If you’ve ever played the telephone game, you know that, as expected, somewhere along the line, one person fudges the message for everyone after. Tracing the steps back to the root of the mishap is easy, but in the world of recruiting, it could be the difference between a candidate who decides to join the team and a candidate who’s left with a bad impression of your company.
How airtight is your team’s recruiting and hiring plan?
Get your team on the same page when it comes to passing off candidates from the phone screens, interviews, and the hire.
Set up candidates for success within your company with a positive experience with these tips:
The Phone Screen
The main goal of a phone screening is to determine whether or not a candidate is the right fit for the role before extending an invite for an in-person interview. Phone screens allow employers to narrow the applicant pool in a time and cost-efficient manner.
Before scheduling a phone interview with the candidate, sit down with the team and establish these essential communication touch points: the hiring goal, company culture, and role details.
The hiring goal
Confirm the required professional background and qualifications a candidate needs to be prepared for the role. Vet a candidate’s resume to find out if they’re knowledgeable of their listed skills and industry, and if they have the proper training and experience to do the job. Can the candidate articulate on their previous work experience and projects? Are there any red flags that may stifle the rest of the hiring process – higher salary expectations, work schedule conflicts, location differences?
Company culture
At this level of the hiring process, discussing company culture can work cross-functionally to determine if a candidate is fit to move on to the next stage.
Share details on work environment and atmosphere – is it more casual or structured? Is there a set start and end time to the work day, or do employees come in when they’re able to and stay as long as necessary? What’s the office setup, open or sectioned? Quiet or buzzing? Do employees get a set period for lunch, or is the team free to take their break at any time? Portraying your office’s culture helps candidates gauge how their work style matches up, or not.
One way to clear the air about how the team should be communicating details on culture is to create and share an external messaging document – what to say, what not to say, and how to recover from frequently asked questions that the team should try to refrain from answering.
Role details
Be as prepped to share details on the role at the screening stage as you would be during the interview. This includes, projects, tasks, responsibilities, and info on who team members report to. Send links and examples to candidates as a model of the team’s work, and what they can be expected to create.
When you’ve ironed out these details with the rest of the team, create a list of standardized questions and organize them from least to most difficult to answer, icebreakers at the top, more inquisitive, detail-oriented questions toward the middle and end.
Entrepreneurial engineer Tim Vasil swears by the 5-20-5 rule:
“Spend 5 minutes talking about the company and the job opportunity background, 20 minutes asking questions, and 5 minutes answering the candidate's questions. That first 5 minutes is a nice way to relax the candidate and get him or her excited about the job. Part of the process is 'selling' the candidate on the job, of course!”
Schedule the phone screen with the candidate and allow new recruiters to shadow your seasoned employees to get an idea of a successful phone screening. Be sure to notify the candidate about this before kicking off the call.
The Interview
In this stage of the hiring process, candidates’ qualifications, skills, and fit are assessed with a closer eye. At most companies, more than one current employee will interview a candidate and the team will spend a longer period of time discussing and vetting the candidate’s hire. Bad hires have costly, prolonged consequences, including interpersonal conflicts between staff members, decreased productivity, and lost time locating a replacement hire.
Candidate research
The interview calls for more probing around a candidate’s background for specific details on their work experience, projects, abilities, performance, expectations, and behaviors. Be sure to research and read through a candidate’s resume before meeting with them to avoid asking redundant and irrelevant questions.
Question variety
While the phone screen may require recruiters to stick to a list of standardized questions, for the most part, the interview allows recruiters a little more room and time to delve into a mix of inquiries. Advise the team to start off with fact-based questions asking about general details including a candidate’s training, academic or work experience in the industry. Behavioral questions can gauge a candidate’s performance at a previous job to measure their future performance.
Questions like, “Can you tell me about a time you encountered and solved an issue between you and a manager at your previous company?” allow recruiters to get a more illustrated example of demonstrated skill, and thought and work processes that can also be double-checked with the candidate’s references.
Another way to assess a candidate’s future performance is to ask situational questions. “What would you do if _____?” requires candidates to think of an answer on the spot. It’s likely they memorized and rehearsed an answer to your question about a time they experienced a disagreement or problem in their previous position. Remember to wrap-up the interview with an opportunity for candidates to ask you questions.
Follow-up
Before ending the interview, be sure recruiters set expectations with the candidate about next steps in the hiring process – when they can expect to hear back from you or someone else on the team, whether you’ll be contacting them by phone or email, and who they can contact if they have additional questions. (Translated: Your chance to give away one of the hundreds of business cards sitting on your table.)
Evaluation and scorecard
Want to make sure your recruiters are getting the most out of their interviews with candidates? Consider asking interviewees for a review of the interview and how recruiters can improve their approach to learning more about the candidate. This can give you better insight on your current interviewing methods and how the team can change and develop a more effective technique that can potentially reduce your time-to-hire.
Immediately after each interview with a candidate, have each recruiter and hiring manager fill out a scorecard to track their impressions and critique of a candidate. Interviewers should not share their candidate reviews with each other, as this can create a bias on how they rate candidates on their scorecards.
Have a rating system that evaluates each skill against a standard to avoid choosing the least bad fit candidate from an already unqualified bunch. Steer clear of comparing candidates to each other. After all scorecards are filled out, interviewers can then discuss their candidate critiques as a group.
The Hire
High five! The team may have breached the light at the end of the hiring funnel, but ensuring a new hire’s success is a long-term work in progress. At this point, the hiring manager and/or department manager is likely responsible for overseeing the employee’s day-to-day tasks and duties. Here’s what the team should be focused on to continue a successful onboarding process.
Curriculum-based training
Within the first week of being hired, new employees should receive training on basic information about the company, their duties, upcoming projects, management, reporting, and other standard company procedures. Take new hires through a typical day at the office, touching base with each department, if possible. Set a standard process for getting employees up to speed with the company during the first day, first week, and first month of hiring.
Goal timeline
Hiring managers can share a timeline of expected dates for reaching a goal with their employees. Be sure to map out and communicate expected, typical obstacles, including hiring freezes, budget changes, and business seasonality.
Evaluations
New hires, on average, feel comfortable and in tune with their role at least six months into the job, although everyone works at a different pace and style.
Managers can consider implementing a check-in with all employees one month, six months, and one year into the job to ensure goals are being met, challenges and issues are solved, and employees’ expectations, development, and satisfaction are on par with the management team’s supervision. Weekly one-on-ones are also a good way for managers to sync up with employees to understand their short-term goals and the help they need to reach them.
By regulating onboarding practices and expectations with the recruiting, hiring, and management team, organizations can improve the quality of candidates coming in through the pipeline, and boost employee satisfaction and retention.
Want to learn more about how your company can enhance candidate handoff from the sourcing to the hire? Join Entelo and Greenhouse for “How to Set Up Candidates for Success,” on Tuesday, July 30 at 10 am PT/1 pm ET. Register now! We saved a seat just for you.
