Recruiters often use phone screenings as the first step in their hiring process. Many recruiters are starting to use asynchronous interviews — also called on-demand or one-way interviews — to alleviate the need to schedule virtual or face-to-face times to speak with a candidate. This study hopes to identify which days and times gather the most responses when a candidate is invited to conduct a phone interview asynchronously and which outlying times hold significance.
We found that when candidates had the opportunity to complete on-demand phone interviews, the highest response rate was on Wednesdays between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. We also discovered that an on-demand phone interview platform allowed many applicants to respond outside of typical business hours. This flexibility brought in 75.5% percent more responses than typical phone interview hours.
We surveyed 50 businesses — ranging from healthcare to call centers. Each one uses Qualifi, the premier on-demand interview platform for high-volume hiring, to gather and track phone interviews during their hiring process. The data presented in this whitepaper was collected over sixteen months, from January 1, 2021, to May 1, 2022, and shown in Eastern Standard Time. These findings are based on:
This data observation aims to assess the behavioral patterns of candidates being interviewed through Qualifi. Our intent is to determine what times tend to gather the most interview responses and examine notable outlying data points. The purpose of this study is to guide recruiters on their interview choices — such as what time of day to share invites and how that impacts their hiring cycle as a whole.
Several of the key findings in this study revealed that although on-demand phone interviews tend to occur predominantly during business hours and during the traditional Monday through Friday work week, they also occur at notable rates outside of those parameters.
We found that Wednesdays tended to gather the most responses for phone interviews, but many were completed over the weekend as well. While we found that the majority of responses for phone interviews were gathered during typical business hours, it was only by a slim margin, as 43% of interviews were taken outside of these hours in the evening or over the weekend.
Over 16 months, all of the 22,130 completed interviews were documented for each hour, then averaged to reveal:
Qualifi’s on-demand interview platform allows recruiters to enter a candidate’s information, send them pre-recorded interview questions, and enables the candidate to complete an audio-based phone interview at their leisure.
Audio-based interviews are beneficial in several ways, such as helping remove opportunities for bias and helping recruiters make more informed hiring decisions based on qualifications. Recruiters can share that recording with team members, track applicants through the hiring process, rate candidates, and share feedback on the platform.
We created Qualifi because over the last 20 years, many tools and processes have improved, but recruiting was left in the dust with old-fashioned, time-consuming interviews. Most people don’t realize that phone interviews are the biggest bottleneck in the recruiting process.
Back and forth scheduling, meeting coordination, and 20-minute phone screenings with hundreds of candidates quickly add up and can be costly in the competitive world of recruiting. There is an increasing demand for easier ways to schedule interviews. According to Careerbuilder, 41 percent of US employers plan to use text messages to schedule job interviews.
Being able to gather more responses is proven to help your hiring process. When applicant pools are widened without costing recruiters more time, organizations can make faster and better hires. Many recruitment cycles are long, costing your organization time and money every extra day you search for the right candidate instead of benefiting from their skillset.
According to the Jobvite 2017 Recruiting Funnel Benchmark Report, the average time to hire a new employee was 39 days in 2016. Glassdoor found that a phone interview adds between 6.8 and 8.2 days to your recruitment process, higher than background checks, pre-employment tests, or in-person interviews.
We found that 19 hours and 44 minutes is the average response time for a candidate to complete their Qualifi interview — a much faster turnaround compared to traditional phone interviews. Using Qualifi is like hiring another recruiter to work for you overnight and over the weekend. Qualifi expands your recruiting hours and removes the tedious back and forth of scheduling from your role.
When phone interviews are offered at flexible times for the candidate, many interviews are completed outside of the traditional workweek. Our research found that using Qualifi helps recruiters expand their reach without personally working more hours. With Qualifi, interviews are being completed for you around the clock.
We also found that interviews completed during typical business hours tended to occur over lunch breaks. When candidates can answer pre-recorded interview questions independently, they often move through the hiring cycle faster. When candidates also have the flexibility to schedule their interviews, they are often more comfortable and confident.
The flexibility of on-demand interviews allows organizations to broaden their candidate pool and shorten their time-to-hire. Decreasing the time-to-hire helps secure the best candidates before they are offered employment elsewhere. The slower the hiring process the more money and energy an organization spends each day — only to lose the most qualified candidates.
Qualifi is a platform that sends, shares, and tracks phone interviews for recruiters. This speeds up the hiring process and allows recruiters to interview hundreds of candidates in minutes. Using Qualifi, recruiters can send out hundreds of phone interview screening invitations in minutes, gather candidate responses, review, share, give feedback within their hiring team, and hire candidates 7x faster than traditional phone interviews. With Qualifi, recruiters go from struggling to fill roles to becoming talent magnets.
