Pre-Interview Phone Call
Phone screens assess candidate qualifications, skills, and generally how they may be a potential fit for the role.
.png){kind=icon}
From the hiring manager to the line members of the recruiting team, everyone knows that a pre-interview phone call plays an important role in the hiring process. These initial screenings allow teams to evaluate candidates and determine if they’re suitable for the positions they are looking to fill.
During these pre-interview phone calls, recruiters gather additional information about candidates beyond what they provide on their resumes or application forms. As such, these conversations seek to assess candidate qualifications, skills, and generally how they may be a potential fit for the role. Through specifically designed questions, recruiters are able to delve deeper into a candidate’s background and clarify any potential ambiguities.
What’s more, pre-interview phone calls predominantly serve to streamline the hiring process as a whole. This is particularly important in today’s job market. Recruiters often face hundreds of candidates per role. As such, it’s crucial to narrow down large candidate pools quickly. Pre-interview phone calls are just the thing. It separates the qualified from the unqualified, allowing recruiters to focus their time and resources on the most promising candidates.
Moreover, pre-interview phone calls allow recruiters to establish an impression of candidates early in the hiring process. Utilize this impression to gauge professionalism and enthusiasm. Even better, it’s also an important opportunity to engage candidates as soon as possible. According to Career Plug, 84% of job seekers report that employer responsiveness after their initial application influenced their decision to accept a job offer.
Ultimately, the pre-interview phone call is a valuable tool. It allows recruiters to evaluate and identify strong contenders early in the hiring cycle, and create a positive candidate experience in the process. That’s not even to mention the benefits of streamlining hiring to find the best candidates quickly.
The pre-screening interview is another important tool for hiring managers and particularly small business owners who can’t hire large hiring teams. These interviews are designed to efficiently assess candidates. As such, hiring managers are able to quickly identify suitable candidates. A particularly important point in today’s job market. These initial screenings narrow applicant pools down to only the most promising candidates, saving time, money, and effort in the process.
Saving time is particularly important to recruiters. A fast time-to-hire can be the difference between finding the best candidate and an acceptable candidate for a role. And all it takes is a brief interview. With carefully selected interview questions, you’re able to quickly assess candidates for the basic requirements. That includes suitable skills, experience, and availability. As such, the selection process becomes streamlined to ensure that only well-qualified candidates progress to the formal interview stage.
At the end of the day, the pre-screening interview is all about allowing teams to assess and engage candidates as quickly as possible. Screening candidate qualifications early through structured interviews allow teams to effectively identify the most suitable candidates.
Any recruiter can tell you the importance of effective phone screening. It is a critical step in the hiring process. It enables teams to evaluate candidates quickly while still making informed decisions on how they hire. Typically, this involves a brief phone conversation with candidates to assess qualifications and skills. After all, a resume only says so much. Even the most promising CV can come from a woefully under qualified candidate.
Phone screening also gives recruiters an opportunity to gauge a candidate’s communication skills. Well-designed screening questions can elicit candidate responses that demonstrate their experience, problem-solving skills, and potential cultural fit within their organization.
Conducting phone screenings simply require recruiters to first understand the type of candidate they’re looking for. In effect, the most effective screening techniques include designing questions with this ideal candidate in mind.
For all of its importance in streamlining the hiring process, it is also vital to design the phone screening with candidate experience in mind. Today’s candidates value clear communication and expectations. In fact, 83% of candidates surveyed, according to Finances Online, say the overall recruitment experience would benefit if employers provide a clear timeline of the overall recruitment process. The phone screening offers a prime opportunity to give them exactly that.
One of the best tools out there to improve the candidate experience, cut down the time-to-hire, and ultimately build an effective screening interview is the self-guided phone screening.
Also known as a one-way interview, self-guided screenings are a 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 – the biggest hurdle in modern recruitment.
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. 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.
Self-guided phone screenings reduce 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, self-guided 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.
Self-guided phone screenings allow recruiters to interview 24/7, no matter how many candidates apply. Plus, 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.
High-volume hiring can be one of the biggest challenges to recruiters today. As such, it requires a keen strategy, a streamlined process, and the right tools to make it work. Although this sounds daunting, hiring managers across industries do it every year — recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates at a time. Although the average job posting rarely attracts more than 50 applications, bulk hiring brings in hundreds.
Hiring in this way is great for filling large volumes of vacant positions with qualified candidates. However, the caveat is that hundreds to thousands of applications mean recruiters will have to shift through numerous unqualified candidates. As such, it’s easy to become bogged down in clerical work and scheduling. Again, this is why recruiters need the most efficient tools and strategies to make high-volume recruiting work.
Without the right tools to handle such high volumes of candidates, recruiters run the risk of falling victim to the most common bottlenecks and shortcomings of the hiring process such as scheduling interviews. According to Glassdoor, scheduling phone interviews add 6.8 to 8.2 days to your hiring process. With hundreds of applicants to screen for individual roles, recruiters simply don’t have that kind of time.
Thankfully, there are tools like Qualifi that are perfect for high-volume hiring as it can invite hundreds of applicants into the screening process with on-demand interviews at once. This allows recruiters to eliminate the most time-consuming part of the hiring process: scheduling.
