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For years recruiters have been conducting interview after interview and spending hours of their time daily giving interviews to candidates only to spend the rest of their time reviewing those same interviews and realizing that the majority of the applicants are not properly qualified for the position. This leads to hours of wasted time each week that recruiters and hiring managers spend interviewing unqualified candidates. These hours of time could be much more effectively used to review and compare candidates’ applications and discover which candidates are the best fit for your business. So, how can you get back those hours of time and reduce the amount of burnout and daily stress your recruiters feel each day?
One incredibly useful way to better streamline and optimize your hiring process is to utilize an automated phone screen interview or virtual phone screen call rather than a traditional phone interview. You may be wondering, are phone interviews easier and faster than traditional interviews? Well, when it comes to an on-demand phone interview vs. in-person interview, you are talking about a much more efficient and less time-consuming process with the phone interview. This can lead to much more time that your recruiting team is able to then compare applicants and identify your most promising candidates. An on-demand phone interview allows your recruiting team to interview many candidates at a single time as well as ensure a consistent interview for all of them — with all of the same questions. This allows your recruiting team to make more informed and less biased decisions on which candidates to continue pursuing.
Creating a virtual phone interview can seem intimidating at first — especially if you are still used to giving in-person interviews. Luckily, though, there are a number of phone interview conversation samples online that you can use as inspiration for crafting your own phone interview cheat sheet. Additionally, it can be helpful to use a platform, like Qualifi, that can help you to easily record your interview questions, eliminate the need for interview scheduling, evaluate candidates much faster, and offer a much more unbiased and pleasant interview experience for your candidates.
As asynchronous interviews — such as on-demand phone interviews — become more and more popular for businesses of all sizes and industries, it is becoming increasingly more useful for businesses to adopt these types of interviewing methods. While it is nice to have variety, businesses of all kinds are needing to shift their focus more towards creating a pleasant and seamless experience for their candidates, especially in remote roles. And this can be incredibly difficult if you are needing to conduct every single interview in real-time. This is why many businesses are instead using phone screen interview questions in an automated phone interview script so that they can more easily and consistently conduct their interviews and more effectively screen their applicants and focus their attention on only the most promising ones.
Of course, to create a phone interview, you need to come up with a script. This can be challenging at first, but using a platform like Qualifi and looking at examples of telephone interview questions and answers can help you to create the perfect interview script for your candidates. You will likely want to make your interview a balanced mix of HR screening questions and more position-specific questions so that you can accurately assess the qualifications of your candidates. Looking at pre-screening interview questions and answers can be a great way to get inspiration for your interview questions. You want to ensure that you create an interview script that is both useful to you but also allows the candidate to describe themselves and their skills and qualifications. Today’s job market is no longer employer-centric, and businesses of all kinds are finding it more and more important to focus on the candidates — for example, offering an asynchronous interview that shows your candidates that you respect their time and schedules.
Two of the most commonly used types of interviews today are phone and video interviews. Some of this is due to the fact that we have, over the past few years, been subject to a global pandemic that dramatically reduced the amount of time we spent interacting with people face-to-face. Whether or not these methods of interviewing were popularized by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is definitely true that businesses in today’s society do see benefits when using on-demand phone or video interview methods. Both of these on-demand interview techniques share a lot of similarities — for example allowing candidates to more easily interview for positions that may be far away from them geographically.
There is, however, one major difference between video and phone interviews that can take a pretty good interviewing system and turn it into a great interviewing system. This is that phone interviews are more accessible and less prone to biases than video interviews are. Let’s look into this a little deeper. With phone interviews, candidates do not have to worry about high-quality, fast internet connection, a professional-looking “interviewing” space, their appearance, or any other distracting external factors. Phone interviews allow candidates to be reviewed exclusively based on their responses to the interview questions — which can dramatically reduce the effects of any unconscious biases that may affect your hiring decisions in a video interview.
Once you’ve answered the question “what is a phone screen interview” it is only natural for the next question you need answered to be how to conduct a phone interview. Script examples can be very helpful in figuring out what mix of HR screening questions and more position-specific questions you want to ask in your interview script. Using phone interview questions and answers examples can be a great way to get inspiration and inform your own on-demand screening interview. However, even with all of the telephone interview questions and answers PDF examples that are available on the internet today, it can be challenging to determine which phone screen interview questions may be the right ones for your business to include in your interview.
Once you have determined the questions you want to ask — using examples of other phone screenings and your previous interview questions that have performed well in the past — you are likely wondering how to construct a phone interview template. This template is extremely important because, in an on-demand phone interview, every single candidate receives the same interview. This means that you will want to record your questions and create a script that flows nicely and will give your candidates a good experience during the screening. It is also a good idea to offer areas for the candidate to elaborate on their resume, skills, or anything else they would like to speak about. This ensures that they feel they have done all they can in their interview and do not feel like they weren’t given the opportunity to show you their best.
Coming up with your phone interview script can be one of the most difficult tasks in creating an on-demand phone screening interview. You’ll want to create the best balance between HR screening questions and qualification questions in order to best separate your most promising candidates from the rest. Luckily, there are many pre-screening interview questions template options available — including phone interview template Word documents — that you can use to create that perfect interview script for your business if you are wanting some guidance on how to structure your interview.
Once you have your recruiter phone screen script completed, you’ll need to record your questions and then send out your invitations. Using a platform like Qualifi can make this entire process quick, efficient, and effective in the long term by allowing you to easily compare candidates with team members, quickly identify keywords, and review candidates’ applications 7x faster. Additionally, Qualifi can send out the exact same phone screening questions to all of your candidates as soon as they apply for the position so that you can increase your efficiency and allow multiple candidates to interview at once using the asynchronous virtual phone interview.
