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Companies are constantly growing thanks to the hard work of recruiters. However, the more an organization grows, the more applicants they receive. And that means recruiters have to handle more and more resumes, sifting through potentially hundreds of candidates to find the perfect match for an open position. It’s an arduous process, and phone screen assessments make up no small part — representing three-quarters of the entire recruitment process.
Nonetheless, the phone screen assessment is essential to saving hiring managers invaluable time and effort by quickly filtering out unqualified candidates before moving to the main interview. What’s more, it represents an opportunity to identify those candidates that may not have the right qualifications on paper, but still possess valuable skills suitable for the role. Screening plays a key role in identifying these candidates and ultimately building an effective recruiting process.
Strong phone screen assessments take a well-planned, structured approach. That entails building a set of predetermined questions to cover the most relevant qualifications required for the position. Remember, the entire point of this stage is separating the qualified from the unqualified. Save determining if candidates would make a good cultural fit for the main interview.
It’s also important to note there is no size-fits-all solution to phone screening. You must customize your phone screening process to the unique needs of your organization. Thankfully, that’s another benefit of phone screen assessments, they’re remarkably flexible. You can tailor the experience to be as simple or complex as your organization requires.
With the right choice of screening questions, these assessments are remarkably effective to help teams make informed hiring decisions and build a competitive hiring process.
As we mentioned before, the effectiveness of your phone assessment will depend on the effectiveness of your screening interview questions. The wrong set of questions will yield poor results and tell you little about a candidate's qualifications. That’s why we’re going to take a moment to discuss them specifically.
Common phone interview questions are specifically designed to identify and sort out qualified candidates based on their basic qualifications. These are the go-to, tried, and tested questions of the recruitment industry.
Here are just a few phone screen interview questions you can use regardless of your industry:
Of course, these are basic questions. However, basic information is what we’re looking for. Save the complexity for the main interview to save you and the candidate time. Plus, simple questions can ease candidates into the interview process without much stress.
You can match phone interview questions and answers based on what you’re looking for. That’s to say, when you choose your interview questions, you should already know the answers your ideal candidate will give.
As the interview continues, you can begin exploring the true make-or-break information such as salary expectations, candidate enthusiasm, and relevant experience. Keep in mind that you need to strike a balance between simplicity and effectiveness. Whereas basic questions put candidates at ease, they still need to elicit the relevant information you’re looking for to make an informed decision.
As such, consider leading with simple questions and supplementing them with a set of follow-up questions to build a comprehensive view of the candidate.
When building your recruitment process as a whole, it’s important to look at the key metrics. This includes the ever-important time-to-hire.
Time-to-hire refers to the gap between when a candidate applies for a position and accepts a job offer. Think of it as the recruitment process from their perspective. It starts when they apply and ends when they’re hired.
Understanding this metric allows you to measure how long it takes your team to identify the right candidate and make an offer before they leave the job market. Plus, you’ll begin to understand the speed of your hiring process and any bottlenecks that slow down the whole process.
Furthermore, time-to-hire often reflects whether your hiring process provides a positive or negative candidate experience. This is particularly important in today’s hiring environment. A positive candidate experience is key to attracting and retaining the top talent available. However, a lengthy time-to-hire can leave candidates frustrated and feeling unappreciated. As such, understanding time-to-hire empowers recruiters to see where they can improve candidate experience and make better hires in the process.
The modern candidate carries with them high expectations. According to CareerPlug, 84% of job seekers report that employer responsiveness directly influenced their decision to accept a job offer. Here we see a direct correlation between time-to-hire, candidate experience, and ultimately, making a quality hire.
As the average job seeker becomes more and more discerning, companies with the best candidate experience will stand to benefit, scooping up the best talent before their competitors.
And the bottom line we see here is that time-to-hire has become a vital metric to track the recruitment process. Doing so allows recruiters to gain valuable insights into their hiring process and improve the candidate experience. It’s only a matter of using the right tools to make a quick and easy hiring process possible without sacrificing quality in the process.
One of the best tools out there to improve candidate experience, cut down time-to-hire, and build an effective screening interview is the virtual phone interview.
Also known as an asynchronous interview, virtual interviews are a screening tool available to recruiters to determine which candidates should move on to the next round without any of the trouble of scheduling or performing live interviews. As such, recruiters across industries are turning them to meet the pressing demands of the modern talent market. They’re candidate-driven, efficiency-focused, and almost unbelievably fast – everything you want in a screening tool.
First of all, they speed up time-to-hire. We already established the importance of this in the context of candidate experience, but what about financially? According to Zippia, a vacancy costs $98 per day. With an average vacancy taking around 42 days to fill, that brings the cost to fill a position to approximately $4,129. Every day you can shave off this process represents dollars saved, improving the cost-effectiveness of your hiring process.
Virtual phone interviews eliminate the need for scheduling, one of the biggest headaches for recruiters. Rather, the recruiter simply records one side of the interview and candidates answer at a time of their convenience. For organizations facing high-volume recruitment, this easily saves hundreds of hours better suited to actually screening.
What’s more, virtual phone interviews allow you to reach a broader candidate pool. Other on-demand solutions, such as video interviews, require candidates to possess a camera, microphone, and appropriate space to conduct an interview. Phone interviews, on the other hand, only require access to a phone – making them accessible to almost everyone.
Virtual phone interviews allow recruiters to interview 24/7, no matter how many candidates apply. The pre-recorded format then enables recruiters to screen the response quickly. And with the right on-demand platform, like Qualifi, you can reach the most qualified candidates first.
