PROTECTING YOUR REPUTATION AND SETTING UP INTERVIEWS (PT 2)

Last week we looked at how to ensure that candidates felt positive about you and your organisation even though they were not going to be considered for a vacancy and how you can sometimes gain additional good quality referrals at the same time.

Now you have to move on to interviewing.

Unless the role you're trying to fill requires rare skills, you will have a number of candidates to talk to. Presuming this is the case, I recommend that an initial telephone 'screening' is carried out with each candidate. I always do this. Because up until now you have looked for reasons to include people in the group to be interviewed rather than reasons to exclude them, the numbers can be easily become unmanageable for face-to- face interviews. A telephone interview can be short, based around just four or five questions, but it will allow you to establish a short list to move forward.

Generally, it is better to have someone in your department or HR set up the phone interviews but if the numbers are manageable you can set them up yourself. I say it is better to get someone else to do it to avoid you becoming embroiled in conversations about the role and bogged down in coordinating the logistics, which can all prove challenging and time-consuming for an already busy manager.

When I hire, I look to hold three phone interviews an hour with each running up to 15 minutes. This gives me five minutes to write up my thoughts and notes and maybe a couple of minutes to catch up on emails and anything else that is happening in the business. This short conversation means it is usually quite easy to set the interview up for candidates during their normal working day and if it can only occur in the early morning or later in the evening, it is not too intrusive on my own time and can be carried out by  mobile phone if necessary.

Almost inevitably, there will be a number of conversations which will last considerably less than 15 minutes because it's quickly apparent that the candidate is not suitable or that the role is not what the candidate requires. In cases like this, the phone interview stage means both parties have been spared having to pad out a face-to-face interview which wouldn't have been going anywhere!

To allow for this scenario, when conducting a lengthy series of consecutive phone interviews, I always have a number of small pieces of work to do, suitable for any fill-in times. They are not urgent time-consuming tasks, just things that need doing - the kind of jobs that invariably get left on one side. This ensures that I'm not just twiddling my thumbs if an interview is very brief.

So what do you ask during the conversation?

At the outset of the process (and as discussed earlier), you established the core competencies and behaviours that you are looking for in connection with the vacancy. The questions should be based around these. (In the next blog I will explain in detail the type of questions to ask and how to structure the questions.) It is a brief conversation, so focus on two or three core competencies for the job and ask just four or five questions to establish capability. Ask the questions about their most recent or current role, or about the role which relates to the job you are hiring for if their current role is not applicable. The questions are purely to establish whether you want to carry on to the face-to-face interview.

For example, when I am interviewing for recruiters I am looking for the following criteria because a recruiter spends a lot of time on the phone:

• rapport
• good, easy to understand English
• an ability to think on their feet

With my recruitment experience it is easy to establish this just by talking to the applicants and gauging how engaged and comfortable I am with them and how easy it is to understand them.

Once you have established that the applicant is of interest, talk about the opportunities that will come with working with you, their current salary and package and their salary expectations.

Remember: you might want the candidate but they also have to want you to join you. It is important that you to talk about the opportunities and benefits of working with your organisation so that the applicant is interested and places working with you at a higher priority than any other companies they might be talking to or applying to.

When you know you would like to move forward with an applicant, discuss their expectations and any immediate questions whilst at the same time emphasising that all aspects will be covered when you meet. Make sure the applicant knows the phone conversation is all about ensuring that you both feel that it is worth moving forward with the process.  This keeps the conversation duration manageable so that you don't overrun into the next one.

My preference is to let the applicant know that I would like to move to a face-to-face interview there and then, but have someone in my team arrange the date and time at the end of the screening process. I also let applicants know at the time if I will not be moving forward with them and why. As with the earlier selection process, you must deliver this 'bad news' in a constructive way so that they feel positive about your business and know the areas to work on if they're looking for other similar roles.

On The Borderline

There are always some candidates who are question marks - borderline cases. I do try to be inclusive and look for reasons to take applicants forward and in the past I used to invite applicants who were 'borderline' at the phone stage to come to a face-to-face interview. However, after reviewing this I couldn't identify a single case of hiring someone I'd been unsure about at this phone screening stage. Hence nowadays I take an inclusive view up until the phone interview, but from there on in I will exclude anyone who obviously doesn't fit the bill or who I'm not sure about.

In Summary

To summarise,  to carry out effective screening interviews by phone:

• arrange for 15 minute conversations with five minutes between each one;
• interview against three or four of the key hiring criteria laid out in the competencies and behaviours you detailed at the outset;
• talk about the opportunity and options that come with working with you if the candidate seems a good match;
• establish their current salary and package and their salary expectations if they are to take the role;
• either let the applicants know during the phone screening or in writing after the screening if they have not been successful and why not;
• applicants who are borderline remain borderline at best so should be rejected;
• book the successful applicants in for the face-to-face interview.

Next Time:

Constructing the questions for an interview so you establish exactly what you want to know, either on the phone or in face-to-face interviews.