement with a colleague and how it was resolved” This type of question can be used to measure agreeableness. Or asking the candidates how they set goals or meet deadlines could also measure conscientiousness.

Leverage structured video assessment interviews

Thousands of interviews show us that a structured video assessment interview is more reliable, valid, and less discriminatory than an unstructured one. So what is the difference between these two types of interviews?

The typical job interview is an unstructured one: “Please share with me your strengths and weaknesses, which superhero would you rather be, and why?”

Meanwhile, a structured video assessment interview asks questions that are specifically designed to assess job-related knowledge and skills and uses a quantitative rating scale to rate each answer. The same questions are asked of all candidates, and the interviewer is generally trained on how to do this properly.

Why is it beneficial to use a structured video assessment interview? Structured interviews can reduce errors. It also reduces interviewer bias and prevents candidates from feigning their answers during an interview.

Takeaway

The same principles of measuring personality with an assessment can be used to measure personality in an interview. You should approach hiring decisions by carefully designing the best job-related questions to ask, then systematically collecting the data, and finally using quantitative ratings to make your decisions.

Best practices say that you should use a psychometric assessment to measure a candidate’s personality and then use a structured interview to check and add to those personality ratings.

Are you looking for an easier way to gauge a candidate’s true potential and fit? Our video interviewing software got your back.

EVA-SSESS is a next-generation video interviewing software that enables enterprises to pinpoint top talent faster and build diverse workforces. Helping them sail through the screening process faster and gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing HR landscape. EVA-SSESS delivers structured video assessment interviews that minimize bias, empower employers and recruiters to evaluate candidates fairly, and make better talent decisions faster.

Book a free demo today!

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