A light-flooded room with a window front, the view is directed towards a lake and mountains, there are sun loungers on the terrace. Ideal for relaxing at least a little before an interview. It continues into the office: wind turbines, a multimedia company presentation that projects a digital curriculum vitae on the wall. Using what is known as hand tracking, Franz Schmid pushes over a virtual coffee. Finger movements are sufficient, a controller is no longer necessary – he is experienced in finding his way around virtual reality, or VR for short.
Franz Schmid, 35 years old, is Senior Director in the Modern Workplace department at the international digital service provider Avanade and works in Munich. He has been conducting job interviews with VR glasses since August. It’s still a pilot project – but this could become normal in the future.
Companies no longer only invite their applicants to on-site job interviews. Digital recruiting formats are becoming more and more common, and the pandemic is catalyzing this process enormously. According to the digital association Bitkom, at the beginning of the year almost three quarters of the 853 interviewed managing directors and HR managers from companies in various industries conducted job interviews via video conference. Almost twice as many as before Corona.
More and more companies are running parts of the application process online
Digital assessment centers, online test procedures, digital contract signing or trial work are also no longer uncommon. “Corona has definitely ensured that even the most conservative companies have noticed: There are definitely advantages to carrying out parts of the application process online,” says Robindro Ullah. He is a recruiting expert and managing director of the Trendence Institute, one of the leading consulting and market research companies for employer branding, personnel marketing and recruiting.
In addition to time and money, the digital selection saves resources, which is kind to the climate. However, the direct human impression, which often arises from gut feeling and experience, is definitely neglected, says Adél Holdampf-Wendel, division manager for labor law and work 4.0 at Bitkom. “If you are less aware of facial expressions and gestures online, a final assessment of the other person is of course more difficult,” said Holdampf-Wendel.
While 87 percent of the HR professionals surveyed by Bitkom state that video job interviews are at least as good as on-site, according to the surveys by the Trendence Institute, well over half of the young professionals surveyed would like personal interviews.
How does this different perception come about? It should not be underestimated that a digital job interview is not an everyday situation for applicants – but it is now often for HR managers, says Ullah. It is therefore very important that recruiters also pick up applicants during online interviews: “At the beginning of Corona we often received the feedback that the warm-up phase did not take place before the actual interview,” says Ullah.
Certain steps are simply missing online: The person was not at the reception or walked through the company, they were not offered a real coffee. “It is extremely important to consciously make small talk at the beginning of a conversation in order to relax the other person,” explains Ullah. In his opinion, the desire to get to know each other personally will remain in the future, certainly not in the first or second selection round, but possibly at a later point in time.
“As soon as I was in virtual space, I also had the feeling of being physically present.”
Picking up candidates and arousing their interest – that is what Franz Schmid from Avanade is all about. Since both the effort and the number of applicants are high, so far only a few of those who make it into the third round have received an invitation to a virtual reality conversation and VR glasses. If this is the case, you can get used to the technology in advance. Because: “VR can also be exhausting, especially when you wear glasses like this for the first time. It helps to take breaks and slowly increase the time,” says Schmid.
Franz Schmid and a colleague already experimented with VR two and a half years ago. “But that was very expensive, nothing worked: everything always crashed.” In the past year, however, he dealt with it more intensively – also because a large customer event due to Corona had taken place via video. “It was just boring. After that we said: We have to change something to get the customers on board.” After the first successful event in VR, Schmid also wanted to use the now much better and cheaper glasses for recruiting in order to attract new talent, differentiate himself from other companies and exemplify innovation. Schmid says Avanade would also consider virtually recreating offices in different locations so that applicants can see their potential workplace firsthand. In addition, consideration is being given to setting up virtual interviews as an assessment center.
This type of interview could also be an incentive to choose a job at Avanade. That was the case with Hariharasudhan Gunasekaran. The 29-year-old software developer applied for a position as a Modern Workplace Developer at Avanade and will start at the Düsseldorf location in March. Among other things, he will further develop the virtual employee search. How the company is using VR definitely played a role in choosing Avanade as an employer and turning down two other offers, he says.
His interview stuck in his mind: “As soon as I was in the virtual space, I also had the feeling of being physically present.” He was very impressed that the avatars and their hand and lip movements looked so real and hardly differed from reality. “And what I love most about VR is that you can use this endless space.”
AI technologies are used to provide language tips
While Avanade is experimenting with VR, many companies are still not up to date with digital recruiting. Often you have to register before you apply, which is completely unnecessary and scares off many interested parties, says Robindro Ullah. “There is still a lot going on in the technical area that companies could easily fix.” Since not all people have experience of working from home, it is also important to think about different options for selecting applicants. “The pandemic was also a language accelerator. Podcasts have skyrocketed, suddenly there are all kinds of social audio networks.”
The Munich start-up PREZP also relies on language: It offers online communication training in which a digital analysis tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide well-founded feedback on pitch, volume, speaking speed and the number and length of speaking pauses. It also examines whether a lecture contains too many filler words and word repetitions and whether the choice of words has a positive or negative effect. Aspects that are very important in job interviews in order to sell what has been said – and therefore yourself – more convincingly, says Marcus Schmid. Together with Marijo Grman he founded PREZP. The voice can be trained anytime and anywhere via smartphone, tablet or desktop.
In order to reduce fear of speech, the start-up provides another digital aid with VR training, so that you are better equipped for (online) application processes. In 2020, the founders launched the first draft of their offers. “We have been fine-tuning and improving for over a year,” says Marcus Schmid. With the help of VR glasses, lectures can be practiced in front of an audience. In this way it is possible to reduce fear – or even to overcome it. Researchers at the University of Basel have found out that it makes no difference to the brain whether you are in a real or virtual situation that causes fear.
Marcus Schmid says: “The eye movements and the duration of eye contact with the audience are also analyzed using the VR glasses.” In order to be able to offer a realistic virtual audience, the Munich start-up filmed 300 people in various situations in the Audimax of the Technical University of Munich. In the future, PREZP also wants to virtually replicate different scenarios such as job interviews or sales talks. However, such a repertoire is very expensive and investors have deliberately not yet brought it on board, according to the 39-year-old.
It will remain exciting with digital recruiting, because the virtual world is developing at top speed: In 2022, the company Oculus, which was bought by Facebook a few years ago, is to bring VR glasses onto the market that register, record and transfer facial expressions in real time Cyberspace sends. Apple also plans to present such glasses in 2022. Then it will be possible to say thank you for a virtual coffee in a job interview with a real smile.