Video Interviews – Power Platform and RecRight

The use of video interviews as part of the recruitment process is becoming more and more common. In this context, a video interview does not mean an interview with Teams, for example, but rather a situation in which a bunch of video questions are sent to an applicant and they also answer them in video format.

The most suitable applicants are selected for the actual interview on the basis of their applications and the video interviews.

Finnish company RecRight offers a service that covers the entire recruitment process, including job advertisements, applications and video interviews.

What if an organization has implemented the recruitment process on Power Platform. Can they still take advantage of the video interviews contained in RecRight, for example?

Yes, they can.

Let’s take a closer look at this option.

The solution in brief

In our solution, the Power Platform is used to manage open positions, as well as the applications received for them. Our data model in Dataverse contains the following tables

• Open positions (Open position)
• Applicants (Contact)
• Applications (Job application), which are always associated with one position and one applicant
• Video interview templates (Interview template)

RecRight, on the other hand, manages the video interviews related to open positions. Each video interview is accompanied by n number of responses. One for each applicant.

Recruitment Application – Model-driven Power Apps

Open positions are published and they are applied for either in Power Apps Portals or in WordPress, for example. The recruitment process itself is handled by a single model-driven app.

For each open position, we can see

• Position title (Name)
• Which RecRight video interview template will be used in the process (Template for the interview)
• Video interview address (Interview URL), which will appear when applicants are invited to a video interview
• Applicants. For each applicant, we indicate whether they will be invited to a video interview (Invite to video interview)

After the video interviews, some of the candidates will be invited for a traditional job interview. But let’s focus only on the video interviews today.

Video interview templates

In our solution, part of RecRight’s video interviews are so-called templates. Applicants are not invited in them, but they are used as a basis for the video interviews to be created. This way, the right video questions are automatically added to the interview.

Below you can see a list of different video interview templates.

A video interview includes n number of questions in video format. You can pick them up from your library (select from library) or create a new one (click to record a question).

When adding an open position (in Power Apps), we select which video interview template to use. The data for the templates used must therefore be retrieved from RecRight to the Interview table in Dataverse.

Let’s do this with a timed flow that retrieves all of the interviews from RecRight and filters (Filter array) those with the magic word “Template” at the beginning of the name.

In the case of a new template, a new record is created. Otherwise, the existing one is updated.

This way, we have the information of the video interview templates at our disposal.

For each template, its name, interview URL, interview status, and language are stored.

Now we have open positions in our solution with RecRight’s video interview templates included in them. There have also been applications for the positions, great!

What’s next?

Sending invitations to video interviews

Next, we will send an invitation to a video interview to some of the applicants. But how?

Let’s create a flow (Send video interview invitations) that is launched from the open position record (pictured above). The flow first retrieves the data for that position (we need the template id). After this, a separate video interview is created for the open position using RecRight’s API.

We will use the interview template linked to the query as a basis for our video interview.

The id and URL of the video interview created will be added to the open positions information. This makes it easier to navigate between our recruitment solution and RecRight.

Finally, all accepted applicants (tp_invitetovideointerview = true) will be invited to the video interview we just created.

Result

From the users point of view, the functionality looks like the following.

Invite applicants to a video interview by starting a flow from the open position record.

A video interview is created and its URL address will appear in the open positon record.

A new video interview will appear on RecRight to which all applicants still in the process are invited to.

The interview includes video questions according to the template.

Applicants will receive an invitation to the video interview via email.

Applicants’ video responses can finally be evaluated in the RecRight service. As long as the applicants have submitted their answers.

Summary

As you might expect, extending the Power Platform solution with RecRight was quite effortless, because RecRight provides a modern API to developers.

As is, the solution is not completely finished. The following modifications come to mind first.

• Applications (Power Platform) could include a URL to view the applicant’s video responses. This would require sending the invitations in a slightly different way.
• RecRight provides a Webhook that allows you to respond when an applicant submits their video response. Utilizing it, we could maintain in our own application the information on whether the video interview has already been completed by each applicant.
• RecRight allows you to add video questions to interviews directly in model-driven apps using iFrame embedding. This would be useful if open positions were always done with their own unique set of video questions.
• Applicants’ video responses can be viewed from model-driven apps using iFrame embedding.

In practice, the solution could be implemented in a way, in which the user didn’t have to log in to RecRight at all. Everything would be done from the model-driven app.