Taking the initial phone screen with candidates
davidgomes.com
davidgomes.com
You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job?
I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate?
Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…
Roughly, I think many candidates are not in some desperate must-find-job-ASAP mode and therefore will be more interested in finding the job that is best for them. Giving them information so that they can better understand the company/team seems good to me.
I don’t understand what the alternative to this is for you – just accept the first job offered? Or ask lots of questions to try to work out what the company is like? Or rely on network/back-channel communication to only apply to the right jobs?
It's definitely way lower than that in software. Consider the example in the article:
> we ended up doing 81 initial calls which is roughly 1.7 per working week. We hired 5 people from this pipeline!
That's about 6%.
As a hiring manager, i would even take the opportunity to quickly assess whether their experience and cv is close to reality. Hence i suggest the author also asking candidates to quickly go through their recent experience and describe in some adequate technical depth something they are proud of. From my experience this one question can be a very good filter for candidates that can be a good company and role fit.
Either the candidate could be filtered out by a better application process.
Or if the candidate is straight up lying, they wont be filtered out at this step.
At least in my experience job hunting, a lot of filtering at the call screen stage happens when the recruiter misunderstands the job (e.g. conversations like: How much experience do you have doing X, where X is clearly unrelated to the job you thought you were applying for)
The biggest benefit of taking more ownership of your own hiring pipelines is that you can use the results of each stage to improve the others. If many fail the formal tech assessment, you can dive into more tech in the screen or adjust the minimum qualifications. If candidates are rude in the full loop, you can check for that earlier. Or if most candidates pass the full loop, you can loosen up on earlier stages or reduce the loop
That seems very long. I cannot recall ever being on the phone that long at once.
If this is coming from the perspective of a young person who has only ever been in an academic environment and never worked in a collaborative job, I would say “okay, well welcome to work, where half an hour is considered a ‘brief call’. Sorry if it comes as a surprise, but you’ll get used to it”
If it’s coming from someone who has workplace experience.. then I am both confused as to how you have managed this feat, and also surprised that you would be unaware that other people consider half an hour to an hour to be a fairly normal length for a conversation.
Three rounds is also coincidentally my max to give a company I am interviewing. If you can't make up your mind on a candidate after 3 rounds then you don't know what your doing. This 5+ round crap FAANG convinced us all was good is such a waste of time and honestly costs more in time suck then just giving the candidate a shot.
But respect for doing interview instead HR, I despise clueless HR you can't talk to and where you need to switch to chatbot mode answering phrases they wanna hear based on few keywords they say instead of having actual conversation.
I think the spam filter success is 100% (I am on the call and confirm with candidates that they receive it), but I agree I need to make the email much shorter and more appealing.
I also plan to try 15-20 minutes for this soon.
In my experience, I’ve always done quite well, with initial phone interviews.
It’s usually when I first encounter a tech person, that the process goes off the rails. I doubt it had anything to do with my tech cred. I have a very young-sounding voice, and I’m personable and enthusiastic.
I learned to quickly establish my age, up front, and that seemed to reduce my effectiveness at initial screens, but also reduced the “techie no likee boomer” thing that seemed to happen, later.
In any case, it’s all water under the bridge, these days. I just stopped looking for work, and everyone is happier.
How many times have you changed job during these 20 years? When was the most recent time?
If the last time you took a new job was 15 years ago then yeah, not surprised.
The trick is dealing with the signal to noise ratio. If you have recruiters feeding you an endless stream of mediocre, vaguely buzzword compatible resumes, it's not feasible to stay on top of that. IMHO, that kind of process is in any case unlikely to produce good candidates other than by accident. I've interviewed plenty of people this way and you can end up wasting a lot of time like this. The way out is to fix the lead pipeline to be less desperate than that.
I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. The next best thing is people applying to a job and reaching out. If they look remotely legit, talk to them. Ten minutes is enough to figure people out. This doesn't actually happen a lot. If you must use recruiters, make them work for a living and push back when they waste your time with a lot of poorly fitting candidates. Buzzword compatibility is not good enough. Make sure they can tell the difference between a good and a bad candidate.
There's no better way than selling good people on the notion of working for you than just escalating really quickly and having them talk to a decision maker. Have a quick call to verify key assumptions, fit, and expectation management (salary, skills, seniority, eagerness, etc.). First impressions matter. If that's all fine, immediately set up interviews with key stake holders and make an offer if everyone still agrees. Coding interviews don't really factor into this process. I don't use them and I decline to take them. If you've had multiple conversations and then still are wondering if the person can actually code, you messed up. Badly.
If you do have a coding interview as part of your process and you get people reluctant to take those, escalate and talk to them immediately. IMHO nothing qualifies a person more than being mature enough to walk away from a bad deal. Chances are that those are the best leads coming through your filters. And you can find out at the cost of a ten minute screening call.
I completely agree. However, at my current job, referring someone for an open position just means throwing their CV in the mix along with everyone else's. There is no way to bypass even a single step in the weeks-long hiring process. And I suspect this is slowly becoming the norm.
I thought this was the case everywhere, except maybe very small companies. In the companies I’ve worked, if a candidate asks for a referral, I can’t do much more than input their resume into our internal tool, and then tell him “It’s job req. 54401, go apply online for it!” There’s no button on the page that I push to indicate “This candidate is a special referral! Bypass the interviews!”
Maybe it’s different higher up. At the VP level it’s more important who you golf with, and who were your buddies from business school, and who you did coke with at one of last year’s private CES parties. I doubt at that level they even have to apply to job reqs. I’m not even sure that a CxO even interviews!
If somebody approaches me directly with a good pitch (I get some spectacularly bad ones of course), I generally hear them out. We are also planning to put referral rewards in place too when the time comes (too small right now).
The company I run is close to opening its doors for new candidates soon (pending on budget/revenue), so this is not hypothetical. If you are excited about using Kotlin in frontend and backend and are in the Berlin area, feel free to reach out and find out if what I preach lines up with reality.
But honestly, what’s actually the point of this call?
“What do we do here? How do we work? What will the rest of the interview process look like?”
Is any of that really worth it’s own call? The interview process should already have been established in the damn job posting. Why 99% of job postings in an industry that prides itself on intelligence is beyond me… It’s not complicated. X rounds, y and z hoops, done.
As for what we do and how we work, I imagine you can either express it in the posting or you’ll need a real call
I just don’t see the point of this step that everyone wants to do. It seems like a giant waste of time, inefficiency, and I can’t help but feel it’s interviewers flexing some weird ego thing
Basically second half of 2022 I was doing initial calls.
All the information has to be repeated at least twice. I always sent an email to ask for best time to have 15min intro call. People send CVs to multiple companies and even if I sent email that they could prepare by checking the posting lots of time I was having the same conversation.
People don’t care about my job posting, lots of times I have to sell them position/company.
Initial call is also to make sure they understand the offer like compensation/perks and work arrangement. Even if it is written out in the job posting people had sometimes weird ideas that needs to be addressed before we waste everyone’s time.
Because the attitude you and OP and honestly nearly 100% of companies and hirers out there take is “fuck it, we don’t want to do this the right way. we don’t want to respect potential employees time, we want to be vague about what we’re seeking and unreasonably selective as we put candidates through a meat grinder”
No I won’t read the 500th repetitive job posting with business hr speak and no clue what actually lies ahead
I’m not blaming you in particular, this is an industry wide thing. But the problems didn’t start with people seeking a career, they started with entitled hiring practices that are more often than not outright abusive
I wrote everything that is relevant in our job posting.
Salary range, perks, technologies. Maybe 3 sentences about company would fall into hr speak.
My process is super light and easy - I don’t grind people and our company keeps employees happy for years.
It is not my attitude that people are bad because they don’t read job posting.
It is realization that me and my company is not the most important part in their lives and that is why I put work into explaining everything diligently over the phone.
I got offended by this comment but I know you did not have any idea about who I am and what really is the process. So I also understand you read my previous comment through your life experience.
9/10 of the questions I get from candidates during phone screen are answered in the job descriptions. Our stack, our main tools the job's responsibilities and day to day, etc.
But also yes, if I know you applied directly and start asking me "so what do you guys even do?" then we're pretty much done.
If it’s looking good, like this is a real job and I’m not ghosted, and I’ve passed at least one filter, yea, I will do deeper research on what the company does.
The Job Search process is fraught with a lack of clarity for both sides; businesses "fluff" their positions just as much as candidates "fluff" their CVs because the wrong wording, incorrect wording, misleading wording, or wording that sounds less appealing than what other businesses use makes you less competitive in the eyes of potential candidates.
Talent Acquisition teams can only go so far; I work with a great TA team who meets with us frequently to discuss our needs and to ask for help interpreting questions/comments from potential candidates and how to best represent our needs to some of the challenging (but good!) questions potential candidates have. I am well aware that I am quite lucky in this regard as many TA teams do not work closely with the teams they're finding candidates for.
I wouldn't fault a candidate for explaining their understanding of the position but asking for a more clear picture of common activities they might do during a week, or about team/reporting structure, advancement prospects, etc. That's different than if they come to a position and balk when being asked about their experience with elements directly on the posting or normal/expected for the given position.
Do you really use X?! What exactly is involved with being on call?
tldr: I'll start paying attention to job postings when they stop including vague non-sense like "must be a team player", "should thrive in an energetic fast paced environment" and "be a go-getter".
That said you should phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like you're just asking for the same information that's already available: "So the posting said the team uses Agile; how does that show up in a typical week?"
Documentation is often out of date and/or lacking important context, job postings included.
The alternative is to do basic filtering within a more expensive interview, ie to include basic salary/visa requirements while doing a "regular" interview, then for bad candidates you either cut the interview short (effective but rude) or go through the interview wasting everybody's time.
There is no need to drag a large set of people through a funnel that only eliminates them at the very end on the hard requirements.
I built Trovinto.com to generate technical questions and evaluate candidates answers on a quick questionnaire.
Save everyone's time, and when you know there is a fit on skills then I think you should spend even longer on the soft questions.
Getting a new job is a huge decision, not something that should be concluded in 3 hours over 2 interviews and a call.