Sunshine Bunny Co. Interview

This is a real email, to a third-party recruiter. The interview format for the client company is a webcam recording of an applicant, who is asked to respond to pre-recorded questions. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Hey Woody,

 First of all, I will do the video interview. However, I'm doing so under protest. Not for myself, but on behalf of Sunshine Bunny Co. in specific and sanity in general. It has nothing to do with buying a webcam, I'm over that. 

Bear with me, and share this with Janice and any of your bosses you are comfortable sharing with. 
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Companies, we can certainly agree, hire people to provide business value; To achieve business objectives and to solve business problems. They don't hire software engineers to write code, they hire us to provide business value. Any process, tool, resource, or activity that does not add business value is a liability. If we can agree on that, then read on. If not, then we're not even playing the same game, much less in the same ballpark.

Failure to retain valuable resources (in the form of human beings or anything else) after taking the time to evaluate them is expensive. The unavoidable expense of the employee interview process is why some companies resort to automated tools such as the system Sunshine Bunny Co. is using. 

 The video recording, more importantly than being an inconvenience to me, is actually hurting Sunshine Bunny Co. They are losing good candidates to this piece of the process. I guarantee it, and I will explain why. The good candidates they are losing probably did not have any personal problem with the video-recording interview process, but it isn't something they could do anything about from outside the organization, even if they objected to it. We, as candidates, just have to fire it off and hope for the best.

First proposition: Having a video recording of candidates provides no business value. 

It does not tell Sunshine Bunny Co. anything about whether I show up and work hard, nor whether I'm technically capable. It also does not teach them anything meaningful about my interpersonal relationship skills, because there is no immediate human feedback on either end. This allows for assumptions to be made and to grow unchecked, because language is semantically imperfect, body language with no human context even more so. Human beings have a vast number of cognitive biases that are outside of our conscious control. The video will allow these biases to run wild, with no checks or balances against what would be the immediate physical human interaction of a traditional face-to-face interview. A neutral non-response to the video is the most positive thing that can come of it, which in turn fails to justify the expense of the system being used; Making it a liability to the business.

An audio recording, conversely, can at least demonstrate a candidate's verbal communication skills, which is very important for a person's ability to function in all job roles, and therefore provides business value.

Second proposition: Having a video recording can only provide unnecessary rejection, due to unconscious cognitive biases, damaging business value.

If a process or tool does not provide value then the only contribution that can be made by it is, by definition, negative. 

The only potential results of having this video recording are negative. Biases against a person's hair style, their weight or physical fitness, physical comeliness are all potential sources of bias, that again, most human beings cannot overcome.  All of that prejudice exists without even having to mention gender, ethnicity, age, disabilities or any of the other really ugly bigotry that might sneakily creep out of the minds of the evaluators. The way they might grimace when they are thinking, or maybe a candidate absently picked their nose on camera, any or all of these things can lead to a rejection by one or more of the persons evaluating the interview. All of these factors result in Sunshine Bunny Co. losing business value by failing to hire candidates that could be huge assets to the enterprise. None of these factors will lead to a positive determination.

There can only be negative outcomes by the existence of these videos. I am not expecting to change it. I'm assuredly not expecting you share this email with Sunshine Bunny Co., but I think a perceptive leader would recognize that I'm fundamentally correct.

This is the sort of problem, the ones organizations don't realize they have, that I'm especially good at finding and addressing. Eliminating un-needed tools, processes, layers of indirection and other cruft is as important as creating new features and functionality. 

I have to believe this type of pedantic analysis that it seems I inevitably undertake will eventually pay off for me. 

Maybe it will be with Sunshine Bunny Co., maybe not. 

For now; Let's find out!

Sunshine, happiness, bunnies and puppies for all!
Guy Incognito