Phone Screen Questions to Ask
The quality of the questions you ask in an interview can help you quickly uncover top talent.
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A company cannot grow without the hard work of recruiters. Whether they’re dedicated hiring specialists or someone wearing many hats, recruiters are responsible for bringing in more talent to support the entire enterprise. Unfortunately, this task gets harder the more a company grows. Whereas a small business will find itself hiring for a handful of positions
Screening is an essential part of a successful hiring process. Otherwise, recruiters and hiring managers alike will inevitably become bogged down by a stream of underqualified and unsuitable candidates. Recruiters need to reach the best candidates quickly. Hiring is a time game. The longer the time-to-hire, the harder it will be to reach that ideal candidate before the competition. The job market is cut-throat like that.
That’s why today we’re discussing the phone screening questions recruiters need to ask during the interview. For a recruiter, phone screen questions are just as important as conducting the screening in the first place. After all, what’s the point of having a screening process at all if you ask all the wrong questions?
The questions you select for your own screening process will highly depend on the role you’re hiring for. However, regardless of the role or your industry, successful screening questions will share some key qualities.
For example, diversity is more important than ever. According to McKinsey’s 2020 report “Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters,” data indicates that the most diverse companies are more lkiekly to perform their less diverse peers. What’s more, a 2018 Boston Consulting Group survey found that organizations with above-average diversity saw a greater proportion of revenue from innovation – 45% in total.
As such, every recruiter today is looking for ways to mitigate bias in the hiring process, and the screening process is a integral stage in achieving that goal and more.
As an important stage of the hiring process, HR screening questions need careful crafting, designed to accurately assess a candidate’s suitability for a given role. These questions go beyond just evaluating technical skills. Strategic interview questions to ask candidates should include soft skills as well. Questions designed to evaluate both are ideal. Recruiters want to know early on about a candidate’s mindset, problem-solving skills, and general knowledge of the role in question.
For questions seeking technical skills, recruiters should ask pointed questions on how to solve skill-related problems. These provide candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. Meanwhile, recruiters can examine skill level.
On the other hand, questions to evaluate problem-solving skills typically involve hypotheticals. Using scenarios or real-world challenges, recruiters are able to assess candidates’ soft skills. This helps identified candidates likely to bring serious innovative solutions to the organization as well as overcome unforeseen obstacles.
Overall, strategic interview questions are about quickly evaluating a candidate in the screening phase and moving the most qualified candidates to the next phase of the recruitment process.
The only problem with screening interview questions is that there’s virtually no end to the questions you can ask. However, we’re pressed for time and have to learn as much as possible. Everything needs to be concise. Start by understanding exactly what you need from your ideal candidate. Then design your phone screen questions around that candidate. Designing your screening interview questions will become infinitely easier with that focus.
However, we’ve put together a list of sample phone screen questions and their purposes to help you get started.
It’s important to note for all these questions, the wording is important. You should avoid biased language wherever possible, which is harder than it sounds. No matter the language you speak, words carry connotation. Even if the literal meaning doesn’t carry bias, the meaning around those words can exclude many candidates.
Do you know what biased language looks like? Test your knowledge with our Spot the Biased Interview Question Quiz.
Now that we’ve covered the importance of screening, your question selection, and potential questions you can use, there’s one more problem to address. What makes an effective screening process? The modern recruiter is often overwhelmed with bottlenecks that seriously slow down the entire process, and most of these bottlenecks are found in the interview.
Have no fear. We have some simple phone interview tips to help you overcome these challenges.
First, ensure your process is accessible to as many candidates as possible. Consider adopting the self-guided phone interview as a modern solution to modern recruitment challenges.
Self-guided phone interviews allow anyone with a phone access the interview process. What’s more, they’re asynchronous. That means no more scheduling interviews and no more scrambling for the right time for both parties. Recruiters simply record their end of the interview. That is delivered to all selected candidates with the few clicks of a mouse. Then those candidates are able to respond at a time of their convenience.
If you want to learn more recruiting tips and how on-demand interviews can change how you reach the best talent, check out the Qualifi blog today.
