Interviewing over the phone is a very common and the very initial phase of hiring candidates for a company. You can save a lot of time if you can sort out the most potential candidates in this step. Even you can relieve the extra hassles that may occur during recruitment phases.

So you should know the best practices and some techniques to apply during this process to make the hr operation smoother.

If you're new in the human resource management (e.g., hr executive, hr officer, hr associate, hr intern, etc.) department, then this article will give you a mass kickstart to your hiring interview process over the phone call.

You can make things easier by following the mentioned vital points while taking the interview over the phone, skype zoom, etc. Let's start with interviewing hacks over phone call tips and tricks. 

Interviewing Hacks Over Phone Call 

Are you planning on interviewing candidates over a phone call? But unsure about how to start a phone interview with a candidate? Get useful tips and make the best use of them. 

1. Standardize the core keys for choosing your candidate 

First of all, you must define the core key points to rate your candidates based on the designation and departmental requirements, and job descriptions which also include core skills, educational background, hard skills, soft skills, language skills, etc.

If you do not make this benchmark sheet first, you'll be hassled to sort out the ideal candidates. It's not possible to benchmark 50 candidates that quickly from the thousands of people, especially when you're just at the beginning of your hr career. 

This candidate benchmark result helps to understand which candidates should exclude from the interview and which candidates should be invited for the next phase of the interview. 

2. Review resumes to benchmark candidates 

Reviewing a candidate's CV or resume is the best step to understanding the overall quality of the candidate. So, you must check every candidate's resume in detail to get the ideal profile. It's a really time-consuming task if you do it manually.

If you have more than hundreds of candidate cvs' and don't have enough time to review them all, you can get help by using recruitment software such as jobdesk®. Upload all your candidate resumes there within no time, and auto parses their resumes on your recruiter account; then, you can easily input your requirement on the filter setting in a few clicks, and here you'll get the most strong or weakest profiles within your candidate filtration criteria. You have no idea how much time it's going save for you. There are also a bunch of features available by which you can manage your hiring operations efficiently and smartly. Try jobdesk® for free! 

Compare them to your baseline requirements and isolate those that don't fulfill them or do so very little. Despite the comparatively small amount of time, it takes to interview a candidate over the phone. When all that time stacks up, it's still a lot.

By going through the weed-out process early, you're essentially saving yourself a lot of wasted effort. Plus, you can use the extra resources on your existing candidate list and be able to go through in-depth screening.

3. Make sure your workplace has the best environment 

Phone interviews are already at a disadvantage compared to regular interviews regarding better perception and face-to-face screening. You can negate some of these disadvantages by holding the interviews at a quiet place and good network service. Background noise is the enemy of video conferences. It confuses and wastes the valuable time and energy of the interviewer.

A nice quiet place will allow you to listen and focus on the candidates much more efficiently. Good internet service is also mandatory. It is demeaning for a business or a company to hold an interview with bad reception when the line is cut or lagging from their side. Audio and visual quality is essential to consider as they are both necessities for holding a formal interview.

So, make sure you have a silent, preferably soundproof room with a decent interview connection before starting the process. Besides, you can read more here if you're unsure how to make your workplace great. 

4. Get into the more detailed questions when they pass the first test 

Since you have a list of requirements you'd like fulfilled, a good idea would be to break them down into a list of questions and establish a phase-by-phase interview. The higher the phase, the more detailed the interview.

This will allow you to save yourself the trouble on the candidates that don't seem qualified, as you can finish those interviews early and allocate that time to the ones that pass.

Breaking the questionnaire down into 2 or 3 test phases is usually the way to go. Designing your questions this way allows you to streamline the hiring process quite a bit more.

5. Let your candidates talk and be specific 

A good interviewer will always find the nitty-gritty details of their candidates. They do this by asking precise questions, trying to get them to talk, and evaluating them based on their expressions and responses.

Although it's a bit harder to accomplish in phone interviews, it's not impossible. Designing your questions accordingly might be able to give you an edge in this regard.

So, don't be shy to ask for details. Talk to them, ask them questions that will bring out their authentic responses to specific topics. The more they share themselves with you, the clearer the image you will have of them. 

6. Take good notes that you can reference later 

Chances are you might have to take a lot of interviews throughout a specific period. You can't possibly hope to remember every single detail of every single candidate, no matter how good you are at this job.

Most interviewers take notes which they can review later. It would help if you did the same. You might like specific details about a candidate that you can't remember, so you'd have to overlook them. Worst case scenario, you might miss a good candidate and settle for a mediocre one.

This counts as a failure of an interviewer. Phone interviews will only make this ordeal even harder. So be sure to take ample notes you can reference from later down the process.

7. Ask candidates whether they have any questions 

Phone interviews can often be entirely one-sided as the interviewer is always asking the questions, and the applicants are struggling to find good answers. Candidates usually have questions of their own that may remain unanswered.

If a candidate has unanswered questions and has applied for multiple jobs, there's always a chance you might lose that candidate to someone who has provided those answers for them.

So always ask your candidate if they have any questions and answer them formally to the best of your ability.

8. Inform clearly about the next steps 

Finally, after an interview is over and you have all the information you need, the candidates are the ones who find themselves on uncertain grounds.

Often, they have no idea what the next step after the interview will be and will, therefore, be left hanging until the next phone call or email.

By giving them an overview of your next steps after this interview, you're helping them ease this tension and calculate the approximate time that will take before you can contact them. This shows you have respect for the candidate's values and therefore gains you similar respect from them.

Hope you've enjoyed our guide on how to conduct a phone interview with a candidate and this article helps you in the hr career journey. If you find this helpful, please share it with your colleagues or hr buddies.