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Improving A Low Response Rate
Improving A Low Response Rate

Try these tips if you're sending a lot of invites but not seeing many videos completed.

Shiri Hirschhaut avatar
Written by Shiri Hirschhaut
Updated over a week ago

It's inevitable that certain Jobs will receive a higher response rate than others - it all depends on the confidence (both personal and technical) of the target interviewees. In any case, if the response rate is low, we can look at adjusting the language used and/or reducing the difficulty of the interview questions.

Try improving the response rate for your Jobs by:

  • Enabling Practice Questions
    This option makes a big difference in ensuring the interviewee is comfortable recording themselves, and has no bearing on the actual answers submitted. 

  • Adding in an Intro Video
    Intro videos are really effective at putting an interviewee at ease. We'd suggest filming yourself or another member of the team. Speak briefly about who you are so the interviewee can also put a face to the name, then go on to explain that a video interview will greatly improve their chances at being hired, and that the video is just another opportunity for them to show their personality.

  • Reducing the number of questions
    If you've set up 10 questions totalling over 10 mins this will be quite daunting for interviewees! The best response rates are received for question sets with 3-4 questions that total around 3-5 minutes. Unless you're looking to use our AI for video response analysis - which increases in accuracy the more content it has to work with - we'd suggest removing some of the questions to bring this down.

  • Reducing the time allowance for each question
    Interviewees often try to use the entire allotted time, thinking the longer response they give the more this will benefit them. Often the quality of the response deteriorates the longer they feel they need to speak. Unless it's a complex question, reduce the time limit down for each question to be 1.5 mins max. 45 seconds will usually be more than enough time to answer each of our standard questions.

  • Decreasing the difficulty of the questions
    Questions set to Hidden (only allowing 30 seconds of preparation time) with no retries are on the most difficult setting. This will ensure the responses from interviewees aren't rehearsed, but it is also quite daunting for interviewees. Swap the questions to be Open to allow the interviewee 'unlimited' time to think about their answer to each question before proceeding.

    If you have the questions set to Open, decrease the difficulty further by allowing 1 or 2 retries. This will improve the interviewee's confidence as well, and their responses will still be genuine: our analytics show that around 80% of the time interviewees choose their first attempt anyway.

  • Adjusting the email content
    If you're sending out your own custom invitation emails either through your inbox or your ATS/CRM using a Direct Link, consider the language and layout.

    Make it brief, friendly and clear.

    Rather than a 'video interview' you could frame this as a 'video introduction' instead, which makes it seem less like a test and more like a supplement for the resume.

    You could also embed the Direct Link behind a clickable image or button rather than including it as text in the email, for example: Click here to begin your video introduction!  or:

  • Try inviting through our platform
    If the invitations you are putting together separately aren't receiving the response rate you'd expect, you could try out our platform invitations instead. Find them under the Invitations section against a Job.

    We have designed them with open and friendly language, and you can change some of the content at the time you are sending them out. They provide advice for the interviewee as well as an indication around how long the process will be. They can be customised further for a fee.

    Reminder emails can be set up in this way as well, and you can configure them to trigger in a set number of days. Reminders are a helpful way to increase response rates.

    In addition to emails our platform invitations can simultaneously be sent out as SMS messages. We find that around 65% of video interviews are completed on mobile phones, so the response rate is boosted by prompting the interviewee with a link provided as an SMS.

    We can draw more information and provide analytics based on invitations sent out through our platform. These are all stored under the Analytics section and can indicate the best times to send out invitations based on response/click-through rates, as well as other insights.

  • Reach out for help!
    If these tips still aren't returning the results you expect, pop a message into the Chat Tool available on the myInterview dashboard or reach out directly to your Success Manager. We can step through your specific use-case and make sure you're able to get the most out of video interviewing. We're a friendly bunch over here and we're always happy to help out!

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