Why screening interviews are a bad experience and how to fix them

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic came, phone screening was and continues to be a highly popular method of interviewing people for your open roles. I’m here to tell you that screening interviews are driving your business into a more old-fashioned crisis — lack of qualified candidates.

What is a screening interview?

A screening interview, if present, is usually the first round of a recruitment process. Its goal is to determine whether or not a company should continue the hiring process with a certain candidate. Screening interviews are generally conducted remotely, as a phone call or a video call, however there also other forms such as in-person meetings. The latter is rare since a screening interview is meant to be short (doesn’t usually exceed 30 minutes). Therefore it would be counter-productive to schedule a face-to-face meeting for 30 minutes or less, especially as a first encounter. This sets a first bad impression since the candidate feels like you’re disregarding his or her time.

What can you expect from a screening interview?

There’s two sides to this: candidate expectations and hiring manager expectations.

Candidates can expect a series of questions, some about their skills and knowledge (e.g. Have you ever worked with X? / Do you have experience working with Y?), while some are more focused on their personality or way of thinking (e.g. Tell me about yourself. / What are you looking for in a job?). You might also be asked about your financial / salary expectations and availability.

These questions help recruiters decide whether or not they send your profile up the ladder or pull the plug. A recruiter’s goal is to find the best match available or, in larger companies, create a shortlist with the most likely people to be a match. In small, more niche companies, a recruiter will mainly check to see if you could be a match. If so, you move on to the next step, regardless of other candidates.

Hiring Managers usually expect the recruiter to send only qualified candidates. Again, depending on the size of the company (or on the HMs perspective), the process differs and they might first expect a shortlist or have the desire to see more candidates before making any decisions. Or they might just agree to schedule a technical interview. As for the screening interview itself, HMs expect recruiters to ask a series of predefined technical questions, to gauge at the candidate’s experience and eliminate those candidates that fail to provide adequate answers.

What are the perceived benefits of a screening interview?

Time.

Hiring Managers don’t spend precious time looking over dozens of resumes. They merely look over those selected by the recruiter. Recruiters don’t waste hours in interviews that are going nowhere and have a quick and simple way of determining who passed and who didn’t (some even use tools such as score cards). Candidates that don’t make it further don’t waste a lot of time talking with the recruiter. And those that do move forward appreciate the employer’s respect for their time. Either case, they both go through an improved candidate experience.

Fairness.

Every recruiter uses the same recipe with every candidate so everyone is given the same shot. It’s a standardized, routine process that ensures the same level of quality and the exact same experience for everyone involved.

Cost.

Lowering the time-to-hire also implies lowering the cost-per-hire. By narrowing in on a select few, you’re saving recruitment costs that can be used for other parts of the process.

Bias.

Having the exact same process & especially holding a remote interview, reduces the impact of first impressions and allows for more objectivity in your decision making.

Here’s why this is actually BS.

The perceived benefits are actually working against you. Let’s start from the bottom and work our way back up.

Bias.

Having the same process has nothing to do with first impressions. As people, we immediately form an opinion about something or someone. This is true regardless of how we interact — face-to-face or over the phone. If anything, chatting over the phone makes it harder to empathize.

Having the same process may help you to be more objective. But you’re not buying a printer. You’re hiring a human being. And you’re never looking for one particular type of person. Not even when it comes to technical aspects. Say you’re looking for a developer. Regarding experience — middle level.

By asking the same questions and following the same script you’re actually blocking yourself from uncovering people’s potential and areas of expertise. Remember, the only information you get is the one you ask for. So if you never go off script, you never get the full picture. Only the one you’re trying to paint. This results in average candidates, that check your criteria, regardless of how well they actually perform.

Cost.

Time-to-hire reducing cost-per-hire may be true, depending on how you analyse data. However, regardless of your time-to-hire, you will always resort to your same tools & techniques of attracting and sourcing candidates. Imagine you receive a new request, let’s say a Project Manager. You’ll still build a job description, craft some job ads, post them on social media / job platforms. You’ll still have your recruiters headhunt some prospects. By holding screening interviews you’re not reducing any of your due payments (platform fees, salaries, agency fees, etc.). You might argue that you may be spending a considerable amount of money on recruiting agencies. However screening interviews won’t help reduce those costs. If nothing else, they’re also screening candidates.

Fairness.

Standardized, routine recipe. Yeah. Not awesome. We may be creatures of habit however whenever a routine kicks in, we get bored and demoralized. Which means we start having productivity issues. Which means that sometimes we’re not giving everyone the same experience. Which means we’re actually being unfair towards some candidates.

Remember bias? Imagine not feeling in the mood for a screening interview. Whether it’s the bad day you’re having or your feelings about the role you’ve been assigned to fill, you’re feeling low and annoyed to some degree. Now the candidate isn’t the chatty type. You have to extract every single bit of information. This frustrates you even more. How likely is it that he’ll pass? Not likely, even if your score card is saying 9/10 or strongly recommend. Why? Human nature. You’ll argue he’s not a cultural fit and move on.

All this leads to you actually losing more people than you’re passing, using your optimized solution.

Time.

Judging everything we’ve uncovered so far… are we really saving time? Not really. Yes, fewer candidates make it to the Hiring Manager. But, not the right candidates. The candidates the HM does get to see… aren’t good. Either from a technical standpoint or personality related “flaws”, the HM isn’t happy, rejects everyone and says you need to keep searching. Soon enough, the HM is seeing a whole lot more people than he initially wanted and neither of them seem to be hitting the mark. This adds more frustration and creates a long-lasting process. When you’ve finally found someone, it’s because you’ve simply said “you know what..let’s just hire this person and see how it goes”. The bad news? You’ve gone through 20–30 people before you made this decision. And those are good (low) numbers. Oh, and the recruiters? Hundreds. Hundreds of people they’ve talked to, thousands of CV screenings. All this effort, and you managed to hire one person. And you’re not particularly excited about your decision.

What about the candidate experience?

Not great at all. Sure, the new employee is happy (hopefully) and a reasonable number of people feel satisfied (again, hopefully) with your process. They got their feedback, they didn’t spend too much time. But not all of them.

We’re human and mistakes happen. Some waited weeks for their feedback. Some are still waiting. Some don’t even understand how they were rejected since all you did was ask some general, some unrelated questions to their work experience. One of the main reason we’re in this situation is because we adopted screening interviews as a practice. Changing the way we do things impacts our results. Being able to go faster through candidates gives us the opportunity to go through hundreds of candidates. And this leads to mistakes. And away from our original goal which was the exact opposite.

So how do we fix this?

There’s no one-hat-fits-all solution. Having said that, there are some guidelines that you can follow to actually improve your candidate experience today.

Start with what. Then with why.

Before doing anything else, form a team. No one is a one-man-show. Next, ask yourselves what do we want to achieve? Do we want more candidates? Do we want better candidates? What does better mean to you? Because trust me, it’s different than what it means to another company.

Once you’ve established a goal ask yourselves why. Why do we need to achieve this goal? Why haven’t we? This will give you a better understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. And will help you make sure that you’re working on something worth working on.

Consider the steps needed.

Next, consider the steps needed to achieve your goal. Ask yourself how might we do this & how might we do that. Simply framing a problem as a question let’s you think of it as an opportunity. In other words, you’re changing your perspective from defining the problem/goal to finding ways to accomplish that goal.

How Might We (HMW) questions enable a world of opportunity. That’s good. You want to find as many solutions as possible. After you’ve asked some questions on how you might solve the problem (so you’re giving yourselves directions to explore), start coming up with ideas. How? Brainstorming.

Start brainstorming. But with an optimized process.

For now, think quantity not quality. Also, be visual. Use sticky notes and put them on the walls or write everything down on a whiteboard. I recommend sticky notes because it helps everyone think independently and write down their own ideas while eliminating the possibility of influencing each other. More on this here.

Once you’ve given yourselves a bunch of ideas, it’s time to cut down the ideas that just don’t feel right. Consider giving each team member a number of votes they can cast. Have them browse through the ideas and vote on those that they like. Once you’ve narrowed it down, apply some additional filters. Consider Impact vs. Effort. You want to discuss and decide what impact your ideas have and how much effort you have to put in, in order to implement them. This will help you find the main ideas.

There are also other decision making matrices and frameworks, but for now let’s keep it simple.

Develop your ideas.

You made it! By now you’re most likely reduced to a maximum of 5 ideas, if not less. It’s time to expand them. If you don’t know where to start, ask the people that wrote down these ideas to give you more insight into what they were thinking. Discuss as a group and see how you can build these ideas. Try using “yes, and” statements. E.g. Colleague X: We can invite people to attend one of our meetups and talk with them there. Colleague Y: Yes, and we can also ask a technical colleague to share some insights on what they’re working on.

The goal here is to come up with concrete steps of implementing your ideas. Once you feel you have a good, solid plan… test it! First, make sure you have everything you need. E.g. that technical colleague from earlier? Let’s make sure he’s attending the meetup and agrees to do a bit of selling to some candidates. Then, test your game plan. Ask colleagues for feedback. Ask former candidates for feedback. Ask your friends and family for feedback. You want to make sure you’re on the right track before you implement the actual solution. Otherwise we have another screening process on our hands.

Start solving problems.

By the way, notice how I stopped mentioning the screening interview lately? You don’t know and shouldn’t know what the solution to your problem is. First you need to recognize the problem and then frame it correctly. Only then can you talk about solutions. If you want to jump right in and just improve your screening interviews, go for it. Ask yourselves “how might we improve our screening interviews?”. But please keep an open mind and first make sure that you actually need and want a screening interview in your hiring process.