Telephone Interview Advantages

It’s hard to remember a time when phone interviews weren’t standard for screening candidates. More and more companies interview candidates over the phone every year. And it’s no wonder when you look at the phone interview pros and cons.

Let’s look at the telephone interview advantages first.

• Eliminate distance - In business today, many roles are remote. As such, employers have access to a vast labor pool. However, that is only if they’re able to reach remote candidates. As such, telephone interviews are great for eliminating the distance between employers and candidates, allowing the employer access to candidates beyond their immediate area.
  
  
• Calm interview anxiety - Everyone has experienced interview anxiety at some point in their life. For many, this stems from the visual component of the interview. Phone interviews relieve this anxiety and allow participants to focus on what they need to say.
  
  
• Shorter interviews - This could be considered a pro or a con depending on how you view it. However, phone interviews are certainly shorter on average than in-person interviews. That means recruiters can screen more candidates daily to find the right person for the job.
  
  
• Lower costs - In addition to saving time, a phone interview saves money when compared to face-to-face interviews. An effective phone interview helps recruiters reduce their time-to-hire while saving the candidate transportation costs.
  
  
• Flexibility - Phone interviews, especially on-demand phone interviews, grant a great degree of flexibility for both the candidate and the recruiter. Scheduling an in-person interview is a costly and time-consuming endeavor that requires both parties to schedule large portions of their day. A phone interview, however, takes far less planning and can even be set up to be asynchronous to make it convenient for both parties.
  
  
• Mitigate bias - The unfortunate side effect of in-person and video interviews is that the recruiting process can fall under the influence of unconscious bias. As such, many businesses struggle to create a fair and balanced hiring process. Phone interviews eliminate visuals and therefore mitigate recruiter bias by eliminating visuals — the source of many biases.

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And these are only a handful of the advantages of phone interviews that we’re going to look at today. Regarding drawbacks, the shorter interview process and nonvisual aspect of these interviews can make it difficult to build rapport.

What is a Telephone Interview?

As we’ve discussed, many businesses have shifted to phone interviews as their standard interview medium. The last few years have created radical change across industries and in our personal lives. The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed over the edge to a world of remote work and software solutions. Although the pandemic is rapidly retreating in our collective rear mirror, the effects are expected to continue.

As such, many businesses rarely conduct screening interviews in-person anymore. They rather opt for solutions such as on-demand phone interviews to remain competitive in the modern, remote labor market. It allows recruiters to conduct the initial screening interview quickly and efficiently without struggling with, according to Yello, the 30 minutes to 2 hours it takes to schedule an interview.

But, what exactly is a phone interview? In essence, a telephone interview is any phone call where the recruiter can determine if a candidate is qualified to move on to the next stage of the hiring process. With on-demand phone interviews, you offer an interview experience that allows the candidate to respond at a time convenient while also allowing the recruiter to review answers whenever works best for them.

And that’s the long and short of what a telephone interview is. It’s simply an easier and more efficient way to screen candidates. And with on-demand interviews, all you need to do is record the recruiter's end of the interview. That is delivered to the candidate, and the candidate returns to their interview when it works best for them. Utilizing an on-demand phone interview platform like Qualifi simplifies this process and allows you to easily standardize your phone interviews for a better and faster-recruiting process.

Advantages of Phone Interviews

Again, as we’ve discussed, there are many advantages of phone interviews. The foremost of these, which we will discuss here, is their capacity for high-volume hiring and accessibility. These are particularly useful to businesses that frequently face high turnover rates and accessibility issues in their hiring process. Phone interviews offer a solution to both.

Up to 65% of companies face high-volume hiring demands. These businesses include restaurants, healthcare, and call centers. All of these are frequently hiring more and more employees to cover their turnover. This is where phone interviews set up for high-volume hiring come in. An on-demand phone interview platform like Qualifi can allow you to screen more candidates than ever before and automate the most tedious parts of the hiring process such as scheduling. This enables even small hiring teams to handle large candidate pipelines and consistently hire the best talent to cover potentially hundreds of open positions.

Then there’s the matter of accessibility. A candidate cannot engage in your hiring process if they lack the ability to do so. Not everyone owns a webcam or can spare the time to interview in the middle of the business day when they already have a busy schedule. Phone interviews help circumvent this challenge. Roughly 97% of Americans own a cell phone, and that means almost 97% of Americans can access a phone interview.

Video Interviews vs. Phone Interviews

If you’re an experienced recruiter, you’re well aware of the existence of video interviews and how they offer similar benefits to phone interviews. Which brings us to the question, what is better when we consider video interviews vs. phone interviews?

Well, let’s first take a look at what they both have in common.

Both maintain a human connection in an asynchronous hiring process as they both allow your team to apply tone and brand voice to your interviews. And then, in terms of consistency, both on-demand methods require pre-recorded questions. As such, each candidate receives the exact same interview, which gives everyone an equal opportunity.

However, the similarities end there. Through closer analysis, we find that video interviews consistently fail to measure up to phone interviews.

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• Bias Mitigation - Video interviews share the same problem regarding bias in the hiring process as in-person interviews. This is a visual medium after all. Phone interviews, on the other hand, remove the visual element entirely from the screening process.
  
• Accessibility - As we’ve discussed, most Americans own some form of a cell phone. That makes phone interviews incredibly accessible to almost everyone. Contrast this with video interviews which require candidates to have access to a quiet space to have the interview, a camera, and a suitable microphone.
  
  
• Speed - A phone interview platform like Qualifi allows recruiters to send out mass invites, gather and responses simultaneously. Recruiters can interview while they sleep, and even filter answers by relevant keywords. This makes the overall process incredibly fast - unlike video interviews that require time-consuming manual review.
  
  
• High-volume hiring - With speed and accessibility comes a tool suited for high-volume hiring. And as we’ve established, video interviews are not that tool.

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