The Secret To Getting The Most Out Of Your In-Person Interviews

The solution: a great screening interview.

Conducting in-person interviews has a high cost to your organization, as they can eat up dozens of hours for all the people on your hiring team. And yet they are of paramount importance, as the people you hire ultimately will determine the success of your organization.

So, the obvious question is, how do you get the most out of them? That’s easy, as any Boy Scout knows, it is all about preparation.

So how do you prepare? Well, the key is to go beyond the resume and conduct screening interviews before bringing people in. A good screening interview allows you to:

1.       Know A Candidate’s Strengths And Weaknesses

For example, recently we received a resume from a candidate that was very impressive. However, after conducting our VoiceGlance screening interviews, we found her to be a bit stuck-in-her-ways. In our interview, we delved into that and discovered she was too rigid for our company.

The point is that might not have come across in the interview unless we as a hiring team knew exactly what to ask about, specifically, how open she was to new ideas (not as open as we would have liked).

2.       Quickly Weed Out The “Exaggerators”

A great screening interview allows you to quickly weed out people who perhaps might have “exaggerated” their resume. By asking specific questions in your screening interview, you can quickly determine who truly is qualified and who is making it up as they go along.

There is nothing more frustrating than wasting an hour or two of your hiring team’s time on a candidate who either “exaggerated” their resume or clearly isn’t a fit. A great VoiceGlance screening interview can weed these people out quickly.

3.       Know If You Need To Recast The Net

One thing we stress is to never settle for a hire, which is generally the result of a weak applicant pool. And once you bring in people face-to-face, even if they are not truly qualified, there is a tendency to “look around things” as you’ve already made a pretty significant investment of your time.

However, if you do screening interviews, you’ll be able to determine before in-person interviews if there are some candidates who are truly worthy. If there aren’t, it is time to post the job again and find new candidates. Granted, that’s never ideal, but it certainly is better than doing it after you’ve wasted hours interviewing people in-person or, even worse, hiring the wrong person.

Recently, we had a candidate for a sales job who had plenty of experience in the field. From our VoiceGlance screening interview, we quickly concluded that he was a hard worker and a team player.

Our hang up was discovered in our screening interview. In it, he didn’t seem to be particularly well-versed in technology, a concern for us, because he was going to be selling our cloud-based program. So when we brought him in for an interview, that’s what we focused on.

During the in-person interview, he confirmed everything else we already thought about him: he was hardworking, charismatic and could sell. But he also proved that while he wasn’t overly technically proficient, he was willing to work in that area.

When he was hired, we spent the first few days really working on that aspect with him, and he became well-versed with our platform. Now, he is a sensational employee. So, not only did our screening interview allow us to pick a strong candidate, it also allowed us to tailor a training program for him that maximized his effectiveness.