Audiovisual quality impacts assessments of job candidates in video interviews: Evidence for an AV quality bias

Abstract

Video job interviews have become a common hiring practice, allowing employers to save money and recruit from a wider applicant pool. But differences in job candidates’ internet connections mean that some interviews will have higher audiovisual (AV) quality than others. We hypothesized that interviewers would be impacted by AV quality when they rated job candidates. In two experiments, participants viewed two-minute long simulated Skype interviews that were either unedited (fluent videos) or edited to mimic the effects of a poor internet connection (disfluent videos). Participants in both experiments rated job candidates from fluent videos as more hirable, even after being explicitly told to disregard AV quality (experiment 2). Our findings suggest that video interviews may favor job candidates with better internet connections and that being aware of this bias does not make it go away.