Video Interview Insights

Video Interview Insights 150 150 Georgie Morgan

Video Interview Insights

The Challenge

Covid-19 created a double crisis for the UK Government’s Department For Work and Pensions (DWP):

  • A potentially steep increase in the number of claimants
  • Restrictions on face-to-face contact for in-person interviews

As part of their ‘digital-first’ transformation, it was proposed that they needed to assess whether switching face-to-face contact for in-person interviews was going to be successful or have a negative impact, before committing to switching to initial claimant interviews being conducted over Zoom. The DWP need to understand if this was likely to be successful prior to committing.

Video Interview Insights

The Solution

CitizenMe created a data survey for 500 UK benefits claimants selected from the CitizenMe community (identified in-app via Citizen ‘MeData’).

The data collected in the data survey included:

  • A number of Market Research questions about attitudes to using video
  • Behavioural data (mobile apps installed on phone, mobile data plan)
  • Psychometrics (life satisfaction, optimism, self-esteem, cultural values, emotional intelligence, OCEAN Big5 Personality and personal belief scales)

Our Marketplace platform offers deep, consented data sets with ethical, accurate data coming directly from Citizens providing a 360º view of people’s digital selves – and always with them in control. The aggregated and anonymised results were analysed for correlations between the multiple data types, self-reported answers and psychometrics for respondent cohorts.

The Result

Due to the unique insight provided, the DWP was able to draw two important conclusions from the project which potentially saved them millions of pounds:

  1. Claimants with particular app types (e.g. streaming) were more likely to respond positively to doing interviews via video. Claimants on different benefit types are more/less likely to have these apps.
  2. Low self-esteem and pessimism correlate strongly with an aversion to conducting video interviews. Those in highest need (the unemployed & unable to work) are far more likely to have low self-esteem & optimism.

The project was able to help mitigate potential harms caused by the roll out of digital transformation projects. Therefore, video interviews were not rolled out universally and are only used as a solution for a well-selected set of identified cohorts and in specific contexts.

What they said

The CitizenMe app and marketplace technology has already made an impact in the short time it has been employed by the DWP. The 360º zero-party data is fostering unique opportunities for the important research taking place in the digital space and CitizenMe’s the fast turnaround and quantitative results are proving vital in this transformational space. Teams are already reporting hundreds of responses within a few days. We have collaborated with them on a number of features such as voucher banks and methods to improve the quality data for in depth research which has been invaluable to our projects.

Nicole & Rose, Department for Work and Pensions

Perhaps this is something you wish to investigate further yourself. You can do this all through the CitizenMe Marketplace platform. Check out how to do this here: