How to Conduct Assessment Tests & Phone Interviews
Assessment tests can offer an additional way for you to conduct a comparative evaluation of different applicants within your pool and find the best fit for the role; Phone interviews offer a cost-effective but personal way to screen through a large applicant pool when compared to in-person interviews.
So You’re Considering an Assessment Test?
Pre-employment assessment tests offer an objective, standardized way of gathering data on applicants during the hiring process. They have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to filter and manage large applicant pools.
Bless the internet for making it easier to apply for jobs, but this also leads to some job-seekers spamming job posts by distributing their resumes across the web with little regard to if they actually meet stated requirements or if they are a right fit for the job in question. As a result, most hiring managers don’t have the proper bandwidth to thoroughly review every applicant’s application.
Assessment tests offer an additional way for you to conduct a comparative evaluation of different applicants within your pool and find the best fit for the role.
You can create your own GMAT-style tests using platforms like Classmarker, or have applicants complete a free personality quiz like 16personalities or plum.io and have them share their results with you.
A quick word of advice here. Before you go ahead to make applicants take certain tests, make sure you understand how to use/interpret the results. A quick way to do this is to take the quiz yourself, together with your current team members, and see what the results show; think of it as “calibrating your measuring tools”.
Setting up and Conducting Phone Interviews
By reading the application and conducting an assessment test, you should have already determined whether the applicant is qualified “on paper” as well as key parts of their profile you might need to follow-up on.
As a business with limited resources, a phone interview offers a cost-effective but personal way to screen through a large applicant pool when compared to in-person interviews.
However, to get better results, such an interview needs to be well-structured, designed with the end in mind, and conducted by someone who actually knows how to interview effectively.
You cannot approach your phone interviews haphazardly and expect that it results in a quality hire.
To help you out, here is a general structure you can use for your phone interviews including tools that can help with semi-automating your scheduling process:
Phase One: Setting up the interview
“The Platform”:
In order to create a near-perfect experience, putting together a seamless scheduling experience helps remove any potential bottlenecks on both your side as the interviewer and the applicant being interviewed.
To do this, there are a number of scheduling platforms you can use, but our preferred free choice here is “Calendly”. (If you’ve got a few dollars to spare here, you can check out Mixmax)
Using platforms like this one reduces the amount of email trail generated from the back and forth conversations that usually happen while trying to find a time that works for a meeting.
Calendly and tools like it are straightforward to use. Here is how they typically work:
- Connect your calendar
- Select blocks of time when you are available to speak
- Include instructions for how the applicant can connect with you or request for the applicant’s contact details
- Send your calendar link in an email invitation to the applicant.
“The Email Invitation”:
Considering that some applicants might not be familiar with the automated scheduling platform you have chosen, it saves you time if your initial email with the booking prompt includes key information about how the platform works and what the applicant should be looking out for.
Don’t forget to sign up for the VFA newsletter to get helpful content like this directly in your inbox ✉️
Phase Two: Preparing for the interview
“The Digital Rubric”:
A rubric is a scoring guide that aims to evaluate applicant performances based on the sum of a pre-selected, explicit and descriptive range of criteria that is designed to reflect the weighted importance of the traits you are seeking out during the interview. This helps ensure that your evaluating standards do not change over time and across interviews.
Although we at VFA are strong advocates for free-form note-taking during a phone interview, we also believe that having a well thought out rubric that turns some of your qualitative judgements into quantitative metrics is good practice. This is especially key when trying to determine the relative performance of applicants after their interviews.
You can put together a simple google form with a rating scale for sample qualities to look out for in potential applicants during your phone interviews.
These different data points can then be combined to produce a total score for each interview you complete. You can choose to use this data however you please when making decisions on your applicants.
As an example, we typically use weighted averages — a combination of weighted results from this interview and other stages within the hiring processes, which can then be used to compute running averages and possibly rank applicants “objectively”.
Phase Three: During the interview
“The Questions and How they’re asked”:
This is the secret sauce of the mix.
The most common issue I have encountered with most interviews is the lack of interviewing skills shown by the interviewer. Yes, you might have a list of questions you have to ask the applicant, but it helps no one at all if the interview begins to feel like an interrogation.
If you choose to conduct interviews this way, you face the greater risk of getting generic responses and you lose the opportunity to actually get to know the applicant beyond what is already visible on their resume.
After conducting 500+ phone interviews over a period of 6 months, my rule of thumb is simple:
“Make your interview a conversation”
Think of the interview as a conversation, and that you as the interviewer get the opportunity to set the tone of that conversation.
The approach here is to be as personal as is required, which in turn gets the applicant to relax and open up much more. From this point forward, You should treat the interview as a discovery process just like you would when trying to get to know a new person.
I believe this approach gets you quicker to the real truth than asking situational questions that tend to produce STAR responses.
Above all, your interview should concentrate on these 3 broad goals:
- Validating the applicant‘s understanding of the job opportunity, your organisation and its vision, and how it fits into their journey as a professional looking to build a career.
- Learning more about the applicant‘s listed skills particularly those that are critical towards succeeding in the role they’ve applied for.
- Understanding the applicant’s drive, energy and self-awareness. Hard-skills you can teach, soft-skills — not so much.
In the next post of this series, we are going to look at how to set up a communication pipeline that keeps everyone within your process aware of what’s going on.
We’ll show you how we’ve done this at VFA using checkpoints within our process to identify key places where a touchpoint with applicants is necessary and using that information to general high-quality email templates.
