Async Video Screens Reward Compliance

Picture two people who apply for the same senior sales role on the same afternoon. The first has three other processes going and a recruiter from a competitor calling her every other day. The second has been looking for a while, and this is the best lead he has. That evening both get the same email asking them to record video answers to five questions sometime in the next few days.

Which one records the video? You can't say for any particular pair, but you can guess how it goes on average. The person with the fewest alternatives has the most reason to comply, and the person with the most alternatives has the least. Run that across a few hundred applicants and the format is quietly sorting your pool by how much each candidate needs this job, which is close to the opposite of what you meant to sort by.

That's how I've come to think about completion rates for async video interviews. They've fallen. One estimate puts completion in competitive hiring markets at around 62%, down from above 80% in 2021, when the format was at its pandemic peak. Hiring teams tend to read a number like that as a comment on candidates, as if people have gotten less serious. I think it says more about the format, and about which candidates are willing to put up with it.

Consider what the format asks. The candidate performs and the employer watches, later, maybe. There's no conversation, no chance to ask about the role, nothing coming back the other way. From the candidate's side it's all give. People with plenty of options are the ones most likely to turn down a deal like that, and they're usually the ones you most wanted to talk to.

There's a second problem that gets less attention: even the answers you do get don't tell you much. When someone records a reply to "describe a time you managed competing priorities," they do it in a quiet room, with notes, after as many takes as they like, possibly days after first seeing the question. That's about as far as you can get from the conditions of the actual job. What you learn is whether the candidate can produce a polished ninety-second monologue. That's a skill, but rarely the one you're hiring for.

A live conversation, even an ordinary one, tests something else. The follow-up question isn't known in advance. The candidate has to adjust partway through an answer, keep hold of a thread, and show whether their thinking holds together when it isn't rehearsed. That matters in nearly every professional job.

To be fair to the companies that adopted async video, they were solving a real problem. You can't put a recruiter on a live call with 400 applicants in 72 hours. Async video let the pipeline keep moving, and it looked like a structured process. But it gave teams the appearance of evaluation more than the thing itself, and they often felt that in shortlists that kept disappointing without anyone quite knowing why.

So the constraint was real and the fix was wrong. What you'd want is a live conversation with every applicant that doesn't need a recruiter on the other end of each one, and that is the problem Asendia was built around. We chose a phone call over a recording for the reasons above. A spoken exchange is hard to rehearse, because the next question depends on what the candidate just said, and hearing someone work through a question they weren't ready for tells you more than a polished take. So Asendia calls soon after someone applies, evenings included, holds a structured screening conversation by voice, and asks follow-ups based on their actual answers. The results go into the ATS: a qualification summary, a ranked shortlist, and verbatim excerpts, waiting before the recruiters get in. There's no separate platform and no queue of 200 video files to sit through.

The bigger difference, though, is who ends up on the shortlist. A conversation is a smaller ask than a recording session, and it goes both ways, so the candidate with other options has less reason to skip it. You stop filtering for patience with the process.

If you use async video today, there's a simple way to look at your own numbers. Whatever your completion rate is, your shortlists are drawn only from the people who completed. The rest didn't drop out at random, and nothing in your ATS tells you who they were. I wrote more about metrics that hide gaps like this in a piece on which recruiting KPIs still make sense once AI is in the process.

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