Phone Interview Surveys

In the last post, we described a situation when someone might use surveys to analyze candidates, especially after an interview where the interviewers discussing a candidate could cause some bias that tends to cause issues with streamlining the hiring process and ensuring all questions about someone's candidacy were answered. Phone interviews are another area when this can be beneficial, especially when running multiple phone interviews in order to narrow down the applicant pool. It's not uncommon to interview 20 or more candidates in a week with phone interviews as you figure out which candidates deserve a first interview opportunity. But when you do it with this method, it can introduce problems, especially with analyzing candidates one after the other.

Streamlining is the most important part of finding a great candidate, especially when you're interviewing multiple candidates in a day. You need a way to take the bias out of the hiring process and evaluate each candidate individually.

For example, a really good candidate that comes after a great interview may appear to be a worse candidate than a good enough candidate that comes after a bad interview. Human beings are prone to these types of mistakes and comparisons, and ideally you want to strip the human error out of the equation and evaluate each candidate on what they say and who they are. You can do this easily by running a phone interview with a survey, where the individual running the phone interview has a survey in front of them with interview questions, along with boxes and options to select for the answers.

A survey made for phone interviews would often have all of the questions that the interviewer is going to ask in front of them, followed by either a box to fill out the answers or an answer list that the interviewer can select from. There would presumably also be a subjective part of the survey, where the interviewer can answer things like "confidence level" and "knowledge level" based on their experience. The interviewer would then go through each question and type in their answers.

They could also rate them on how valuable they think the answers are. There can also be extra spaces for things like questions from the candidate, other questions that were sparked by answers, and so on. We'll continue this in the next article.