"Can you hear me?" Making an automated video interview flow.
Highlights of the product
01The problem
Even a Zoom call starts with "Can you hear me?"
In a live call, someone on the other side answers that question. In an automated video interview, nobody does. The applicant is alone, often on their own laptop or phone, sometimes recording a video answer for the first time. A blocked camera, the wrong microphone or a muted input does not show up until the answers are already recorded, and by then the company has an empty interview and the applicant has had a bad experience.
The challenge was to make the app and the applicant check themselves: guide every applicant through the same checks a human would do at the start of a call, without a human there.
User flow
From the invitation email to the last recorded answer, every applicant goes through the same steps, repeating the question loop for each question. Four of them exist only to let the applicant check their own setup before anything counts.
02Where applicants drop out
There are two significant drops in the flow.
01Most applicants opened their invitation, but about 23% decided not to continue. Based on customer support calls, this happened because of a mix of lack of motivation for the job and a natural fear of being recorded.
02At the Camera & mic access step, we saw a 4.2% drop. Approximately half of it was due to technical problems (browser type or version issues); the other half came down to a simple lack of technical knowledge that we couldn't bridge.
It was a huge success for us that only 4.2% of users churned due to technical problems.
Summary
Creating and polishing this flow was one of my biggest challenges in product design so far. The natural fear of being recorded and then judged by a couple of unknown people is huge. Navigating users through the technical aspects of this was a big responsibility for me.
Making technical support calls with desperate applicants who were trying to get through their interview grew my emotional understanding of users and made me realise the gravity of our part in a process like this.