The key to having a successful interview process is ensuring you keep the candidates engaged. Which is why, with today’s market being the most competitive it has been in many years; it is more important than ever to keep your interview processes as short as possible. The companies who are the most successful with new hires across 2021, are the companies who can complete their interview process within one week.
Interviews may help you understand the candidate’s suitability better, however, don’t forget that during this process they are judging you and your company as well. First impressions are the most important, so you’ll want to make sure your interview process is perfect. If your process is full of delays, hurdles, test, and some cases repetition, this greatly increases the chances of the best candidates dropping out of the process.
Making sure your interview process is efficient!
In reality, there is no such thing as the perfect interview process. However, what you can do is to make sure you have full control of your interview process by making it short. By doing this, you will ensure you learn more important details about each candidate quickly, resulting in more successful hires. Another positive of this approach, it avoids wasting your time, the companies time and saves your company money, all while improving the candidates experience throughout the process.
Your interview process is the first impression of how the interviewer sees how your company treats its employees. If you are successful in conducting a professional interview in a well-timed manner, not only will you have a much higher success rate with exceptional hires, but you will become more attractive to future candidates and improve your overall hiring efforts.
How to improve the interview process.
This is constantly an ongoing debate on how to improve an interview process. By improve, we mean attract better professionals and make more successful hires. Companies constantly think that a longer and more difficult interview process results in finding better and more suitable candidates, however is this the case? Unfortunately, this is not true, as with the current competitiveness across the market this year, it has changed from a candidate having one to two offers to potentially comparing four to five offers. Therefore, on average it has been shown that the longer interview process is now losing out on the best candidate due to the shorter interview process sealing their offers much quicker. Resulting in more successful hires.
Now this doesn’t mean that as a company you need to neglect your interview process, what it does mean you need to ensure you have a good structure and map out your interview strategy effectively. In a recent survey it showed the more successful companies with recent hires are able to complete their interview process within 7 to 10 days.
How to improve your company's interview process?
Here are some steps to consider when structuring your interview process:
Phone Screening Interview
As a first stage, this is the best way to screen potential candidates. You will want to focus on high level questions, to fully qualify a candidate and make sure their skill set is a good match before you decide to invest further time in them.
Technical Test / Interview
Technical questions allow you to find the best fit for each role, this helps you hire employees who have the right skills to support your product, drive innovation, productivity, and profits. This stage is a vital point in the process to decide how candidates will be moved forward or eliminated based on the results.
Remote Video Interview
At this stage in the interview process, if you have performed your first two stages sufficiently, you already know that the candidate is generally well-qualified for the role, so all that is left now is to find out if they are a culture fit. See if you can identify what motivates a candidate, what attracted them to your company and how they work with a team. By asking these final questions, you should now have everything you need to make your decision on whether you wish to employ this professional into your team.
The days of on-site interviews being a necessity are becoming a distant memory, many candidates interested in new opportunities today are only interested in full remote work. This has come from the effect of Covid pushing companies to have to work full remote for the best part of 2020. As a result of this, many candidates on the market won’t even consider an interview if it’s not performed remotely. This allows the candidate to save annual leave, as they can complete interviews during the working day and not have to take up a whole day with commuting back and forth to on site interviews.
Interview process time management is fast becoming a huge deciding factor to potential candidates. Now this doesn’t mean that you need to neglect your process to now be successful in finding suitable candidates. However, if your interview process is four, five or six stages, with many technical tests and on-site meetings, you may want to reconsider your strategy, as your competitors could be winning the battle to hire the best professionals.
If you would like to talk more about how to improve your Interview process, feel free to drop me a line on Ben Quinn [email protected].
