Hiring teams need a scoring system that helps them evaluate job seekers objectively. Each hiring team member must also share their distinct points of view regarding potential candidates with other interview panelists so they can agree on which candidates deserve job offers.

That’s where an interview scorecard can help.

Why small business recruiting teams use interview scorecards

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte A. Burrows recently noted around five in six employers (83%) screen and rank candidates using recruitment automation.

Investing in recruiting software with automation is essential for your small businesses.

Some hiring automation technology can sort qualified candidates from unqualified candidates. This saves your HR team lots of time they can put back into other core HR and hiring tasks.

However, one activity your small business should not allow your recruitment platform to tackle for you is ranking candidates and deciding which ones to hire.

That’s because the human element of hiring is required to make smart decisions about which high-quality candidates to engage, interview, and extend offers to. 

Rating job seekers is a manual task, but it’s one that can be carried out efficiently with an applicant tracking system (ATS) that offers an interview scorecard:

• Let’s say your hiring team has a structured interviewing process. That means you ask candidates who interview for the same role the same list of questions. This allows you to compare each job seeker in an organized way and remove the potential for hiring bias.
• After speaking with candidates, some SMBs use an interview scoring sheet to rate candidates without providing any context around their rating decision. Others create Microsoft Word or Google docs where they simply jot down their thoughts on job seekers.
• The more streamlined and consistent way to evaluate candidates you engage is to use a candidate scorecard, also known as an interview scorecard.
• Interview scorecards help recruiters, hiring managers, and others who speak with candidates make data-backed hiring decisions and help them stay focused on candidates’ answers to interview questions.
• Instead of determining whether a person is worth hiring based on whether they maintained eye contact during an interview or their personality traits, interview scorecards feature the same criteria for all roles your company fills.

To streamline this process, you can easily use the JazzHR Candidate Scorecard tool to rank job seekers based on a candidate fit in the company culture, their past work experience, and whether their resumes match the job-specific qualifications tied to a role. 

This ensures they make fair and objective hiring decisions based solely on this uniform rating system and data-backed insights shared by hiring team members, not any subjective criteria.

How an interview scorecard can improve your hiring process

Skills-based hiring is on the rise. The approach ensures candidates are assessed and selected based on their expertise and abilities that directly apply for roles they interview for.

To ensure your small business hiring team evaluates and chooses qualified candidates with the required qualifications in a repeatable and consistent way, you need two things:

1. An applicant tracking system (ATS) where you can store all candidate info in dedicated profiles that are easily scannable and accessible to all hiring decision-makers
2. An interview scorecard that is included in your small business ATS software and allows your hiring team to compare candidates in a fair and unbiased manner

Here are three specific benefits of using an ATS with a candidate scorecard.

1) Keeps recruiting structured and removes bias 

“Discussions that lack structure can fail to gain insights into a candidate’s ability to manage responsibilities and excel,” recruitment advisor Sean Fahey wrote for Forbes. “Not only can this leave job seekers with a poor brand experience, but interviewers can also fall victim to confirmation bias.”

However, when your hiring team chats about candidate fit and factor ratings from your interview scorecard in your discussions, you can make smarter, bias-free hiring decisions and ensure all talent you engage for job openings are evaluated using the same criteria.

2) Enables SMBs to make data-backed decisions

A candidate scorecard is a form of data. It provides a numeric grade for each job seeker you speak with that you can use with hiring team feedback to decide which candidates to move to the next stage of your hiring cycle and offer jobs to.

The more hires you make based on the use of an interview scorecard, the more quality-of-hire data you can collect and use to update your SMB’s interviewing approach.

“By correlating your predictions with candidates’ actual performance on the job, you can also get quantitative feedback about your accuracy at assessing different criteria,” executive coach and development consultant Ben Dattner wrote for Harvard Business Review. 

3) Ensures the right candidates are ultimately hired

Your quality-of-hire data may show you make bad hiring decisions from time to time. 

The reality is, even when you use an interview scorecard and a structured hiring process, there will sometimes be candidates who don’t pan out for reasons you couldn’t think of when interviewing them.

However, you’re far more likely to see a strong candidate “hit rate,” as Ben called it, than hire poor-fit employees at your small business when you judge candidates with a fixed scoring system.

Chat with us today to learn about JazzHR’s Candidate Scorecard and take the tour of our powerful small business recruitment software. Schedule a custom ATS demo today.

Secure and take action on candidate feedback

Give candidates an easy way to provide feedback about the job interview process and their own journey. By doing so, you can find out what improvements you should make: from the screen phone interview all the way to the final interview.

By getting insights into each step of your interview process, you’ll not only set yourself apart from other businesses’ hiring processes, but also give yourself a better understanding of where you can stand to improve your approach to different types of interviews and better engage job candidates.

Tasia Duske, CEO, Museum Hack

Start out with a personal anecdote, and be human

I’ve always found that a good interview is typically a two-way street and should be a dialogue rather than an interrogation. Try it. Whether it’s an in-person interview or Zoom chat, you can put your interviewees at ease by starting the discussion off with a personal story. (As opposed to jumping right into the question-and-answer portion when you discuss job requirements.)

This can be about anything just so long as it tells them a little about you as a person. This gives them a starting point in seeing you as a person, rather than the arbiter of their fate with being hired at this company or not. It is a simple way to make the interview experience easier for the interviewee and give them a more positive impression, even if they don’t get the job.

Dragos Badea, CEO, Yarooms

Implement a behavioral interviewing approach

Focus as much as you can on behavioral interview questions, particularly during screening interviews and the initial interview with the hiring manager, to best evaluate each candidates’ work approach.

We all know the best indicator of future performance is experience. The format of behavioral interviews forces candidates to speak specifically about their experiences. This gives the interviewer a clear understanding of how they would perform in the future.

Even if a person is relatively inexperienced, you can ask them behavioral questions on their soft skills and work history to determine if they merit advancement in the process and, eventually, a job offer.

Madhurima Halder, Content Manager, Recruit CRM

Use structured interviews and scorecards

Structured job interviews might sound rigid. But, they do help prevent bias and establish fairer hiring practices. Interview scorecards give you a simple, standardized set of criteria you can easily follow as you ask questions about hard or soft skills, experience, and cultural fit.

Only essential criteria should be included on a scorecard to maximize value, while minimizing time spent during the process. Some candidates may find structured interviews impersonal, so it’s critical to explain the process — and your reasoning for using it — long before the interview takes place.

While some employers are hesitant to send out their scorecards ahead of time, it’s relatively easy to weed out the “fakes” through assessments and references. You’ll give those candidates that might not traditionally interview well the chance to prepare, calm their nerves, and bring a more authentic self to the interview.

Maximilian Wühr, Cgo and Co-founder, FINN

Include open-ended, divergent questions

Our interview process, while thorough, involves open-ended, divergent questions to assess their company fit and soft skills more effectively. These questions focus on opening discussions on workplace matters, such as communication, collaboration, and accountability.

There are no right or wrong answers at this interview stage, and we encourage candidates to speak as honestly as possible. It provides valuable insights into how they handle common issues at work. We set a more conversational tone to make the environment feel more relaxed for the candidates. It promotes a smoother two-way discussion for more genuine responses.

Grant Polachek, Head of Branding, SquadHelp

Keep things fairly simple and straightforward

We put in a lot of effort to improve our job interview processes and hire over 300 people. The two things that helped us the most were simpler job descriptions and interview surveys

A lot of companies like to publish these broad, detailed job descriptions. But, our data shows that this approach overcomplicated the process a lot. Instead, we made our job descriptions simple and direct, where almost every element was advertised as a must-have for the interview process.

This helped improve the quality of our interviews and sped up the entire process.

Surveys were an amazing addition as well, and once we started collecting essential data about our interview process, we could recognize and fill up the gaps and thoroughly improve our processes.

Michael Maximoff, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Belkins

Find out how you can streamline your interview process — and all other elements of your recruiting efforts — with our powerful yet easy-to-use applicant trackings system for small businesses.

Recruiting automation streamlines the recruiting process, taking tedious tasks away from recruiters and freeing them up to do more important tasks like nurturing relationships, promoting the company’s employer brand, and developing more strategic recruiting strategies, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

That’s why smart recruiting teams are incorporating automated recruitment tools into their everyday processes. The recruitment automation solutions available today — like automated job posting and messaging, resume screening, interview scheduling and more — can improve recruiting efficiency without sacrificing hiring quality or the candidate experience.

6 Smart Ways to Apply Recruiting Automation In Your Business

There’s no question that recruiting is a human-focused job. Yet within the scope of the recruiting function, there’s a wide variety of tasks that can benefit from automation. These include the more tedious and repetitive parts of any recruiter’s job description, where automation can be applied to get the job done quickly and efficiently. For example:

#1: Job posting: Using an automated tool, you can automatically distribute job descriptions to hundreds of job boards, from top job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter to targeted boards for specific industries and audiences. You can also customize posting destinations based on specific job attributes to make sure it’s seen by the most relevant candidates. And centralized management of all your job postings means you can edit or update your job postings from one system, across all locations.

#2: Resume screening: Automation makes it easy to find the right skills and experience at scale. With automated resume screening, you can streamline the time-consuming (but necessary) process of reviewing resumes. Automatically ingest resume or profile data into your CRM, review candidate qualifications, collect feedback from internal stakeholders, and capture decisions about whether to advance a candidate to the next stage in the process.

#3: Passive candidate nurturing: Passive candidates represent an incredibly valuable talent pool, but it takes effort to develop them into engaged, active applicants. Recruitment automation lets you nurture passive candidates with automated email or text campaigns to keep them up-to-date on job openings, company news, and other relevant content. These automated communications help keep passive candidates moving toward eventual conversion with minimal effort.

#4: Candidate communications: Automated messaging solutions can be used to streamline a variety of candidate communications: invite candidates to apply for a job, send interview confirmations, answer common questions, deliver personalized rejection letters, and so much more. Automated messaging can be managed through your ATS, allowing recruiters to view every text thread in one place and creating an easily accessible audit trail.

#5: Interview scheduling: Slow, inefficient interview scheduling can cause applicants to lose interest — and while you’re busy juggling schedules, they may already be meeting with your competition. Automated scheduling tools eliminate the tedious process of checking calendars and sending invitations, allowing you to automatically propose interview times, confirm availability, and book meetings. Scheduling changes and unexpected cancellations can be communicated instantly, so neither side is left hanging.

#6: Internal feedback and collaboration: Sharing information within the hiring team is essential to collaborative hiring, but it’s a resource-intensive process when recruiters have to chase down stakeholders for their input. Automated internal communication tools allow hiring managers and other stakeholders to enter feedback on each candidate and store it in a central location, where it’s visible and accessible to the entire team — taking the guesswork out of next steps

What Are the Key Benefits of Recruiting Automation?

No matter how large or small your recruiting team may be, automation lets you turn repetitive manual tasks into a more manageable workload that can easily scale up or down along with your hiring needs. And recruitment automation offers a number of benefits over traditional, manual processes. Here are a few of our favorites:

Free up valuable time: Recruiters spend countless hours on manual, repetitive tasks like posting job openings, screening applicants, and scheduling interviews. While these tasks are necessary to keep the hiring process moving forward, they don’t contribute much to the company’s long-term success. Recruitment automation helps to streamline these time-consuming tasks, so recruiters can focus on the critical, strategic elements of recruiting that require a “human touch.”

Enhance the candidate experience: When talent is tight, keeping candidates happy is critical — and communication is one of the key elements of a great candidate experience. Recruiting automation can help to ensure that every candidate receives consistent, timely communications that put your employer brand front-and-center. Remember, automation won’t remove the “human” element from your hiring process; instead, it can actually create a more personalized, engaging experience for your candidates.

Improve hiring metrics: Performance metrics fall into two main categories: quantitative and qualitative. Recruitment automation tools can help with both sides of the equation. On the quantitative side, automation streamlines the end-to-end hiring process, leading to improve measures like time-to-hire and conversion rate. On the qualitative side, automation reduces friction in the candidate experience, which can help to keep top talent engaged and lead to improved quality-of-hire.

Increase process visibility: Recruiting automation can help to improve transparency throughout the hiring process, keeping teams aligned and ensuring that candidates never get lost in the shuffle. Candidate profiles are managed in a single location, giving recruiters and hiring managers access to details about their current status, communications they’ve received, and next steps in the process.

Reduce unconscious bias: Eliminating bias from the hiring process is difficult because it’s seldom intentional. Recruiting automation can help to reduce unconscious bias by taking the human subjectivity out of tasks like resume review and candidate screening. Some tools even hide personally identifiable information from a candidate’s profile, enabling an unbiased evaluation based entirely on relevant skills and experience.

What Are Potential Challenges of Recruiting Automation?

The benefits of recruiting automation are clear and there are countless ways to use it, but that doesn’t mean the path to adoption will be easy or stress-free. By anticipating the pitfalls you may encounter along the way, you can prepare appropriately and increase your chances of success.

Fear of automation: Among the top challenges of adopting recruitment automation is people’s knee-jerk reaction to the concept. Automation is often depicted as a replacement for the human workforce — and no one wants to feel expendable. The truth is, automation isn’t meant to replace recruiters, but instead to supplements their capabilities by taking over repetitive manual tasks. Show critics how automation can make their work easier — and advance their careers — and they’ll become fans in no time.

Internal adoption: Humans are naturally resistant to change, so successful implementation of any new technology can be a struggle. Start by ensuring that you have buy-in from the top down, to create built-in support and accountability. If possible, recruit your most supportive stakeholders to help champion the initiative. Implement a thorough training program to get everyone off to a great start and celebrate your successes along the way.

Brand and experience concerns: You may face resistance from people who believe automation will make the employer brand feel robotic and sterile, leading to a poor candidate experience. You can reassure those individuals that automation can actually enhance your brand by delivering consistent messaging that’s timely, engaging, and personalized. And because automation leaves recruiters with fewer manual tasks to complete, they can focus their attention on delivering the best possible experience to the most qualified candidates.

Technology integration: Proper integration can be a point of frustration with any technology — but especially one that’s intended to make your life easier. Systems that don’t integrate seamlessly end up creating more work and delays for recruiting teams. So take the time to question your vendor thoroughly on integration capabilities and be sure your IT team is involved in the selection process.

Wondering Where to Start? We Can Help.

The first step in adopting automation is to assess the current state. Look for inefficiencies in your current workflow, then implement automated tools to relieve the burden of those manual tasks. While you may be inspired to apply automation throughout the hiring process, it’s easier to monitor results if you stick to automating one thing at a time.

Be sure to look at common metrics like conversion rate and time-to-hire, then set goals to measure how automation impacts recruiting performance. And don’t forget to review your results periodically to see where you’re making progress — and where there’s still room to improve.

When you’re ready to get started, JazzHR offers leading recruiting automation solutions to help you streamline the recruiting process and take your hiring to the next level. Contact us to learn more or view our blog for new recruiting trends and insights.

To get the most out of all of your hiring tools, it’s important to use their best practices. For a video interviewing platform specifically, those benefits include creating a modern, personalized, and more efficient hiring process. With Spark Hire’s 8+ years providing video interviewing software, we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the unprofessional when it comes to video interviews. Follow these 10 tips to optimize your virtual hiring.

1. Test your setup

When inviting candidates to a live interview, or recording a video message for one or many candidates, it’s crucial to test your setup. For best results, hard-wire your device to the internet. Alternatively, get as close to your router as possible.

For lighting, make sure your dominant source of light is in front of you.

Positioning yourself in front of your light source results in a you-shaped shadow taking over your video! Next, be aware of your background. Look for space that provides a neutral, professional background free of distractions. Last, control the sound in your video by making sure you know where your microphone is located on your device. This ensures you won’t cover it up if holding your device and you know where to direct your voice to be more effectively heard. Control the sound for your video by setting up in a room that has a door to be closed, or is away from others.

2. Provide a detailed explanation for candidates on how to use technology

Point candidates towards helpful resources like a candidate bootcamp, technical support, and other resources provided by your video interviewing platform. These resources let your candidates prepare and research the video interviewing process until they’re comfortable, rather than being limited to the information you have time to provide. Doing so helps your candidates feel confident in their ability to complete your process.

3. Prepare questions ahead of time

Whether you’re running a live or one-way interview, be sure you and your team determine quality questions from the start. These questions should be based on concrete job qualifications and consistent for every candidate. Creating a structured interview process allows you to compare each candidate more objectively to one another, resulting in an increase in unbiased hiring decisions.

4. Use a live interview concierge

If provided by your video interviewing platform, take full advantage of their technical support offerings with a live interview concierge. This gives you an opportunity to triple check your technology, surroundings, and connection for a seamless live interview experience with candidates. Concierges are also offered to candidates, ensuring the process is a success on both sides of the recruiting equation.

5. Dress as you would for an in-person interview

Remember video interviews often take place before a candidate has a chance to meet you in person. This means your video interactions set the tone for your personal and employer brand.

So treat this interview as you would an in-person interview and dress professionally from head to toe.

Not only will this impress candidates and show them you’re serious about their interview and the opportunity, it keeps you in a professional mindset and less likely to stray from your structured interview questions.

6. Complete up-to-date conscious and unconscious bias training

One of the concerns of video interviews is one of accidental bias creeping into your process. Like with any other hiring technique, it is imperative to attend or provide training for your hiring team on conscious and unconscious bias to avoid any candidate discrimination. By focusing on job-related skills and qualifications for all candidates you interview.

7. Communicate the whole hiring process to candidates in multiple places

Provide your candidate with a clear and transparent timeline of your hiring process so they feel comfortable moving forward with it. The best places to outline your process is on your careers page before candidates have applied to your open positions, as well as in an auto-responder email thanking candidates for their application. You can further provide peace of mind to candidates by notifying them at the end of every stage with an estimation of when you anticipate moving to the next phase of your selection process.

8. Create accountability/deadlines for interviews to be reviewed

To avoid dragging out the hiring process, implement hard deadlines for your team to review interviews. For our team, this means candidates’ one-way video interviews should be reviewed within one business day of their completion. This keeps the hiring team accountable to the timeline provided to candidates and allows the process to move rapidly. 

9. Use an interview scorecard

Along with bias training and a structured interview format, interview scorecards allow every interview evaluator to focus on the relevant skills and expertise needed to fulfill the role. By rating each candidate on their abilities for the job qualifications, you have a documented method for comparing candidates with seemingly different backgrounds and skills to the role.

10. Integrate hiring tools

No matter what’s included in your HR tech stack, the ability to integrate your hiring, interviewing, and onboarding in the same place allows your team to work efficiently. A hiring platform like JazzHR helps build the whole hiring process so decision-makers at each stage get notified when their feedback is needed. When the hiring platform syncs with your video interviewing solution, hiring managers respond even quicker to completed candidate interviews.

The importance of getting this stage of the hiring process right can’t be overstated. A poor interview process can have a significant impact on how candidates view your brand:

• 83% of candidates say that an unimpressive interview can change their mind about the job and the employer [LinkedIn]
• 60% of applicants never hear back from employers after interviewing [Human Capital Institute]

During the webinar, Corey and Kelly shared the ins and outs of building an effective interview process, including how to create a positive candidate experience during this key stage of the recruiting funnel. Areas of focus included:

• Creating a better candidate experience from the beginning
• How to find the right mix of interview stages
• How to prepare your hiring teams
• How to start and close a great interview
• How to capture actionable feedback

During the discussion, our audience members raised a number of relevant points. Here are our answers to their top questions:

I work for a career development program, and we recruit every semester. For Spring 2021, we’re looking to recruit 200+ people. So for high-volume recruitment, what are some tips you have to ensure we provide the best experience for all candidates getting into our program?

Providing a positive candidate experience during high-volume hiring starts with the rights tools. Leverage technology that allows you to automate your candidate communications while enabling you to put a human touch on each interaction.

By automating these communications (e.g. emails and text messages), you’ll lighten the load for yourself and your team. In turn, you’ll be able to spend more time on strategic recruiting activities, including more personalized messages with engaged candidates.

Resources:

• The High-Volume Hiring Toolkit: Maintaining Quality as You Scale
• Solis Mammography Case Study

We recently had several positions attract over 400 candidates. I’m our company’s only recruiter; giving feedback to each one who asked for feedback is daunting. Any suggestions?

You’re not alone—responding to a large group of applicants can seem overwhelming. And responding individually to hundreds simply isn’t realistic.

Instead, focus on creating a more targeted candidate poll with additional screening throughout your process. Tools like Knockout Questions, questionnaires, and assessments allow you to gather information from candidates without having to schedule an interaction. Once completed, you’ll be able to review the results on your own time and move candidates into targeted Workflow Stages based on their answers.

If you engage with a candidate who did well on your Knockout Questions and questionnaire, but wasn’t a fit based on his/her assessment, move this person to a descriptive disposition (e.g. “Potential Future Hire”) and create automated email feedback based on this outcome. Build multiple dispositions like this one to integrate automatic responses into your pipeline.

Resources:

• An Empathetic Applicant Experience Starts with Automation
• How to Automate Your Recruitment Process

It feels straightforward to tell someone you’re moving on with other candidates if the person isn’t qualified or isn’t as experienced, etc. But if you’ve narrowed your field down to, say, five people, and you really, really like all five, what are the best practices for communicating with the four great candidates you ultimately didn’t choose?

This is a situation every HR professional has faced, and it’s never easy. First and foremost, reinforce that it was a difficult decision. Let them know how much the team enjoyed learning more about them as a candidate and that you hope they’ll keep your company in mind.

If you feel comfortable doing so (and your policy allows) you may also consider citing whatever differentiator ultimately “broke the tie” between the candidates. Providing this feedback in a professional way will help the person progress in their candidacy for other positions. 

Resources:

• The Complete Guide to Building an Inclusive Recruitment Process

If the job seeker doesn’t complete the assessment, how would you be able to go onward with deciding on whether to interview them or not?

Candidates may sometimes need a gentle nudge or reminder to complete an assessment. If a candidate doesn’t complete an assessment in a timely fashion, a safe rule is to remind them one time. This is important to ensure the candidate has actually received the email.

If they still haven’t completed the assessment after a reminder, this is often an indicator of a lack of interest in the position. Rather than continuing to reach out to disengaged candidates, move on and focus your efforts on more active candidates in your pipeline.

Resources:

• Recruitment Text Message Templates
• Candidate Experience vs Candidate Engagement: What’s the Difference?

In my organization, the recruiter schedules the interviews for the hiring manager. Is this the best candidate experience? The recruiter then needs the hiring manager’s schedule (and the candidate’s) and becomes the middle person. How do you recommend handling this process?

This strategy works well because it gives the candidate a primary point of contact in the event something goes wrong. It also gives the hiring manager someone (the recruiter) who can run interference if they’re running behind during the interview itself.

There are definitely benefits to automating this, though. With tools like Calendly, candidates can enjoy some flexibility in autonomously scheduling and rescheduling their own interviews.

Before automating this process, though, be sure to connect with the hiring manager directly. Some may prefer to schedule manually while others will embrace the automation.

Resources:

• Empower Your Team to Be As Productive As You With Calendly for Teams

What are your thoughts on live coding versus technical assessments/homework that candidates complete to be qualified for the next step of the interview process?

Each of these assessment approaches can provide value depending on what your team is looking for and their working style.

When we hire for technical roles at JazzHR, for example, our team usually provides the technical assessment (a coding challenge) after the original resume review. This helps make the most of both the team’s and candidate’s time by ensuring we have a strong sense of the candidate’s technical abilities before scheduling virtual meetings with the team.

Talk with your team, hiring managers, and leadership to understand the goals of each assessment. Then, choose a targeted solution based on your objectives and incorporate it into your process accordingly.

Resources:

• 4 Reasons to Add Pre-Employment Assessments to Your Hiring Process
• JazzHR Marketplace Assessments 

I work for a company that targets mainly high school to early college students. A problem we encounter is the responsiveness to our Calendly invites. Do you have any insight on how to increase candidate responsiveness in a world where younger generations are not apt to always check their emails for interview invites?

The best way to engage unresponsive candidates, especially if they’re part of the younger generation, is through recruitment text messages. Reaching these candidates where they are most often—their phones—is the best way to get their attention, decrease response time, and ultimately reduces your time-to-hire.

While not ideal for every single communication, texts are perfect for quick follow-ups, reminders, and scheduling interviews. Include a Calendly link, for example, within a text message to both accelerate and automate the entire interview process.

Resources:

• 5 Best Practices for Texting Candidates
• Best Practices for Sharing Your Calendly Link

Do you recommend any type of funnel for candidates that you haven’t selected? I work in a high-burnout field. It is pretty common for people to change jobs every couple of years. Is it worth keeping good candidates that you weren’t able to select on a mailing list or directing them to content to build your brand so that they want to reach back out in the future?

Absolutely! Taking a marketer’s approach to your recruitment funnel is key to building an effective employer brand and standing out from the competition. Nurture candidates (whether you move forward with them or not) as you would business prospects.

Keep those who you identify as great potential future hires in a targeted bucket and consider communicating with them via a drip campaign. The intent is to keep them aware of what’s going on with your company so when the time is right for both you and the candidate, they think of you first.

Resources:

• Recruitment Marketing Email Templates
• 3 Overlooked Parallels Between HR and Marketing

I am curious about any additional recommendations for small teams. We are a team of 2 and it can sometimes be overwhelming recruiting, managing the candidate experience, managing the ATS, communicating with hiring managers and candidates, etc, etc. Our company is 70+ and actively hiring for 15+ roles.

As a small team, maximizing your reach starts with having the right tools in place. Choosing solutions that can be easily integrated, like JazzHR and Calendly, can be an efficiency gamechanger for you and your team. Once you have your technology in place, be sure to establish replicable processes to standardize expectations and ensure alignment across all team members.

Resources:

• Talent Acquisition Technology Buyer’s Guide

What’s the best way to train my team on interview best practices?

Establishing a set of guidelines and standards for your interview team to reference anytime is key to repeatable success. And thankfully, the team at Calendly has made it easy with a training framework!

Access their expert-approved training template here.

‘I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years, we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently.’ – Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

Zuckerberg isn’t the only CEO predicting a shift in workplace culture. Businesses across the globe have had to adapt their ways of working in response to COVID-19. Some have done so as a temporary measure, others as a more permanent shift.

Whether temporary or not, today’s HR teams are hiring remotely, and many are looking for new interviewing techniques for managers. Understanding a candidate’s cultural fit is one such challenge, and if you get it wrong, it’ll cost you. According to The Society for Human Resources Management, the result of poor culture fit due to turnover can cost an organization between 50 to 60 percent of the person’s annual salary.

Here are a few interviewing techniques for managers to help your team find the best-fit candidate, regardless of whether you hire remotely or not.

3 Interviewing Techniques for Managers

1. Ask the Right Questions

Finding candidates whose values, behaviors, qualifications, and ethics align with your organization is a hiring manager’s biggest obstacle. That’s especially true if you never get to meet a candidate in person.

Armed with the right questions, however, you can begin to paint a comprehensive picture of each candidate. Here are a few culture-focused interviewing techniques for managers to include in your interview process:

• What gets you excited about coming to work?
• What surprises people about you?
• How could a manager best support you?
• What motivates you to do your best work?
• How do you manage conflict with coworkers?

These questions aren’t designed to understand skillsets or past work experience. Instead, questions like these help uncover how a candidate will respond to certain workplace pressures, how they approach their work, and what intrinsic factors will help drive their engagement with your business.

2. Involve More Than Your Hiring Team

Diversity of thought is one of your greatest assets. It allows you to gather a consensus about a candidate’s fit not just within a department, but across the entire business.

According to LinkedIn, however, only 35 percent of companies ensure they have a diverse interview panel when hiring. If you want a clear picture of a candidate’s culture fit with your business, be sure to include people from all corners of the business throughout the application process. When prepping your team for screening, be sure to convey these interviewing techniques for managers.

3. Perform Reference Checks

Reference checks are more than just a formality. They’re an excellent way to gather real-world testimonies about a candidate’s character and personality.

Testimonies aren’t to be relied on by themselves, however. Instead, use reference checks as a way to confirm your internal assessment of a candidate’s organizational fit. This will offer reassurance when it comes to making a final decision.

Informal meet ups aren’t out of the question

Work-from-home policies at many businesses are extending into September and beyond, according to the New York Times. And rightly so.

If you’re still unsure about a candidate’s culture fit after reviewing these interviewing techniques for managers, remember that informal meet-ups are still an option (if you do meet up in person, be sure to keep social distancing in mind). This is a great way to help hiring teams gather that important ‘gut feeling’ about a candidate’s fit at the business, which can be easily lost over a webcam. Ultimately, it’s this ‘feeling’ that matters most when it comes to considering culture fit, and it’s what will save your business from a bad hire.

If you have an open position at your company, you’ll want to hire the best person for the job. Interviews are an important part of determining whether a candidate will be a good fit, but they can only do so much.

If you rely on interviewing alone, you increase your chances of making a poor hire. According to Career Builder, bad hires cost companies a whopping $14,900 each. 

• This is why pre-employment tests are so important. With these assessments, you can properly gauge candidates’ skills and check that they are aligned with what you’re looking for.

Pre-employment tests also reduce unconscious bias and the chance that you’ll base your decisions on your own subjective perceptions. Instead, they provide objective results on which to make a choice. 

The pros of pre-employment tests

There are numerous benefits to pre-employment tests. Aside from helping you make an objective decision, they also have a host of other advantages. Two reasons to conduct pre-employment tests today are they:

• 1) Shorten the hiring process: If a candidate doesn’t do well in your pre-employment test, you can take that person off your list immediately and move on to other candidates. 
• 2) Test an applicant’s personality and attitude: Pre-employment tests aren’t only for assessing particular role-based skills. You can also use them to assess personality and attitude, helping you to determine whether the candidate will fit well with your company’s culture.

In other words, pre-employment tests complement traditional interviews and allow you to make a more informed choice about who should be extended offers and hired for a role that is complex in nature.

4 types of pre-employment tests

Now that you know the benefits you can get from pre-employment tests, let’s look at four effective types of assessments you can use when interviewing top talent for job openings in the future.

1) Job knowledge tests

Job knowledge tests allow candidates to prove they are capable of the tasks a role requires. For a job on your Finance team, you could assess a person’s ability to prepare balance sheets and budget reports.

These tests should be timed. Depending on the task, anything from 15 to 45 minutes is a good timeframe for this kind of pre-employment test. Use an employee time clock software to time every candidate’s test. 

2) Integrity tests

Integrity tests assess a candidate’s ethics and character. They can be particularly useful for jobs that might involve negotiating difficult situations or ethical dilemmas. 

• The questions in integrity tests are usually situation-based.

Examples might include asking candidates what they would do if a manager assigned them a task that violated company policy, or how they would respond if a client asked them to do something illegal.

You can also ask other less situation-based questions, such as asking about their core values and best personal qualities. The idea is to see whether or not your candidate possesses the principles and character you need the post-holder to have.

3) Personality tests

Personality tests allow you to determine whether a candidate has the attitude that will enable them to do well in your company. Different personality types do well in different roles.

While you should try not to have too many preconceptions about personality types, you probably have a good idea of the attributes the post-holder will need to excel in their position.

Some examples of these types of tests are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Caliper Profile, and the DISC assessment. Choose the one that makes the most sense for your company and the role.

The candidate’s results will help predict their workplace behavior if they’re hired.

4) Emotional intelligence tests

These are also pre-employment tests that assess how a candidate builds relationships with colleagues and customers and resolves conflict on the job. They allow you to test the following attributes: 

• Teamwork: Is the candidate able to work well with other people?
• Empathy: Does the candidate understand and care for other people’s feelings? 
• Adaptability: Can the candidate respond effectively to a range of different situations? 

Candidates who score highly in emotional intelligence tests are more likely to maintain strong relationships with coworkers, be more collaborative, and cause less conflict. Emotional intelligence tests reduce the likelihood you’ll have to deal with an employee complaint against a candidate if you hire them.

Administering pre-employment tests

Pre-employment tests should be part of your talent acquisition strategy if you want to make sure you hire the best person for each role. They give you insights that an interview alone simply cannot. 

• Of course, not all test types will be appropriate for all roles. Only use ones that will truly help you assess the skills and competencies that are necessary for the job you’re trying to fill. 

If you complement pre-employment tests with a robust resume screening and interview process (and, really, a well-run recruitment cycle), you’ll get a more accurate and fully rounded picture of each candidate.

From there, you can more capably decide who will excel at your company and who likely won’t.

Screen smarter and interview more efficiently with our powerful recruiting software for small businesses. Schedule a JazzHR demo today to learn all about our award-winning applicant tracking system.

2020 has been one of the most challenging years our country’s had to face. No employer could have possibly guessed what awaited them three months into the year with a global pandemic shocking the economy. Many companies have had to make serious changes to adapt to this new reality. Compared to last year, when the U.S’s unemployment rate was at a record low, our unemployment rate is now at a record high resulting in an influx of people seeking jobs. Talent acquisition teams across all industries have had to adjust, but with hiring volumes picking back up and job creation on the rise, now is the perfect time to reevaluate and build your team to meet your new needs and expectations.

A year ago, when a recruiter posted about a job on their company’s career page, they would receive very little activity. Now, if a recruiter posts about a position, they can expect hundreds of applications in the first week. Even though there are many more applicants than last year, it doesn’t make the hiring process any easier – maybe even the opposite. Recruiters need to be more diligent than ever before to ensure their hiring process results in hiring quality candidates. But it doesn’t have to fall solely on the recruiting team to come up with a strong interview process. Lean on your hiring managers, the interview panel, and the leadership team to define, align, and decide who makes the ideal candidate to join your company!

Getting prepared for a long string of interviews requires planning and preparation. Use this step by step guide and to increase the quality in your recruiting program!

Get started by creating a full job profile

When a hiring manager reaches out to the recruitment team to get a job filled, ensure the position is thoroughly defined and well thought out. Ask the hiring manager for their present and future needs for this role.

A complete job profile consists of 3 components:

• Job description
• Interview plan
• 30-60-90 day plan for the hire

Empower the hiring manager to write the job description, not the recruiter. The hiring manager knows better than anyone else which gaps need to be filled on the team, and where the new hire can step in and add value. I start by telling the hiring managers to write a list of bullet points of key responsibilities. Then I have the recruiting team take it from there to add language around the company culture and audit the job description for any biases such as gender or age bias.

From there, ask the manager to build an interview plan. An interview plan guides the interviewer through the interview process. They can focus on specific areas to ensure they’re asking relevant questions pertaining to the role. This could range from honing in on technical skills, behavioral problem solving, or exploring the candidate’s alignment to the company’s core values. Having each interviewer focus on 2-3 core topics allows them to peel back the onion and extract more detail rather than only staying surface level in their questioning.

The last component of a job profile is the 30-60-90 day plan. Candidates want to know what their first 90 days will look like in their new role. Making sure your recruitment team has this information upfront enables the recruiter to begin setting expectations from the get-go.

Host an interview kickoff

Before the interview team meets the candidates, get all the interviewees together for a kickoff. The hiring manager leads the meeting and goes over what they are looking for in their ideal candidate. This is also an opportunity for the interview team to ask questions, debate, and align. Not aligning before meeting candidates could cause the time to fill metric to extend because the interviewers may end up calibrating as they go in real-time versus being prepared in advance.

Taking the 20 minutes, in the beginning, to talk about the ideal candidate for this role will save your team weeks, even months, on the back end.

Consistency with each candidate’s experience is a must

Make it standard practice for all candidates to speak with a recruiter before talking to the hiring team. The recruiter can touch on basic parameters like salary and career expectations, alignment to the company’s values, and basic fit.

From the recruiter stage, impress upon the interview team to be consistent with the number of steps, the people they meet, the topics covered, and the applicant’s assignments. This will keep bias and unfair treatment out of the interview process altogether. Not allowing variables to enter the interview process will keep all candidates an equal playing field.

Gather evaluation feedback

Make it a habit to add a short 15 minute period for the interviewer to write notes and submit evaluations about each interview. An evaluation helps the interviewer and recruitment team keep track of potential new hires and assure that the feedback stays objective. I’ve had interviewers mix up candidates before because they weren’t keeping track of their notes.

Most applicant tracking systems, like JazzHR, will have the ability to create customized evaluations.

Host a roundtable discussion

After everyone meets a candidate, gather the interview team together to share feedback. Giving everyone a voice empowers the team to bring different perspectives to the table. To prevent groupthink, ask individual contributors to share first and then work your way up the management chain. If a leader were to share their feedback first, you might find junior-level interviewers swaying their opinion to appease the leader.

Set the tone that different views are welcomed. At the end of the day, it’s up to the hiring manager to decide if the candidate is hirable based on what they gathered in a roundtable. A skills gap identified doesn’t necessarily disqualify a candidate. The hiring manager may decide that a particular skill is coachable and that their other skills outweigh what the candidate doesn’t possess.

Make a firm decision

I always tell recruiting teams to use the motto, “so so equals no.” If your interview team has doubts about a candidate and the only reason they want to make the hire is that they are tired of interviewing, it’s best to pass. Waffling back and forth to convince yourself that the candidate meets the criteria is a slippery slope to compromising quality. Be respectful and pass so the candidate can continue their job search without being strung along by your company.

When hiring quality candidates – always remember – a good process shall set you free. Find consistency in your recruiting program, hold the hiring managers accountable for their part, and don’t compromise when interviewing fatigue sets in.  Recruiters have one of the most critical jobs in the organization. The people you hire today build the company for tomorrow.

About the Author

Christina Wells is the VP, People at PLANOLY, and a loyal JazzHR customer and enthusiast. She is a regular contributor to the FloRecruit blog and more. Connect with her about recruiting, human resources, and learning & development best practices on Linkedin.

Most businesses can’t afford to make the wrong decision, though—the US Department of Labor puts the cost of a poor-quality hire at 30% of their salary. ‘Hiring with confidence’ is easier said than done, but it’s very possible with the right processes.

With an unstable economy on the immediate horizon and a candidate pool that’s larger than normal, now’s the time to give your screening and assessment methods some attention. With so much talent available, it’s crucial to be able to identify the best-fit candidate when you see them.

5 highly effective candidate screening methods

Investing now will save you time and effort once you open roles back up. Here’s how you can go about screening candidates more effectively throughout your recruiting funnel and in each hiring cycle.

1) Resume screening

Professional recruiters spend an average of six seconds looking at a resume. That’s not always enough time to determine whether or not the person behind the document is the best-fit hire.

Instead, consider leveraging technology to take a closer look at each resume in an automated way. Screening solutions, for example, enable you to filter candidates by pre-set minimum requirements and filter out those who don’t meet them.

Rather than manually discarding hundreds of resumes that clearly don’t fit the bill, these tools enable you to translate your ideal criteria into a shortlist of candidates that are qualified for the position on paper.

• With technology like an applicant tracking system (ATS) in place, you’ll have a seamless way to organize, rank, and assess swathes of applicants.

Still, only some employers are currently leveraging this technology. As a result, they’re likely leaving a ton of talent on the table. Without these tools, there’s no effective way to work through a high-volume pool of applications. Using an ATS gives you a major edge as a recruiter, while also letting you access the latest influx of talent as a result of COVID-19 unemployment.

And remember, the initial setup is important – the software is only as unbiased as the criteria you set. Platforms that highlight their commitment to inclusivity help you build a diverse team that could see your business safely through a recession.

2) Pre-employment assessments

Using technology to streamline the initial resume screening process is guaranteed to save you a massive amount of time. With the job market now flooded with candidates, though, you might still find yourself with hundreds of resumes to contend with.

A pre-employment assessment platform can help to chip away at that mountain of applications. The right assessment tool will deliver skills, personality, and emotional intelligence tests at scale. Best of all, these also result in a ranked list of candidates once they’re complete.

If you’re automating these assessments, it’s also important to choose a provider that continuously evaluates their own tests for validity, and backs them with research.

3) Hands-on assessments

Automation can do a lot of the legwork for recruiters, but once you’ve got a more manageable list of candidates, it’s a good idea to take a more active role in the assessment process.

The ‘right assessment’ will vary depending on the position you’re trying to fill. You can learn all about some of the most common testing methods implemented by talent teams today in our blog post on the subject.

• Ideally, a few of these methods should be used alongside one another to provide a comprehensive picture of an applicant’s abilities.

While it can be helpful to have an ‘ideal candidate’ in mind, don’t be too rigid about it.

It’s important to use assessments not just to eliminate those that aren’t right for the job, but also to look at an applicant’s transferable abilities so you can identify areas for training and development.

Applicants don’t have static skill sets. You can help them grow once they’ve been hired.

4) Background checks

Trust is an important factor in the hiring process. As a result, many businesses choose to perform background checks on candidates in order to make the most informed hire possible.

Look for a provider that is certified by the Professional Background Screening Association (PBSA), and that can perform the essential checks in one place to avoid confusion.

You’ll also want to follow up with any references provided as part of the application.

5) Structured interviews

Once you’ve significantly narrowed your options, invite candidates for an interview.

The average vacancy sees just 2% of applicants reach the interview stage, so if you’ve done your screening, testing, and checking right, you should only have your talent pool narrowed down to a few highly qualified people.

• If not, consider an additional screening step like a one-way video interview. These allow you to ask candidates a set of predetermined questions and view their responses on your own time.

Beyond one-way video interviews, the COVID-19 pandemic has made remote interviews a must overall. If you haven’t already, invest in a video interviewing software to remain flexible and compliant with safety regulations.

Whatever the medium, it’s important to create as diverse an interviewing panel as possible, prepare questions ahead of time, and standardize the note-taking and evaluation process.

Screening candidates effectively requires the right approach

The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 300 million jobs have been lost worldwide as a result of the recent pandemic. That’s a huge number of talented people waiting to help your organization weather the coming economic instability.

A screening and assessment process that blends unbiased automation and thorough, relevant testing will help you cut thousands of applicants down to the best three or four for the job. Get evaluations right, and you’ll make quality hires with confidence.

Enhance your candidate screening and evaluation efforts with JazzHR. Book a demo with our team today to learn all about the powerful yet easy-to-use capabilities of our ATS for small businesses.

Thankfully, there are best practices for cutting through the noise of interviews and evaluating what really matters about a candidate. Here’s how to nail the post-interview assessment.

• Reconnect with your priorities

Some of the most important work that goes into a successful post-interview assessment should be set up before the interview itself takes place.

What’s essential to the role you’re trying to fill? Decide on the attributes that are non-negotiable, and prioritize them. Be as explicit about them as possible and ask valuable, relevant questions – and take focused interview notes. Once the interview’s done, it’s then a matter of deciding whether or not the candidate meets those priority criteria.

• Rate them against your benchmarks

It’s useful to have something that’s easily digestible for all of the decision-makers involved in the hiring process. A rating system is one of the simplest ways to break down a candidate’s skillset and compare them to other applicants.

Rate candidates on the crucial skills you’ve identified, and take an average. If some are far below that average, they may not be right for the job. If some are on the same level, get more granular and look at their scores for individual skills, diving into interview notes for more context. It’s an approach that streamlines the selection process without sacrificing detail and nuance when it’s required. When it comes to determining things like culture fit and personability, the ability to dive into more detail will pay off.

• Centralize your feedback

If there’s more than one person involved in the hiring and interview process (and there should be), it’s crucial that interview notes, ratings, and recommendations are gathered in a centralized document or platform. Failing to do so can result in disorganization and delays that could cause as many as 66 percent of candidates to move on to new opportunities.

Applicant tracking software (ATS) is built for this exact purpose. It’s a tool designed to gather and manage job advertisements and candidates in one place, and it’s worth considering when improving your post-interview assessments.

• Counter bias as a team

We all have conscious and unconscious biases, which has to be accounted for in the hiring process – never more so than when considering ‘culture fit’.

The post-interview assessment process must be a collaborative, transparent effort shared by as diverse a group as possible. One person may not think a candidate was friendly or qualified enough, and another might think the opposite. The aim is that non-role-related opinions will be balanced out with teamwork.

You want to make a fair judgment. However, bias can skew your assessments and open your organization to the risk of hefty discrimination lawsuits. With a diverse recruitment team and a centralized paper-trail for your assessment process, you are better able to counteract bias.

Making a confident hire

The post-interview assessment is a tricky one. It has to be timely, fair, and thorough all at once. Even if you get everything right, it can still leave you with some uncertainty. That’s normal. With the processes mentioned above, you can remain confident that you’ve done your due diligence and made the best decision possible for your business. Then, the onboarding begins.