I have to disagree with this point. Phone and screen interviews are awkwardly paced and some individuals simply don't come across well in this type of setting. If the qualifications on their resume fit your requirements, just bring them in!
On the interviewing side, I have had 6 phone screens with different companies in one day -I was able to “work from home” to do it.
On the interviewer’s side. I was able to screen 6 people in one day and bring in only two.
A “resume fit” means nothing. People say all sorts of things on their resume but they fall apart when you actually talk to them.
Also, you'd be surprised at how different the role they want to fill is from the one they posted.
As much as I agree that companies should be more willing to just have people come in for a quick chat, I'd like for recruiters to reach out through email or text and then setup a Hangouts chat or such. A video call would be sufficient in my book.
EDIT: One of the things that sucks about phone screenings, IMO, is when the interviewer is clearly asking a prewritten set of questions and taking notes as I speak. What I'd like instead is for the interviewer to record the conversation so they don't have to take notes, thus freeing their minds up to having a chill conversation and perhaps getting a better sense of who I am.
I believe European carriers were traditionally caller pays, not sure if that's still the case.
The sentiment is mutual.
We can talk about how much we hate doing anything over a voice call, but it’s ludicrous to think that interviewers should never ask a question that could be answered by reading the résumé.
For example, we have some Scala code in our analytics stack at my work. I have worked with it, but I avoid touching it and honestly, I am not a Scala programmer.
I have been at this company for 3 1/2 years, on this team for one year. Some people in such a situation will say that they have 3 1/2 years of Scala, an outright fabrication.
Others will say that they have 1 year of Scala, which is kinda-sorta true on some bad-faith, you-can’t-call-me-a-liar planet.
If I put Scala on a résumé, I would totally expect someone to drill down and find out if I was using it every day, whether I was writing big chunks of code or just fixing the odd bug and so on.
I wouldn’t highlight Scala, personally, but what if I put JavaScript down? Given how tenuous Scala might be, wouldn’t an interviewer want to know if my JavaScript experience is “real” or not? I know that I use JS almost every day and Scala almost never, but my interviewer doesn’t know that I have such scruples, so they are supposed to ask me questions about JavaScript that my résumé answers, then drill down and corroborate.
To provide contrast, I had a phone screening yesterday where the screener was only asking yes/no questions that were easily answered by my resume, didn't want me to go into much detail, and didn't seem friendly at all. Why would I want to move forward with that company? There are others where I can tell off the bat that they'd be a better culture fit. First impressions do matter.
One of the things I like about a video screening is it usually changes the tone of the conversation towards being a bit less formal.
You are a number as an employee, we are all just disposable pieces of the cog. The business transaction is simple. I’ll stay there as long as they are putting money in my account twice a month that is commensurate with my market value and I know they will keep me employed as long as it is in their best interest.
You are just one of a pile of resumes that they are filtering at any one time.
While I wouldn’t want to work in a toxic environment, I have no problem with working with a bunch of professionals that all feel the same way and just want to go home to their families, friends, and enjoy other alternatives.
I have no interest in playing foosball, socializing after work, etc.
But I gave up getting meaningful raises within a company. My m.o. for the past 10 years has been to look at the market, gain the skills that are paying more, and change jobs.
As far as promotions, that’s not something I care about. 20 years ago, I was sitting at a desk writing code in Visual Studio 1997. Now I am sitting at a desk writing code in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code - making a lot more money of course.
I was a Dev lead for a while, at one company just to put that on my resume, I self demoted, got a job at another company with the same pay, less responsibility, and the chance to fill in some technology gaps for next job as an overpriced consultant.
It's not uncommon for there to be a huge mismatch between what the resume says and how the candidate interviews. Especially since it's well-known that resumes are programmatically screened nowadays, candidates feel pressured to play buzzword bingo with their resumes.
A quick phone screen or take-home is far more humane than bringing them on-site for 6 hours and having them flail miserably in the interview because of the resume problem.
I also don't see how they could nail an on-site interview but fail a phone screen. It seems like the skillset there is roughly equivalent, regardless of whether you agree with that skillset being indicative of on-the-job performance.
Both of these before either side has expended significant resources on a proper interview. More that 50% of the most recent interviews I have done have involved getting on an airplane (sort of "amusingly", more than once even for a position in the same city I was located) - no way I'm going to put that sort of time in for most places without talking to them first. On the other foot, it's pretty frustrating as a hiring manager to have interviews and people all lined up and prepped for someone it only took you 10 minutes to know was not going to work out.
I should probably add, I mean technical, or at least hiring manager, phone screens. Recruiter can rarely handle this, and if I'm talking to one it's really only to arrange/understand who I really need to be talking to.
In more niche/difficult to match area, good recruiters can be helpful at finding difficult to source candidates, much more so that evaluating them.
Those two skill sets are quite different, most recruiters don't do both well.
I suspect many of the gut feelings people get doing phone interviews are a matter of luck.
I do appreciate the convenience of a phone interview, but it would be incredibly good for my peace of mind if more of them could start off with a simple email conversation to introduce each other. I tried to do that myself for a brief moment where I was interviewing people, and I thought it went quite well. (My boss, wondering how he almost didn't hire me, put me in charge of hiring someone like me, which was surprisingly non-destructive, but I'm grateful I don't need to do it on a regular basis).
With that said, I really dislike the jobs where they ask you a bunch of random questions right in their application form. That's way too much work when your answers to those questions probably won't even reach your interviewer anyway.
Eg. I’ll provide more context on my needs as the hiring manager (often the recruiter explains the role poorly). Then I’ll ask a few questions related to the role that are pretty basic to validate your background isn’t BS.
So if you get screened out here despite nailing the questions then the manager is hiring on the wrong criteria (likability?) and you probably don’t want to work for them anyway.
Furthermore, phone screen allows ability to get perspective on soft skills. At least in my field, technical people need to communicate and therefore a phone screen allows ability to review this attribute of candidate which isn't conveyed on a resume.