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11 Virtual Interview
Best Practices
Introduction
With 1 in 5 Americans sheltering in place right
now, more people are working from home than
ever before. And although remote work has been
shown to boost productivity, transitioning at the
drop of a hat from being in-office to fully remote
is no small feat for any talent team.

That’s why we turned to the remote hiring

advice from our recent webinar with Zoom and
Docusign, From Interview to Offer: Creating an
Exceptional Candidate Experience. Three experts
came together to share their top tips for creating
a strong remote hiring process.

Here are their best practices

for remote interviewing
to help you provide a great
candidate experience and
work more efficiently in
the months to come.

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

01 Look for Verbal Clues

Making the switch to video interviewing requires gauging

a candidate’s quality through a different set of criteria. You’re
still looking for signs of engagement, but you can’t rely on
things like eye contact to tell you they’re enthusiastic. The trick,
says Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Zoom,
is focusing on what the candidate is saying over how they say it.

“ At Zoom, we coordinate our interviews into four

simple steps, including a hiring manager screen,
and the ability to lay eyes on people to gauge their
reactions to questions. You get so many verbal cues,
that doing a video screen with a hiring manager
gives us a much better feel for how successful that
candidate will be as they move through the process.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

02 Allow More People

in the Interview to
Streamline Stages

When every interview is remote, panel-style interviews get

a whole lot easier to schedule, since you don’t have to rely on
travel to get people together across time zones and countries.
Which means speeding up the time it takes to move promising
talent through your hiring pipeline.

“ Allowing for video and phone screens gives hiring

managers a lot of confidence when they pass people
through. I think allowing for the virtual screening and
the ability to assemble panelists and allow candidates
to do online presentations via video is also a great way
to accelerate the decision to hire or not to hire.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

03 Ensure There Is Compliance

You might be tempted to record an interview to share it with your

hiring team, but be sure you’re up to speed on local, regional,
and state laws before you do. If you find it necessary to record,
always let the candidate know you’re recording before you start.
But remember, recording can often impact the quality of a person’s
interview, due to nervousness of being recorded.

“ Zoom has an amazing feature when you begin

recording that notifies everybody in that meeting
that they’re being recorded. It gives you the option
to opt out if you’d prefer not to be recorded. But when
it comes down to interviews, I try to dissuade as
frequently as possible the recording of interviews.
The simple reason is, when you notify someone that
they're being recorded, they tend to act differently.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

04 Know the Cues That

Demonstrate Your
Company Culture

Just like an in-person interview, you want to help candidates feel

relaxed and at ease in video interviews. Only then can you get
a feel for whether they’d be a good culture add for your company.
That means being familiar with the cues that demonstrate
alignment with your culture.

“ With an interview process, we always want people

at their purely natural, especially as we're trying
to determine whether we have someone that is
demonstrating the qualities and attributes that we
want at Zoom. We don't want them to be filtering
who they really are.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

05 Have a Pre-Offer Checklist

It’s an interview best practice to have a pre-offer checklist to guide

your interviews, either in-person or online. Why? Because market
conditions aside, the benefits and perks your company provides is
a big selling point that should be emphasized when interviewing
top talent.

At Lever, the team likes to have a checklist to guide conversations.

“ We have a pre-offer/offer checklist. Some things we

think about, some things we dive into before we get
that offer out. One thing we like to align on is, not to
focus just on salary, there are more things to an offer
and/or more things to an opportunity.”
Sam Cuerington, Senior Sales Recruiter, Lever

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

06 Ensure Excitement
About the Role

Chances are good you’re not the only company somebody is

interviewing with, so anything you can do to generate excitement
is a huge help in getting them to say yes. The best way, according
to Haynes, is to convey how they’re going to grow with your company.

“ We really want to get down to the nitty gritty of

what are the drivers. It could be something as simple
as commute time here in the Bay Area, but it could
be something as complex as better benefits. The
#1 reason why people are leaving jobs is the lack of
career growth. The more that we can hire somebody
and give them an opportunity to grow as they come
in and perform here at Zoom, that's how we're
assuring that they're excited about the role.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

07 Have a List of Great

Questions to Ask

When it comes to interview questions, there’s no such thing

as the perfect list. But having a strong mix to help you suss out
a candidate’s experience and personality is paramount. Equally
important for virtual interviews? Encouraging a conversation
and connection over video.

“ We interact as people, and so trying to make

decisions without the ability to interact, see people's
facial expressions, see their body language, again,
we're not trying to create separation with people,
we're trying to create that connection with people.
And I think you do that live in a much better fashion
than you do in recorded.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

08 Identify Any Factors That

Might Slow You Down or
Lead to a Declined Offer

Nurturing a candidate through to offer, only to have them

decline, hurts. That’s why it’s important to identify factors in
your own process that could slow hiring down to speed them
up, as well as any roadblocks to a candidate saying yes.

“ We optimize for the speed at the offer letter stage

by identifying what are the factors that slow us down.
It’s about ensuring that our Total Rewards Team,
our HR business partners, the hiring manager, all
the stakeholders in every offer that we have, are all
aligned on the correct offer for this candidate. Getting
everybody on the same page is one of the key ways
that we speed to offer here at Zoom.”
- Phil Haynes, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, Zoom

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

09 Enable DocuSign for

Easy Offer Signatures

Printing, signing, scanning, and returning takes way too much

time, especially when people are working from their home office.
You can make it the work of two minutes to sign your offer letter
by using an electronic signature tool like DocuSign.

“Getting the candidate to sign the contract via DocuSign, sign

the offer letter via DocuSign, and make that written commitment
is important,” says Haynes. “But we all know that written
commitment only comes to fruition on day one when they actually
show up as an excited, happy, new employee.”

“Speaking just from personal experience, having joined DocuSign

five months ago, one of the most exciting things about the entire
interview process, from interview to accepting the offer letter, to
actually onboarding, was how easy it was to actually sign the offer
letter and get onboarded,” says Elaine Stainfield, Senior Product
Marketing Manager at DocuSign.

“ I was actually on vacation in Mexico, received the offer

letter through my email, opened it through DocuSign on
my mobile device, and signed it within 30 seconds. That
was really what got me super excited about starting and
it reflected on DocuSign, that it’s an innovative company,
and it just made me really excited to be working at
a company that was forward looking.”
- Elaine Stainfield, Senior Product Marketing Manager, DocuSign
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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

10 Be Sure to Send a Gift

Once the Offer is Complete

If you do this as part of your hiring process already, you know

the difference a personal touch like a gift can make for engaging
new hires from the start. This human touch can mean even more
when your hiring process is taking place entirely over video and
phone calls.

“ At Lever, some of the techniques we sometimes use

is a recruiter and a hiring manager call, personalized
emails, new hire gifts, and gifts. A followup from
the team or the panel that they met with, and then
congratulations videos as well, so coming at it from
a few different angles.”
- Sam Cuerington, Senior Sales Recruiter, Lever

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11 Virtual Interview Best Practices

11 Connect Them with

Their New Team

Last, but not least, make sure to transition people smoothly from
candidate to new hire. This can be challenging when everyone is
working remotely, but that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the
window of excitement starting a new role.

“ If in between start dates, maybe host a [virtual] lunch,

and then that onboarding process. At Lever, we have
a Ramp Camp for the first three days, which is really
in-depth, around the inception of Lever, but also getting
people fluent on not just their department, but also
other departments. As of day three, they're feeling up
to speed and really, really excited.”
- Sam Cuerington, Senior Sales Recruiter, Lever

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Final Thoughts:
Making Every
Interview Count
Even in the most challenging conditions,
your team can work together to adapt its
process to make strong hires. But you
need video conferencing and e-signature
tools like Zoom and DocuSign to streamline
those critical stages along the candidate
experience.
To learn how your company can meet
candidates where they’re at with Lever
and Zoom, book a walkthrough of our
industry-first integration here. Already
a Lever customer? The Zoom integration
is available on every plan for free until
May 31st. Check out this article to
learn more.

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About Lever
Lever’s mission is to help the world hire with more predictability. Lever
is transforming the way companies hire through an approach that allows
talent leaders to attract candidates like a marketing leader, forecast like
a sales leader, and have the insights of a finance leader.

For more information, visit lever.co LeverApp Lever @lever

About DocuSign
DocuSign helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare,
sign, act on and manage agreements. As part of the DocuSign Agreement
Cloud, DocuSign offers eSignature: the world’s #1 way to sign electronically
on practically any device, from almost anywhere, at any time. Today,
more than 500,000 customers and hundreds of millions of users in over
180 countries use DocuSign to accelerate the process of doing business
and to simplify people’s lives.

About Zoom
Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZM) brings teams together
to get more done in a frictionless video environment. Our easy, reliable,
and innovative video-first unified communications platform provides
video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones,
mobile devices, and conference room systems. Zoom helps enterprises
create elevated experiences with leading business app integrations and
developer tools to create customized workflows. Founded in 2011, Zoom
is headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices around the world.
Visit zoom.com and follow @zoom_us.

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