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A blogger (I forget who) said to reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many inte

A blogger (I forget who) said to reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads to a lot of unnecessary interviews. Some gentle pressure on your phone screeners to reject marginal candidates works very well. One way to do this is to bring the phone screener to the final hiring meeting, and if you reject the candidate, ask "what could we have done to catch this earlier in the process." More aggressively, you can gather stats and you will find that a few phone screeners are letting through most of the marginal candidates, and some quick conversations with these few will bring down the interview load substantially. Sadly, too many people running companies ignore the cost of interviewing on productivity. It's very similar to how they view open offices as a "free lunch," pretending that there are no costs, and pushing employees to just work more to offset their management mistakes.

shoo 8y ago
> reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads to a lot of unnecessary interviews. This is a good tip. My employer is in the process of tightening this up as well. One colleague noted a correlation between people who are able to solve a phone screen problem inefficiently as frequently performing poorly when they make it to on site interviews. So raise the bar for what solutions are deemed good enough to proceed to on sites. Some good candidates may be excluded but the ratio of good candidates making it to on sites should increase.
muzani 8y ago
Even as an interviewee, I'd prefer more companies do this. Better to be in a small pool with higher odds of getting through, than to have multiple stages or a large pool with low odds.

shoo 8y ago

> reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads to a lot of unnecessary interviews. This is a good tip. My employer is in the process of tightening this up as well. One colleague noted a correlation between people who are able to solve a phone screen problem inefficiently as frequently performing poorly when they make it to on site interviews. So raise the bar for what solutions are deemed good enough to proceed to on sites. Some good candidates may be excluded but the ratio of good candidates making it to on sites should increase.

muzani 8y ago

Even as an interviewee, I'd prefer more companies do this. Better to be in a small pool with higher odds of getting through, than to have multiple stages or a large pool with low odds.