How to Conduct a Productive Video Interview to Ensure You Hire the Right Candidate
Remote interviewing is now a standard part of hiring. For many roles, a candidate may not set foot in your facility until their first day on the job.
This brings real advantages in speed and flexibility, but it also raises the stakes for how well you evaluate someone through a screen. When hiring for senior care, particularly for positions where an employee will work directly with residents, you need real confidence that someone is the right fit both in skill and in personality, and a video call gives you less to go on than an in-person meeting would.
Keep the following in mind to evaluate candidates well and keep the interview itself running smoothly.
Check your technology before the call.
This is the simplest fix with the biggest payoff. If you want a productive interview, you need to actually hear the candidate clearly. Interview from a quiet space with a reliable connection, and test your video and microphone beforehand. Beyond saving time, showing up prepared signals professionalism, and candidates notice when an interviewer fumbles with basic tech.
Listen for voice cues.
Without the full read of in-person body language, your ear has to do more work. Does the candidate sound genuinely empathetic when describing their experience with seniors? Do they speak about their work history with confidence, or do they hedge? Some people naturally have a less steady speaking voice, so listen for changes and shifts as the conversation moves between topics, rather than judging tone in isolation.
Let the candidate do most of the talking.
Video calls can suffer from awkward pauses, audio lag, or the loss of natural conversational back and forth you’d get in person. Resist the urge to fill every silence. When you sit back and let the candidate lead, you learn whether they can give succinct, thoughtful answers under a bit of pressure. Rambling is often a real signal of being unprepared or inexperienced, so an open ear here tells you more than a scripted answer would.
Prepare structured questions in advance.
A video interview leaves less room to recover from a disorganized conversation than an in-person one does. Walking in with a consistent set of questions for every candidate, built around the specific scenarios they’ll actually face on the job, gives you something real to compare across applicants rather than relying on impressions alone. For a senior care role, this might mean asking how a candidate would handle a resident who’s agitated or resistant to care, rather than a generic “tell me about a challenge you faced.”
Structure also protects you from a subtler risk: without it, interviewers tend to unconsciously favor candidates who are simply easier to talk to on camera, which isn’t the same thing as being the better hire.
Pay attention to how they handle the format itself.
A candidate’s comfort with video tools is worth noting on its own, especially for roles that involve coordinating with families remotely, documenting care electronically, or working across shifts where communication increasingly happens through a screen rather than face to face. This isn’t about penalizing someone for a shaky connection, but genuine fumbling with basic navigation, repeatedly talking over the interviewer, or missing visual cues from you can be a small preview of how someone communicates under everyday pressure.
Follow up with next steps the same day.
Remote hiring processes can start to feel impersonal if a candidate doesn’t hear anything for days after a call. Letting them know what to expect next, even briefly, keeps strong candidates engaged and signals that your organization runs an organized process. In a competitive hiring market, candidates are often interviewing in several places at once, and the organization that follows up fastest often has the advantage.
Why this matters more in senior care than most industries
A remote interview can only tell you so much before someone is actually working alongside residents. Pairing a thoughtful, structured interview process with thorough screening before a candidate ever reaches you gives you a fuller picture than a single video call can provide on its own, and it means fewer surprises once someone is actually on the floor.
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