In an age where we could face a global talent shortage of up to 85 million jobs in less than 10 years, recruiters and hiring managers now need to improve how they recruit more than ever.
One way to start is by ensuring the method you use to vet and qualify candidates is at its best from the start, in terms of how much time you take, and the overall quality of the candidates you bring in using methods like phone interviews.
Most recruiters already use methods like phone interviews to vet applicants before calling them in for an in-person interview, video call interview, or technical assessment. And although it is one of the early methods of modern recruitment, phone calls are still used to this day, for their quick nature and ease in providing one-on-one time with each candidate.
This is exactly why the phone interview questions you use in each call will be crucial to the way you qualify people moving forward. If you can ask questions that help qualify candidates more accurately and consistently, you can increase the volume of your high-quality candidates, while saving up on time taken per candidate.
In this article, we will be covering six top tips to help you develop high-quality phone interview questions, so you can qualify more candidates in less time, and better compete in the battle for top talent.
Understanding why recruiters and hiring managers use phone interviews
Despite advances in technology and the aftermath of the pandemic–which has likely led to the prevalence of remote interviews–phone interviews remain one of the top choices for recruiters and hiring managers.
So before we get into tips to craft your phone interview questions, it is important to cover why they are such a crucial component of any successful recruitment strategy.
Here are the top benefits of using phone interviews to vet candidates:
1. Phone interviews can serve as assessments of the interviewees’ skills.
For some job openings, particularly with jobs that require daily phone calls, you can test and record the candidate’s skills in handling phone conversations.
Such jobs would include customer service, sales, customer support, and hotel service, among other administrative jobs. This also means that your phone interview questions can be customized to make the most out of your time with the candidates in the phone call.
2. They allow you to interview multiple candidates in one sitting.
Phone interviews use very few resources–a desk phone or smartphone, and the availability of both the interviewer and interviewee (anywhere in the world).
Compare that to arranging in-person interviews, which take multiple resources like meeting rooms, laptops, printed documents, plus travel costs to the venue of the interview.
With phone interviews, it is generally just you as the recruiter, sitting at a desk (or sometimes pacing around) and going on an interviewing spree of several calls at a time.
3. You do not have to worry about location.
Booking meeting rooms at the office, preparing equipment, and ensuring interviewees arrive at the right location, on time, can all be a hassle.
This is why it often makes more sense to conduct phone interviews–with good qualifying phone interview questions–before actually calling them in for a physical interview. That way, you know you are spending your valuable time on the right candidates.
4. You can write and refer to notes during the interview without making the candidate feel uncomfortable.
A positive candidate experience is crucial to their eventual decision of whether or not to work for you (we will cover this in detail below).
Taking notes mid-interview could make an interviewee feel uncomfortable; Thus, it is best to keep detailed note-taking during the phone interview process, when they cannot physically see that you are collecting more information about them.
Why phone interview questions are crucial to success
Now that we have covered the benefits of using phone interviews to qualify candidates, let us move on to what crafting the right phone interview questions means for the whole interview process.
Crafting the right phone interview questions will benefit the recruitment process both externally and internally, in the following areas:
1. Externally: Candidate experience
As mentioned above, meaningful phone interview questions can improve your candidate’s overall experience as they pass through the different stages of recruitment.
In a nutshell, “candidate experience” refers to the overall hiring process, as perceived by the candidate. It is arguably one of the main factors in a candidate’s decision to select your organization when they are job hunting. Things that contribute to a positive candidate experience include how much time the interview process takes, how modern and updated the process is, how the business decides to treat candidates, and the actual questions asked in interviews.
In fact, according to LinkedIn data, around 4 in 5 candidates believe that their candidate experience indicates how much a company values its employees. In addition to that, 89% of talent said that they would accept a job offer sooner if they were first contacted by their recruiter.
And while part of the candidate's experience strongly depends on your company or client’s policy, much of it actually counts on how you refine your process. And one way you can do this is to start with your phone interview questions, as phone calls are often placed within the first few points of contact between you and the candidate.
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2. Internally: Makes life in recruitment easier through time-saving
Having a proven set of phone interview questions also helps you save time, which is a must in the modern recruitment industry.
A streamlined list of qualifying questions should be used in phone calls, as a way of handling several job openings at once. In fact, recruiters and hiring managers have to deal with around 30 - 40 requisitions at a time on average.
Furthermore, it generally takes quite a few interviews before a hiring decision is made. According to the BBC, Google needs four interviews on average to hire someone.
These time-intensive factors make it incredibly tough for recruiters and hiring managers to deal with a constant flow of job requisitions, especially if the goal is supplying the company or clients with qualified candidates.
This is exactly why developing a question-asking process that delivers the desired quality of candidates will help you increase your output in less time. And this starts with learning how to craft proven, quality-assessing phone interview questions, which we will be covering in the following section.
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6 tips for creating high-quality phone interview questions
To refine your interview process, consider the following six points when developing your phone interview questions, so you can use them the next time you are vetting candidates:
1. Find out what the candidate wants out of the job.
During the phone interview, you will likely learn about what the candidate expects from your job opening. Much of these expectations can be used in the vetting process, as some expectations may be in full alignment with what the job opportunity provides, while others may be too high or too low for what is required.
This information is especially useful when you are compiling a list of candidates to call in for an in-person interview or video call later on.
So as good practice, keep these factors in mind when finding out what the candidate wants out of the job, and compare them to what the job opportunity can actually provide:
- Working hours - Consider the candidate’s questions about the working hours specified in the position. Are they happy with the working hours that the role demands? What do they think about working flexible hours when there is a heavy workload? Do they require overtime compensation?
- Growth opportunities - Pay close attention to whether the candidate wants to grow rapidly at the company, or whether they are looking for something more stable. This directly relates to the expectations of the role in question.
If the position calls for someone who will eventually step up to a management-level role, then a candidate looking to play it safe would probably not be the right fit, for example.
- Remote working policy / Work commute - This Forbes article reports that about 60% of workers prefer a hybrid working scheme. Thus, factoring in everything your candidate says about working preferences or their commuting choices is essential.
Does the role offer a remote or hybrid-working scheme? How far is the candidate’s commute from their residence to the office? Will they require more compensation when traveling to the office?
Questions related to these factors could directly influence the candidate’s decision to accept an offer should they receive one. They will also be crucial in your decision to select them.
- Culture and hierarchies - How does the candidate handle specific processes in a company? Can they deal with top-down management, or do they prefer something more linear?
Working styles directly reflect the culture of a company, and one telling sign of whether a candidate will be the right fit for your role is the type of work environment they prefer most.
RELATED: Hybrid Work: Four Ways to Strategize Employee Retention
2. Ensure you communicate the organization’s wants and needs.
While the candidate’s preferences are important, one unmissable objective of each phone interview is for the candidate to understand the requirements and demands of the job opening.
More importantly, they must understand the expectations of the role from the organization’s perspective. If the job calls for a routine worker, or someone who needs to be in charge of their own growth and progression, then it needs to be communicated through phone interview questions from the start.
Also, consider the company’s vision for the next few years, in terms of where it wants to be, and how the candidate would fit in the vision if they are selected. Confirming these things early on will help you save time later on in the hiring process.
3. Develop a persona of the ideal candidate for the role.
This tip should be considered as soon as you have received a requisition from a client or your executive to fill a role.
It is best to construct a persona of an ideal candidate for each role, in terms of what industry they are currently working in, work experience, core skills, and personality traits. While it should not be used incredibly rigidly, a candidate persona can serve as a criteria or brief benchmark of what kind of person would be the best fit.
Once you have a persona, it becomes much easier to develop the phone interview questions for each candidate, as you will now have an ideal to work towards.
Additionally, candidate personas will help save a candidate’s time, due to your quicker qualification process. This will especially benefit you when you have a candidate who might not be the right fit for a role right now, but would like to keep them in your talent pool for future job openings.
4. Include goal-based questions.
Another best practice in developing effective phone interview questions is to link your questions to candidates’ career and life goals.
Ask them where they see themselves in the next few years, and what they would be doing then. That way, you can see whether a person aims to own a business in the next few years, or if they are still looking to learn more in the field, for instance.
This information will help you pick the right fit in terms of how much a person must invest in the role, which is essential for higher-level positions that require candidates to lead others.
5. Save time by making the process as repeatable as possible.
Phone interviews generally should not take more than 30 minutes, especially if you need to make dozens of calls a day.
This heavily centralizes on having a trustworthy set of phone interview questions on-hand for each job. A reliable list of questions can often be achieved by noticing patterns as you interview more candidates.
If you can see that candidates who answer questions a certain way (likely in relation to your ideal persona for the role) tend to get passed on to the next stage, then centralize your questions around those findings.
For example, if you ask candidates about how they would solve a hypothetical problem, and find out that most of the favorable candidates answered “as a team,” be on the lookout for such answers as a benchmark.
Another way to make the entire recruitment process as repeatable as possible is to streamline it with an applicant tracking system (ATS).
Phone interviews can be hard to keep track of, especially if you have to make several per day and update the status of each candidate manually in spreadsheets. With an ATS, however, you can keep track of the entire recruitment process from a customizable dashboard, like this one from Manatal:
Using tools like these help you make the entire process repeatable, so you can contact more candidates, conduct more interviews, and improve your overall output.
6. Ask questions related to their character.
As the final tip in this list, asking phone interview questions related to a candidate’s character and attitude can help determine how much of a cultural fit a candidate is.
Although such questions–like whether or not they understand why the business wants to be in an industry’s Top 10 rankings within three years–can be left for later interviews, it is generally a good idea to ask them early on. Doing so will provide you with more information in the vetting process, by allowing you to qualify who is more likely to be committed to the role.
However, you can also ask questions related to a company’s vision and working culture from their perspective, in case you feel it is not good for the candidate’s experience to be too direct with the company’s needs.
Keep in mind that the objective must be to learn as much as you can about the candidate in terms of their personality and defining traits that make them who they are, so you can make your best decision during the vetting process.
MORE RESOURCES: Industry-Specific Interview Question Templates (Free to Use)
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Next steps for recruiters and hiring managers
Phone interviews are one of the most useful forms of candidate qualifying, as they are arguably the least time and resource-consuming interview methods. Hence, knowing how to form the right phone interview questions will surely aid you in your journey to find top talent for every job opening.
Now that you have a list of tips to craft your questions, the next step is to make the most out of available tools to simplify your overall recruitment process. Combined with using the right phone interview questions, recruiting with an ATS will help open more opportunities for you to find more talent, and manage it more effectively than using manual spreadsheets.
Manatal’s ATS is currently offering a 14-day free trial, which includes a complete and customizable candidate dashboard, centralized applicant database, AI-driven candidate recommendations, automated candidate profile creation, and report generation.
It also includes an easy Activities list where recruiters can view their schedules, so they do not miss an interview or a candidate update again:
Want to know how Manatal can help transform the way you recruit? Sign up for your 14-day free trial today!
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