After thousands of candidate phone screens, it’s still tough to determine who makes a great fit for a particular role, team and company.
If you’re talking about highly specialized, highly skilled workers – degrees, licenses, certifications and their associated acronyms can really narrow a search in terms of candidate qualifications for a given job. On the other hand, the more general the requisition, the more challenging it is to select the ‘best’ candidate. When hiring against less specific job requirements, decisions become based on much more subjective variables that include – transferable skill-sets, related experience, soft-skills and culture fit. This is when the interview process can get messy.
If I had a nickel.. for the number of times I hung up the phone after a 30 minute candidate phone screen, shrugged my shoulders and thought to myself.. “Hmm, I’m on the fence.” As a seasoned recruiter, I usually have a good idea of who and what we are looking for, but recruiters are not subject matter experts. I’m not an engineer, not a finance or accounting whiz, and not a seasoned product leader. On phone interviews, candidates say some good things. They say technical, complex, or industry-specific answers that I don’t fully understand. Some answers even sound wrong, from what I know about the position in question – but again, I’m not the hiring manager.
During phone screens, candidates have great questions about – the company, the team, the industry, the hiring manager, and why a role would be a good step for their career. Good recruiters can address their questions, overcome objections and sell the candidate on the role, why the timing is right and where the company is heading. Once the candidate is hooked, it’s time for us to determine next steps. Let’s look at the options.
A) Decline them and potentially lose a diamond in the rough – someone who really wants it and would make a great, hardworking & motivated employee.
B) Clean up my notes and share a written summary with the hiring manager to review. Hopefully it’s clear, concise and free from misinterpretation, miscommunication and possible personal bias.
The Hiring Manager has options:
1) Schedule another 30 minute phone interview for the hiring manager to ask similar questions and listen for soft-skills, personality and domain experience. If it goes well, great! If it goes poorly, eek.. That’s an expensive 30 minutes the hiring manager won’t get back.
2) Invite the candidate into the office. Since we’re still on the fence, and everyone’s busy, it’s probably premature to get the rest of the interview panel involved at this point. We can bring them back-in if the meeting with the hiring manager goes well, the candidate won’t mind…
Time is money. Recruiting is subjective. How do we improve the communication experience among candidates, recruiters & hiring managers?
We’re attacking this fundamental challenge of today’s hiring process at Honeit.com. The Honeit Interview Platform enables recruiters to conduct more efficient, more effective live (two-way) candidate screens and share audio (or video) sound-bites from their conversations. No more misinterpretation, no more miscommunication through scribbled notes.
Honeit introduces new options to recruiting teams, to save everyone time, money and frustration.
C) Send the Hiring Manager a few highlights from my conversation with the candidate. Hiring managers can allocate 30 seconds, instead of another 30 minutes, to hear (or see) a candidate’s real-time answers to in-depth questions the Hiring Manager would have typically asked themselves.
D) Tap the recruiter sitting next to you. Ask them to spend 30 seconds and listen to a candidate’s answer. For the first time ever, recruiters can get a second opinion from peers or recruiting managers, before sharing talent with clients or the line of business. Sound-bites can also be stored in your CRM or ATS for the next recruiter to review.
By incorporating more rigorous interview questions discussed in our kick-off meeting, hiring managers can review a candidate’ answers and remove redundant steps to accelerate our hiring velocity. Everyone can quickly get a sense of a candidate’s personality, soft-skills and domain experience, without inherent bias along the way, to determine the appropriate next steps.
Liberate Your Recruiters and Get Started for Free at www.Honeit.com.
