What Do You Want?

What Do You Want from a Screening Call?

A suggestion for HR teams:

A screening call is often a candidate's first contact with a firm and first meaningful impression. It should be handled carefully by the recruiter and cover some key points - but avoid others.

I remember a recruiter in the HR team where I worked making a list of interview questions for a screening call. She asked me to review them. On one hand it was good that the list avoided some common pitfalls but, alarmingly, it also omitted a few of what, in my experience, were the most important questions of all.

Pitfalls? Like What?

Well, for example, do not confuse a screening call for a deep dive with a hiring manager. It should not attempt to cover what the main interviews do and should avoid technical & competency based questions that the recruiter is not really in a place to engage with and which are far beyond the remit of a screening call.

Any recruiter questions should be kept simple and open, aimed at maximizing candidate talking time, and avoid placing answers into the candidate's mouths.

I always started a screening call by asking what, if anything, the candidate knew about the company I was working for. A simple question... that served multiple purposes and offered several useful opportunities:

1. It gave a chance for an easy ice-breaker and a chance to get the candidate engaged & talking, and HR listening.
2. Moreover, though, it was a opportunity to quickly assess the candidate's English ability in an accessible way (I was working in Thailand).
3. It was also a chance to check if the candidate had done any research on the company. If they had applied for a job there, and did not know anything, this was often a red flag.
4. However, especially if it was a headhunted candidate, it was also an opportunity to fill them in on any gaps in their awareness of what my company did.

Checking

In simple terms, a screening call is a structured approach to checking key points.

Checking if the roles match; if the professional, developmental & financial expectations match; if cultures & personalities might match, if the short-term & long-term expectations match.

For me, to boil this down to the key "match-making" musts that cannot be omitted, we need to ask these core, interrelated, questions:

1. Why do you want to change jobs?
2. What do you want? (What are you looking for now?)

The number of HR interviews, as well as interviews with the business, that ignored these key points were, for me, the biggest indicator of an interview that had failed, and interviewers that were not doing a good job.

Expectations must be managed from the start. If these questions are not asked then you are neither helping the company nor the candidate. Nobody is a winner if they do not match up.

Establishing what the candidate wants should be as meaningful and informative for the hiring manager as it is for the candidate.

One last thing I also tended to check, seemingly almost as an afterthought, was if they had applied or were interviewing anywhere else.

Why? Well, this was important in case you needed to "hurry up" the interview process but, more than that, it also fed into the key "What do you want?" question. If you had talked to them about Position A at your company and then, after all that chat, they revealed that they were also actually inteviewing for completely unrelated Position X at another firm then..... red flag time again.

A screening call should not take 5 minutes - this shows a lack of seriousness on both sides. However, it should not take 40, 50, 60 minutes - save the deep dive for the interviews with the hiring team. Nevertheless, what it must include are questions that focus on motivations, and checking to see if what the candidate wants matches what your company wants and can offer.

What Do You Want from an Interview with the Hiring Team?

An appendix for hiring teams & candidates:

This article is not focusing on the main interviews. However, it is worth stressing here that motivations need to continue to be checked in the main interviews also.

This is not to "grill" the candidate and is not one-way. It should be reciprocal, exploratory and discursive.

Interviewers need to check that the candidate is consistent in what they say they want and that it matches what the company can offer. Similarly, it is worth the interviewers being aware of these questions to continually be sure of what they are looking for - that it matches the job description they have put out, that they are being fair to candidates.

And candidates must not be afraid to ask the same question.

In my experience, just as many failed interviews come from hiring managers not really understanding what they are looking for as candidates having unclear or unrealistic expectations.

Effective interviewing, of course, draws on many things such as work-sample tests, structured interviews, consistent behavioural questions, the same standards applied to all candidates etc. (see Schmidt & Hunter, 1998)

However, the "What do you want?" question should never be overlooked.

One way to "bake in" this to the process is to have a structured interview model where checking motivations and role is a key component.

I have attached an example below for your consideration. I passed this on to interviewers along with a pool of questions when possible. If used well it should improve your hiring standards significantly.

The interview and assessment process is not foolproof. Even the best hiring managers and HR teams can hire badly. You just use the most effective tools at your disposal to make a hire that hopefully works out well on both sides.

However, attempting to hire without asking the core questions, without establishing clearly what both the candidate and hiring manager want, is most likely doomed to failure.