Recruitment series – Part 4: Telephone screening
About the Author: Ashley Thomson
Our continued focus on coaching advice to get the best people for your business has lead us on a journey that has featured our thoughts. (Previously in the Recruitment Series: Part 1: Job Descriptions, Part 2: Job Advertisements, and Part 3: The screening process )
That now leads us to an aspect of the recruitment process that can be a real deal breaker: screening candidates by phone.
Screening candidates by phone offers a large degree of utility by saving time and effort and honing in to finding the best candidate for the position. Why waste your precious time conducting a 45-minute face-to-face interview when you get cold feet in five minutes after meeting somebody? Or devote your precious resources to conversing with candidates about details you can clarify over the phone?
For us it’s counter-productive and counter-intuitive, characteristics no business should have.
So how do we advise our business coaching clients to get the most benefit out of conducting phone interviews?
Get your particulars out of the way first. You’ll find that this will save you an enormous amount of time when you meet face to face.
You might like to find out your candidates remuneration expectations. Or enquire as to their travel times and find out holistic details about their resume.
Then start to hone in on a few investigative questions that will give you a greater insight into whether the candidate is worth your time, or whether they are worth the flick in the process.
Find out what road they find their career on and whether it matches up with the road your business is going down.
Explore what they are good at and why they want the role.
Question them on what their previous manager would say about them in their last role.
Query them on their salary expectations.
All these questions will give you a great understanding of who your candidate is, what they are about and whether they’re are worth sitting down with to discuss potentially moving forward with the role.
Another benefit of this entire process also lies in its ease of exit. If you don’t feel the candidate you’re speaking with is the candidate for you, it’s simple to make a 45 minute phone call a 5 minute one, saving time and effort that would be wasted in a face to face interview.
Next up in the Recruitment Series:
