A 30-minute test to know if your video screening tool will survive twelve months.

Every recruitment leader has the same story. A video screening tool gets bought in Q2. Everyone is excited. By Q4 the recruiters have quietly stopped logging in, the dashboards stop being checked, and the contract gets renewed anyway because cancelling feels like admitting the purchase was wrong.

The shape of that story is so consistent it can be predicted in advance. You can run a 30-minute test, before signing, that tells you with high confidence whether your team will still be using the tool a year from now.

Here is the test. Six questions, in order. Walk through them with the vendor on a call, not on a deck.

1. Show me a candidate record.

Not a marketing screenshot. An actual record from a real customer (anonymised), inside their actual ATS, with the video sitting on it. If the vendor's first move is to switch tabs to their own dashboard, you have your answer. The product lives somewhere else, and your team will have to live there too.

The right answer to this question is a click that opens the candidate record you already see every day, with the video embedded on it. That is what your recruiters will actually use.

2. Walk me through your activation.

Ask what happens between contract signature and the first video moment landing in your ATS. If the answer involves a phased rollout, an integration project, a sandbox tenant, or any phrase that ends in 'kick-off call', the tool is going to need internal champions to survive. Champions move on.

If the answer is hours or a few days, with a switch flipped on the vendor's side and an authorisation on yours, the tool is going to slot into a workflow that already exists. That is the version that survives.

3. What happens when a recruiter quits?

Every recruitment tool is sold to whoever bought it. The question is what happens when that person leaves and their replacement inherits the stack. If the answer involves training material, an onboarding session, or a per-seat licence transfer, the new person is going to ask a perfectly fair question: do we actually still need this?

If the answer is that the new recruiter never sees the vendor's brand at all, because the video lives on the candidate record in the ATS they already log into, the question never comes up.

4. Where is the data, exactly?

Not what region. Which physical infrastructure. Which sub-processors. Which countries does the data transit. If the vendor cannot answer that quickly with a current sub-processor list and an unredacted data-processing agreement, the procurement review is going to take six months and the candidate experience is going to get blocked by works councils in three different jurisdictions.

If the answer is a clean EU footprint, a current sub-processor table, and a DPA you can read in one sitting, you are dealing with a vendor that has shipped this before.

5. Show me what the candidate sees.

Open the candidate-side link on a phone. Time how long it takes to get from the link to recording a 30-second answer. If the path involves account creation, an app download, or a captive-portal style data-consent flow, the candidate is going to bail and you are going to lose the funnel input the tool exists to capture.

If the path is link, allow camera, record, send, the candidate completes it. That is the experience your funnel will actually see in production.

6. What do you not do?

This is the question that catches the most vendors off guard. The good ones answer it crisply. They tell you that they do not score, do not rank, do not predict, do not train AI on candidate data, do not sell anonymised aggregates, do not auto-shortlist. The bad ones tell you about machine-learning models and continuous-evaluation engines.

The reason this matters is not philosophical. It is operational. A tool that does not score does not need to be defended to a works council, does not need to be audited under the EU AI Act's higher-risk categories, does not need to be explained to candidates who ask why they were rejected. A tool that scores has to do all of those things, and your team is the one that ends up doing them.

If you score five or six out of six.

The tool will survive. Your team will use it without needing to be reminded to use it. Recruiters who join in a year will pick it up without an onboarding session. The contract will renew because the value is visible, not because cancelling is awkward.

If you score three or four, you are buying a tool that needs ongoing maintenance from the people who bought it. Sometimes that is fine. Often it is not.

If you score under three, the procurement is going to outlast the usage. Pick a different tool, or accept that the line item is going to keep paying for a tool nobody opens.

Flipbase scores six out of six on this test by design. That is the test we built the product to pass. If you want to run it on us live, the demo takes thirty minutes.