Self-Paced Phone Interview
How self-guided phone interviews work and can improve your hiring practices
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As the labor market continues to evolve, so must the recruiters looking for the best talent out there. That requires constantly evaluating their recruitment process, and adopting new strategies and solutions. Otherwise, hiring teams can only expect to be left in the dust as competitors scoop up the best.
Traditional interviews will always have their place in the hiring world. However, for most recruiters, the old way of interviewing poses numerous challenges such as scheduling and overall efficiency. However, self-paced interviews address both of these concerns. An innovative interview method, self-paced interviews provide a flexible and efficient alternative.
As such, these interviews have revolutionized how many hiring teams recruit. Unlike real-time interviews, where candidates and interviewers are forced to coordinate busy schedules, self-paced interviews allow candidates to approach the interviewing process at a time of their convenience. Plus, recruiters no longer spend that time scheduling but rather focusing on screening.
The immense flexibility of this solution creates a remarkably accessible interview experience. In fact, Qualifi’s research found that this flexibility brings in 75.5% more responses outside the typical interview hours. Before using self-paced interviews, these hours would have been inaccessible. Now recruiters can interview any time, and give candidates some control over the interview phase.
But what does this all mean for the hiring process? Beyond flexibility, self-paced interviewing allows recruiters to eliminate scheduling from their workload entirely. This empowers smaller hiring teams to compete with large organizations, build large candidate pools, and screen hundreds of candidates without becoming overwhelmed.
Why should your hiring team adopt the asynchronous interview approach? Well, there are numerous benefits of self-guided interviews that fundamentally improve hiring no matter your company size or industry. Let’s take a look at a few.
First of all, adopting the on-demand interview helps you fix a slow time-to-hire. Time-to-hire refers to the period between when a candidate applies to a position and when they’re hired. As such, it's fundamentally tied to candidate experience.
According to Yello, 84% of job seekers are particularly concerned with employer responsiveness. If it takes a long time to hear back after an application, candidates can see a slow time-to-hire as an indication of what they can expect from an employer. This is potentially why 60% of recruiters report regularly losing candidates before they even schedule the first interview.
On-demand interviews allow you to reach out to candidates almost immediately, consequently satisfying the modern candidate’s demand for a speedy hiring process and fixing your time-to-hire.
Speaking of candidate experience, the benefits of self-guided interviews go beyond simple response time. They also provide a remarkably accessible option. Roughly 97% of Americans today own some kind of cell phone. And that’s all a candidate needs to access an on-demand phone interview.
Then there’s the matter of mitigating bias in the hiring process. Recruiters everywhere are constantly looking for ways to make a more fair and equitable hiring process. On-demand interviews help make that possible.
With an on-demand phone interview, you eliminate visuals from the screening process. As such, you minimize the opportunity for visual-based biases to affect the recruiter's decision. What’s more, it also creates a standardized interview process. Every candidate receives the same interview. This allows recruiters to screen every candidate using the same questions. Consequently, all candidates receive an equal opportunity to sell themselves and show why they’re the right person for the role.
With all the benefits in mind, you’ll no doubt want to know how self-guided phone interviews work. Well, good news. It’s a remarkably simple process.
Self-guided interviews revolve around conducting interviews where the candidate responds to pre-recorded questions over the phone. What’s more, they do it at a time of their convenience.
It starts with the recruiter creating a set of questions designed with the ideal candidate in mind. These questions must be clear, concise, and include all the necessary information a candidate needs to answer the questions fully. They then record said questions and make them available to candidates via phone call with just a few clicks of a button.
Then these interviews are distributed to candidates alongside instructions through the designated platform as well as a timeframe to complete the interview.
Once the candidate receives the invitation to interview, via email or text message for a job interview, they can choose a time suitable for them. Then it’s only a matter of calling the designated number or accessing an on-demand interview platform. During the interview, they’ll listen to each question one at a time and be allotted a specified time to answer. However, they can proceed or pause as necessary. The asynchronous nature allows candidates to take time to formulate responses without pressure.
After completing the interview, candidates will submit their recordings through the designated platform.
Then it’s time to screen. Once a recruiter receives the recorded response, they’re able to screen each candidate using the same questions. Here you will assess the quality of the responses, and skills, and compare each candidate accordingly. Just as you would in a live interview.
This straightforward process allows hiring teams to reach vast candidate pools without becoming overwhelmed with scheduling each candidate.
Now that you understand the process, let’s look at what self-paced interview questions look like.
For the most part, on-demand interview questions look the same as live interviews. However, they’re designed to be as concise as possible to avoid any confusion. And that can be intimidating at first, but it is as simple as adopting traditional questions in a more modern format.
Let’s look at a one-way phone interview example question.
