Chapter 1. The Telephone Interview and Its Role in Hiring
What created the need for telephone interviews? After all, everything was running just fine without them. Or was it? How is it different from a traditional job interview process? Professionals understand that a job interview is a process of evaluating a prospective job candidate by the recruiter with the intention of exploring whether the candidate is suitable for the job in their organization or not. Now, it would be easy to assume that this interview process, when it happens via telephone, would be known as a telephone interview; this is only partially correct. A telephone interview never replaces a face-to-face interview, but is in fact a preliminary step to qualify the applicant for a detailed face-to-face interview.
As an experienced recruiter, I have seen the status of the telephone interview undergo a transition over the past ten years. It started with the candidates demanding a telephone interview because they wanted to make sure that they were being called for the right role, and not just to fill in the recruiters' monthly interview targets. It used to be a tug of war where the candidate wanted a telephone interview, while the recruiter wanted to interview the candidate face to face. Things changed over time and now the recruiter prefers to interview a candidate by telephone for the first round. The tug of war ended and candidates were no longer complaining. Yet, I observed that in most cases, telephone interviews were still strictly limited to the evaluation of basic communication skills and role suitability of the candidate.
The recession in 2008 altered the scenario entirely. The telephone interview gained prime preference for the recruiter as well as the interview candidate. Telephone interviews were no longer merely a means of basic screening. On parsing the interview data of 60 clients associated with my firm for the financial year 2010-2011, I can say that telephone interviews became a deciding factor in more than 80 percent of interview cases.
In this chapter, we will analyze how times have changed in the last ten years and the impact of these changes on candidates' attitudes and on recruiters' hiring strategies. We will also explore the key advantages a telephone interview delivers to a firm, as well as the candidate. A good telephone-interview process saves time, effort, and money for both parties.
This chapter highlights the reasons to develop prospective talent resources for organizations in the light of changing times, and demonstrates how to make telephone interviews an instrumental process in accomplishing this goal. You'll learn when, how, and why telephone interview gained the importance it enjoys today, and why that's important for your own hiring strategy.
