The job market might be in a tough spot, but the staffing industry is still in high demand. From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. staffing industry has created more jobs than any other American industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, staffing companies added more than 786,000 jobs to their payrolls in this time period. In 2012 alone, the staffing industry employed 2.9 million temporary and contract workers per day.

The life of a staffing professional certainly hasn’t slowed down, even in this tough economy. With more job seekers vying for open positions, if anything things have gotten more complicated for staffing pros looking to sort the best from the rest. You need a way to find the smartest candidates and deliver them to your clients faster, and the video interview might just be the solution.

In fact, six in 10 employers are currently utilizing the power of video interviews in their hiring process. Below are four reasons staffing professionals might consider embracing the video interview:

Connect Personally With Candidates

The traditional hiring process can take a long time, but clients want to see results as fast as possible. This leaves you scrambling to find the best people quickly. According to a recent report by the Society of Human Resource Management, the average time it takes to fill a job vacancy is 34 days. But let’s be honest, it’s not like clients want to wait a month for you to find talented workers.

With video interviews, you can connect on a more personal level with talented candidates faster than in the traditional hiring process. Instead of wasting time on lengthy phone screens which ultimately don’t provide a great picture of a candidate’s personality and skills, use a one-way video interview instead. In a one-way video interview, candidates answer your written questions on video.

If you know immediately a candidate is a bad fit for the position, you can move on without wasting any of your precious time on the phone. By allowing a more personal connection with applicants, video cuts down on the major time-wasters in the traditional process and helps you deliver top talent to your clients faster.

Reduce Costs

That old saying “time is money” rings especially true when you’re trying to find top talent for impatient clients. They want the best people as soon as possible, which means you don’t have time to waste on the wrong candidates.

Thanks to the increased personal connection of video interviews, you can spend more time focusing on only the best candidates for the job. By watching applicants’ one-way video interviews, you can quickly remove the candidates who are only good on paper, but all wrong in reality.

This leaves you more time to focus on delivering the best and brightest to clients. A shorter hiring process means more money in your company’s pocket and clients who don’t have to wait over a month for their next superstar employee.

Easy Candidate Sharing

The portability of video interviews makes them perfect for busy, on-the-go staffing professionals. Since video interviews can be viewed on mobile devices, you barely need to pause your recruitment efforts to evaluate top candidates. And considering, by the end of the year, there will be more mobile devices on Earth than people, using mobile technology in the interview process is a smart move for savvy staffing companies.

Perhaps one of the best perks of video interviews, however, is their ability to be shared with clients. Obviously, one-way video interview answers can be easily shared with your clients as you narrow down your candidate pool to only the best--but live video interviews, where you connect with applicants in real-time, are also easily sharable. Since live video interviews are recorded, you can connect with top talent and then pass these interviews along to clients.

Jumping the Skills Gap

One of the biggest concerns facing staffing professionals is the ability to find candidates with the right skills for the job. In fact, 33 percent of staffing pros in a recent survey said the skills gap was the most pressing issue facing the industry. So how do you jump to the other side?

Removing geographical barriers is a good way to widen the talent pool and find someone with the perfect skill-set, regardless of what town they call home. With video interviews, there’s no airfare, hotel accommodations, or other travel costs required.

Video interviews are simple to schedule and much cheaper than asking a talented candidate to buckle up for takeoff. By reducing the cost of interviewing, in both time and money, you can connect with far-flung yet highly skilled candidates.

Hiring the best candidates for your clients is essential, but you don’t want to waste valuable time and money. Video interviews help you connect personally, jump the skills gap with ease, and save your company’s bottom-line, while still nabbing top talent.

What are some ways you can use the video interview to hire the best? Share in the comments!

Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, a video powered hiring solution that allows staffing professionals to collaborate with their clients around video interviews. Read Spark Hire’s eBook on video interviewing for staffing firms and connect on Facebook and Twitter.

IMAGE: Courtesy of Flickr by dgbury