Async Video Interviews Are Driving Away Your Best Candidates

Async video interviews are a terrible idea.

You know the ones: a candidate records themselves on camera answering a set of prepared questions, you review the clips whenever it suits you. On paper they feel like a dream. Every screening call you've ever sat through where you knew in the first forty seconds it wasn't going to work, replaced by a glanceable recording. If a candidate doesn't bother to record one? Self-filtering. Less work for you. Win-win.

The trouble is, they are one of the most reliable ways to push the best candidates out of your process.

Why they seemed like a good idea

The pitch for async video interviews is genuinely compelling. Every hiring manager has been on a screening call and known within sixty seconds that this wasn't the right fit, then sat through another nineteen minutes because it would be rude to bail. Over a week of screens, that's hours. Over a hiring season, days.

Async video interviews promise to remove that cost. Candidates record at their leisure. You review at yours. You can skim, skip, and close tabs without the awkward social contract of a live call. And if a candidate can't be bothered to record at all – well, clearly they didn't want it that badly, right?

The logic is tidy. The problem is that the filtering it does is not the filtering you think it's doing.

What they actually filter for

Talking to a camera is weird. Whatever your job, you almost certainly don't do it by monologuing at a laptop lens in your spare bedroom. The skill the async format rewards is a very specific one: being visibly comfortable performing to a camera without a counterpart. That correlates with extroversion, with how polished someone is at content creation, and with how willing they are to stage themselves. It does not correlate with most of the work most jobs involve.

So your recording step filters in favour of candidates who are confident on camera – and filters out a lot of brilliant people who just find the format deeply awkward. Some of those people do their best work in actual conversation with an actual human being. You will not hear from them.

The broader research supports this. Studies consistently find that candidates show lower psychological comfort with asynchronous video interviews than with synchronous formats, and that discomfort reduces both their willingness to self-disclose and their intention to accept a job offer if it comes. You are not measuring the candidate. You are measuring the candidate's tolerance for the medium.

The asymmetric time investment

The second problem is subtler and, in my experience, bigger.

A candidate recording a proper async interview spends real time on it. Choosing an outfit. Fixing the lighting. Tidying the background. Reading the questions. Scripting answers. Rehearsing. Recording. Watching themselves back. Re-recording. For a serious candidate applying to a role they actually want, you are easily asking for an hour of deliberate, performative effort.

On your side, the investment is perhaps twenty seconds of skimming. Sometimes less. And the candidate knows that. They can tell from the scroll bar on the playback how much of the video anyone is going to watch.

Great candidates read this asymmetry correctly. They notice that they're being asked to invest an hour so you can invest a minute, and they draw the obvious conclusion about how their time will be treated if they actually take the job. The candidates who don't notice the asymmetry – or who feel they can't afford to – are often the ones with the fewest other options.

Put another way: your hiring process is marketing. Every stage of it tells the people you want to hire what kind of company you are. An async video step tells them that in this house, your time is worth more than theirs.

What the data shows

The numbers are hard to look at for anyone running an async video step.

33% of candidates abandon applications that require a one-way video interview. A third of your pipeline, gone – not because they weren't interested, but because the format itself was the barrier. And 78% of candidates say they would choose a chat-based interview over a video one if given the option; 70% still prefer in-person.

The interview stage is already the biggest single source of candidate drop-off in the whole hiring funnel. 32% of all candidate drop-off happens at interview – more than application abandonment, more than scheduling friction, more than onboarding. Adding an async video step in front of a live conversation compounds that loss at exactly the moment your pipeline is at its narrowest.

And the academic literature is sceptical of the format's validity in the first place. A 2025 review in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment finds that AVIs are reliably viewed less favourably by applicants than traditional formats, and flags open questions about whether the one-way nature of the format effectively signals the things predictive of actual job performance.

The obvious push-back

Here's the fair version of the defence: async video interviews are completely structured. Every candidate gets the same questions, in the same order, with the same amount of prep and answering time. Structured interviews are among the most predictive hiring instruments we have. So async should be a win, no?

The structure part is genuinely good. What tanks the format isn't the standardisation, which is doing its job. It's the two features that sit on top of the structure: the one-sidedness that rewards being at ease with a camera rather than with the work, and the asymmetric effort that signals to the best candidates what your relationship with their time will look like.

You can keep the structure without the asymmetry. A short, live, structured chat interview – even a text-based one – preserves the "same questions, same order, same scoring rubric" property and removes the one-way performance. You also get the ability to ask a follow-up when something interesting comes up, which async formats famously can't.

A small story that changed my mind

I was hiring for a role I expected to be popular and thought a video step would help me filter faster. I set it up with the usual caveats, sent it out, and waited.

Most candidates didn't bother to do it. That wasn't a problem in itself – fine, fewer screens. But every candidate I'd been genuinely excited about, the ones whose CVs had made me sit up, all of them dropped out at the video step.

I asked one of them why, after the process ended. She said: "I assumed you probably wouldn't watch it anyway. And why would I spend time on this when other companies aren't asking me to?"

Good point, well made. I scrapped the step that afternoon.

What to do instead

You don't have to give up on efficient early-stage screening to drop the video step. A few things that work in its place:

1. A short, structured live chat. Twenty minutes, same questions for every candidate, a light rubric. Respects the candidate's time because yours is also in the room. Gives you the back-and-forth that reveals more than any monologue can.
2. A short written exchange. Two or three job-relevant questions answered in writing is faster for the candidate, more reviewable for you, and signals that you're interested in how they think, not how they perform.
3. Move screening upstream of interviews entirely. The "does this person meet the bar for a conversation" question is a structured-screening problem, not a screening-interview problem. This is exactly where automated CV screening against specific role criteria earns its keep.

If async video has been in your process for a while, the test is simple: look at which candidates have dropped at that stage over the last twelve months. If the pattern matches mine, the people you wanted most will be over-represented in the drop-off column. Pull the step.

Where lemonly fits

We built lemonly on the idea that the hiring process is a two-way signal, and that the stages which feel like efficiency to the hiring team often feel like a red flag to the candidates you most want to hire. Our screening product handles the "is this person even in the ballpark" question before any interview happens – which is the filter an async video step is usually trying to be, without driving off the people you actually want. The interview time you save is time you can spend in live structured conversation with the candidates who made the cut.

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Common objections, answered

But we get hundreds of applications. We can't possibly live-interview everyone.

Agreed. The answer is not to run a worse format for everyone, but to do stronger screening before the interview stage. A structured screening pass against your role criteria – automated or manual – narrows the pool to the people worth a proper conversation. A twenty-minute structured chat with twenty strong candidates is better than a ninety-second glance at a hundred and fifty awkward recordings.

Aren't async videos more inclusive because candidates can record at their own pace?

This is the best argument for the format, and it's not nothing. But the research cuts the other way in aggregate: candidates report lower psychological comfort with AVIs than with synchronous alternatives, and the candidates who most need flexibility are often the ones without a quiet room, a ring light, and a fast upload. A short live call with flexible scheduling achieves most of the inclusion benefit with none of the format tax.

Our ATS has one-way video built in. Should we just not use it?

Having a feature isn't a reason to run a stage. Run the steps that produce the hires you want – and drop the ones that don't, even if they came free with your tooling.

What about senior or technical roles where we need to see how someone thinks?

Show of reasoning is exactly the thing async video can't capture. There's no follow-up, no probe, no "wait, go back to that point". Live structured interviews or short paid work samples both beat async at surfacing how someone thinks.

Key takeaways

• Async video interviews filter for people who are comfortable performing to a camera. That is rarely what the job actually is.
• The format is deeply asymmetric: candidates invest an hour, employers invest twenty seconds. Strong candidates read that asymmetry correctly and leave.
• 33% of candidates abandon applications that require a one-way video interview, and 78% would take a chat interview over a video one.
• The interview stage is already the biggest single source of candidate drop-off in the hiring funnel (32% of total drop-off). Async video makes that worse at the narrowest point of the pipe.
• Keep the structure. Swap the format. A short live structured chat preserves the standardisation advantage without the asymmetry penalty.