Top 6 Tips to Create High-Quality Phone Interview Questions

Published in

Manatal

7 min readOct 21, 2022

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.

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.

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:

1. 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?

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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 criterion 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.

*First published on Manatal.com.

*To read the full article, click here.

Manatal is an end-to-end recruitment and onboarding SaaS platform trusted by thousands of brands in over 135 countries worldwide. It is an AI-powered Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that allows companies to hire faster, better and save costs.