I will share my experience with an Asynchronous Job Interview and why I believe that it will be the future

My Experience with Interviews

I work in big companies since 2007 and in my career, I have had more than 1000 interviews. I have been interviewed by tech giants and marker leaders like Google, Facebook Spotify, PwC etc and as a freelancer, I have been interviewed by companies and individuals, including students for tutoring etc.

In addition, I have given many interviews, by having different roles, including phone screening, screening, peer assessment and hiring manager.

In my opinion, the interview process is very important, but also very consuming. I believe that now due to the new norm of Covid-19, companies tend to be more flexible. One example is the video call interviews and many others.

My Experience with an Asynchronous Job Interview

A small company, I would call it a “family business”, was looking for a Data Scientist consultant on a popular freelancing platform. They contacted me and they provided me the “job description”. After we exchanged a couple of messages (asynchronously), they asked me to arrange an interview to discuss the project. Usually, the “clients” send you a link with their calendar and based on their availability and yours, you try to find a slot where both parties are available. This is not always an easy task, especially when we’re dealing with different time zones.

On contrary, the client provided me a link of VideoAsk by Typeform where we could have an asynchronous job interview. The client had recorded around 6 job-related questions. At the end of each question, I had the chance to provide my answers in a limited time (~ 5 minutes). Once I was feeling confident about my answer, I could submit the recorded video and jump to the next question. Note that I was able to see the next question when I submitted the answer to the current question.

Personally, I found this approach very efficient and I believe that in the future more and more companies will start interviewing candidates asynchronously.

The Pros and Cons of the Asynchronous Job Interviews

Below, I will outline the most obvious pros and cons of asynchronous job interviews.

Pros

• You can interview many people in a short period of time.
• If the candidate is not good, you save time by rejecting them without having to be polite by following the “protocol” of the interview process.
• The interviewer has a record of the interviews and can watch them again anytime.
• Since the interviews are recorded, can be analyzed be Machine Learning Models etc
• Both the interviewer and the candidate have the flexibility to work on the interview whenever they want.

Cons

• The process is impersonal.
• The interviewer cannot check if the candidate cheats.
• The interviewer cannot adapt the following questions based on the candidate’s answers. So the process is somehow restricted.

The Takeaway

Personally, I believe that asynchronous interviews will be the new trend and especially during the screening phase. In essence, I believe that in the beginning, it will replace the phone screening interviews and most probably other job interview steps too.