The schools and students who will benefit from changes to on-campus recruiting caused by COVID

Many Fortune 1,000, government agency, and other employers who hire at scale are investigating and already investing in video interviewing as one of the many solutions they’ll need for this massive change to campus recruitment that they expect to see this fall and, probably, beyond.

What we’ve heard from some of the employers who advertise their jobs with us is a shift from a campus- to demographic-centric approach, meaning that fewer employers will target schools and, instead, will target students who fit their desired profile. For example, instead of going to 20 schools because those schools have a lot of women in STEM, they’ll instead just target women in STEM regardless of the school those students happen to attend. Employers will engage with emails, postings, banners, social, and other media and drive those candidates to a landing page. That landing page may be a posting on their ATS but many of them are planning on driving them to a candidate relationship manager (CRM) page where the candidate will be able to watch videos related to the roles of interest, take a virtual tour of the corporate office they’d work in, ask questions via chatbot, and opt-in to receive emailed or texted information.

Once the candidate applies, and sometimes even before that, they may be interviewed by video. Some of those will be asynchronous like Hirevue is known for and others will be bisynchronous like a more traditional, in-person or phone interview. Either way, video interviews allow employers to speak with far more candidates far faster and far less expensively. Instead of being able to interview candidates at 20 schools, they can interview candidates at thousands of schools. That’s great for their diversity and inclusion efforts, but a real challenge for candidates who aren’t comfortable talking into a screen. Mind you, for every candidate who isn’t comfortable talking into a screen there is probably a candidate who isn’t comfortable with an in-person interview.

In a nutshell, I suspect what we’re going to see this fall and beyond is a massive shift that we thought would take years instead taking just months. More and more employers will become school and even major agnostic. For the schools who struggled to attract employers to their campuses, this is great news. For the students whose majors weren’t the most sought after, this is great news. Far more schools and students will find it far easier to become part of the hiring process, but one cost to all will be a much lower touch process with far more candidates considered, far more interviewed via video, and far more extended offers without stepping foot in the facility they’ll work in.