It is important to keep the candidate's experience in mind while creating your interview experience. Every component from highlighting your company brand to the questions you ask can have a positive impact on the candidate experience and help you recruit more effectively.

Branding Your Interviews

Consistent branding is a necessity while hiring and can be a great way to showcase your company culture to your candidates. This will allow your candidates to get to know your company better and help them determine how they should present themselves in their video interview.

Adding branding to your Spark hire account will customize all your interviews, and share links, and emails sent through the platform. When setting up your account to build interviews we recommend you first set up your branding tab. 

Here is a checklist of what you need to do in your branding tab. 

• Add Company info and link your company socials. This will appear on your interview invites for your candidates to learn more about you. 
• Add a header image and company log. The header image appears at the top of all your landing pages, emails, interview invites, and your interviews. The company logo appears in the about us section on your interview invite. 
• Select a brand color that will change the color of some buttons and lines on your interview invites.
•  Add photos and a profile video to further personalize your interview invites.

You can view a branding example from another Spark Hire customer, the chicago cubs in this short video. 

We recommend keeping your branding up to date on Spark Hire but also on your own website and socials. Social media plays a large role in a candidate’s job search now. Your candidates are likely searching for you on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Twitter, Instagram, etc., 

One GlassDoor poll found that 86% of employees and job seekers research a company when deciding on where to apply for a job.

 It’s important to regularly evaluate where your brand appears when you search for a variety of related keywords. If old content is surfacing that may be inconsistent with your current brand, culture, values, and expectations, replace it with updated branding content, especially images and videos.  

Having up-to-date branding will ensure your candidates are receiving the most accurate company information. 

If you have multiple brands you are working with, we do have the option to add multiple brands. 

Question Sets

Question Sets are the groups of questions you will ask the candidates in their interviews. You can premake and reuse question sets for various interviews. After branding, creating a question set is your next step to building your interview. 

If you do not have a list of questions check out our sample interview questions for some inspiration. 

Pro tip: You can add questions to live interviews and mark off questions as you go to create bookmarks. 

There are ways to set up your candidates for success with the question settings. It is important to remember that one-way video interviews do not replace lives. They are their own separate type of interview. Keep this in mind when setting the takes and think time. 

Give candidates unlimited takes and unlimited think time for at least the first few questions. This will allow your candidate to get used to the platform and comfortable recording themselves. If you limit the takes or think time on the first question and the candidate's first take is not a good one they are likely to not complete the interview. 

In fact, we recommend you only use think time on higher difficulty, technical questions, towards the end of the interview. Using think time on culture fit or soft skill questions is not recommended because candidates will be able to give a genuine answer, whereas on a technical question, think time is valuable because it’s assessing a specific knowledge base or skill.

Start with easier questions and work your way to difficult questions. Think of this as warming up the candidate. Ask lighter culture-fit questions at the top and more difficult or technical questions later on. You can read up on how to structure your one-way interview in our customer playbooks. 

Video questions make your candidate feel more welcome and add a personal touch to your interviews. Read more about videos in the next section. 

Adding Videos

 Adding videos to your one-way interviews is a great way to personalize your interviews and engage your candidate. You can easily record videos directly into your library or upload an existing video.

Pro-tip: You can create custom thumbnails for your videos

We highly recommend that you add intro and outro videos to your interviews. These videos play automatically before and after your one-way interviews. These videos are found to have the highest candidate impact in a positive way. They engage the candidate and prepare them for the interview. To help get you started we have sample scripts and example videos from other customers. 

Pro-tip: If you need someone outside of your Spark Hire account to record a video for you, send them a video request. 

Video questions can also add a personal touch to your one-way interviews. When candidates see members of your team have recorded themselves for the interview it makes them more motivated and comfortable to be on camera. Remember when using video questions to still type out your questions. That way if the candidate could not hear the question in the video, they will be able to read it. 

You can find sample video questions from other Spark Hire customers here. 

Adding a profile to your interview invites can help the candidate get to know more about your company culture. You can highlight your company values and what it is like to work at your company. You can view Spark Hire’s company video on our youtube page. If a video you want to use as your profile video is on your company youtube page, we have instructions on how to download it.