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Every recruiter is on the same mission: identify and find the best talent to fill roles for their organization. However, that is certainly a task easier said than done. To tackle this difficult job, recruiters throughout the years have developed a variety of strategies to handle candidate evaluation.
Candidate evaluation refers to the process of assessing and evaluating job applicants. This assessment looks at their qualifications, skills, and overall suitability as it pertains to the position in question. As such, it’s critical to the success of any recruitment process.
During the interview process, recruiters and hiring managers alike consider candidates based on their education, work experience, and various soft and hard skills. Positive interview comments are an integral part of determining candidate suitability. These comments include feedback on qualities such as candidate enthusiasm and personal strengths.
Candidate evaluation based on information gathered from the interview process is key here. It established a set of criteria to compare candidates and standardize assessment. This criteria encompasses various to ensure not only if a candidate is a good fit for the position but how their skills stack up to the needs of the organization.
Your standard candidate evaluation involves marking a candidate based on a series of criteria. That is true. It can be as simple as marking certain qualities on a scale of 1 to 5. However, this alone fails to provide meaningful insights into the candidate.
This is where interview evaluation comments come into play, and they represent an essential part of the overall assessment. Specifically, these comments refer to the feedback provided by the interviewer at the end of the interview process. These comments revolve around assessing the candidate’s suitability for the position in terms of qualifications, personal strengths and weaknesses, and overall performance during the interview.
As such, these comments help recruiters make informed decisions when it comes time to select the best talent for the job. They also provide specific information to support the overall assessment of the candidate.
Interview comments after the interview are particularly useful when recruiters are interviewing numerous candidates for the same position. They can serve to differentiate between candidates that score close together in the standard assessment metrics and allow recruiters to identify the best of that group.
Overall, interview evaluation comments are crucial to successful candidate evaluation, providing valuable feedback for the candidate and hiring manager alike.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at some candidate interview summary examples to build a better picture of the candidate evaluation process.
First, we have Candidate 1. This candidate has a strong educational background and relevant work experience. During the interview, they demonstrated excellent problem-solving and proved their communication skills through well-structured and thoughtful responses. Plus, they understood the company culture and values well before the interview. Overall, their scores across all criteria were high.
Candidate 2 also scored relatively high in the metrics alone. They had diverse work experience and excellent communication skills. However, the interviewer noted in their comments that they seemed to lack confidence and struggled to answer some technical questions. They may require additional training but make an overall good fit for the organization.
Candidate 3 had impressive credentials and experience but lacked communication skills during the interview. Their responses were long and often uncoordinated. Nonetheless, they seem like they would perform well in the role granted their communication skills improved.
Here we see three highly qualified candidates, all of which scored well on the basic criteria we’re looking for in a candidate. However, it’s the additional comments that allowed us to buckle down and build a comprehensive view of the candidate.
Standardized candidate evaluation hinges upon the candidate evaluation form. This form establishes and lists the basic criteria the recruiter is looking for in their ideal candidate. Furthermore, it offers a form to score the candidate accordingly and write any relevant comments.
Let’s take a look at some example criteria you could score a candidate on.
Keep in mind this is only an example of criteria you would find on a candidate evaluation form. Every organization, position, and industry has unique requirements. As such, you can substitute any and all of these criteria with what you’re specifically looking for in your ideal candidate.
For example, you could substitute the more general “technical skills” criteria with something more particular like knowledge of a certain coding language or customer service platform. This would bring a greater degree of specificity which you may desire for highly technical positions.
Furthermore, you could include criteria such as career objectives. Do the candidates’ professional goals align with the organization's goals and values? This is something we can quantify and elaborate upon in the comment section.
Regardless of the position you are hiring for, you can customize your candidate evaluation form accordingly. It’s only a matter of planning and taking the time to understand the exact needs of the position in question.
However, you need to interview your candidate before you can even put your evaluation form into action. That itself can prove a difficult task. According to Yello, recruiters spend as much as 30 minutes to 2 hours scheduling a single interview. And when you’re facing a high-volume hiring initiative, that can represent literal hundreds of hours of scheduling alone.
Thankfully, there’s a solution that can eliminate scheduling and get recruiters screening faster.
Virtual interviews are built with bulk interviewing in mind. This virtual interview solution offers an asynchronous approach to interviewing. Rather than recruiters spending countless hours scheduling interviews, they can interview 24/7 – offering an interview process accessible to everyone at any time of day.
It all starts with the recruiter pre-recording their interview questions. With an on-demand interview platform like Qualifi, that interview can then be delivered to all potential candidates with a few simple clicks of a mouse. Said candidates are then able to approach the interview process at a time of their convenience, recording their answers and returning them to the recruiter. Then it’s merely a matter of screening the recordings in a fast and easy audio format.
Schedule a demo today to see how on-demand phone interviews help you reach the best talent on the market.
