Hiring Step #5: Telephone Screening Interviews, page 107.
- Let’s pretend:
- You posted an ad for a job and received 50 resumes.
- You sent 30 candidates Career History Forms.
- You received 20 back along with their Topgrading Snapshots.
- You analyzed 20 Topgrading Snapshots in 15 minutes and cut the 20 to 5 candidates.
- You studied the Career History Forms of the remaining 5 candidates, and rejected 2 more, leaving 3 excellent-appearing candidates.
- If you invite the three candidates in for face-to-face interviews, you could spend hours with poor candidates who could have been screened out in a few minutes on the phone.
- So the skill to learn is how to conduct Telephone Screening Interviews where you screen out weak candidates and invite only the best in for face-to-face interviews.
Conducting an Effective Telephone Screening Interview
- Prior to the phone call, review the completed Topgrading Career History Form and Topgrading Snapshot.
- Tell the candidate: “Thanks for completing the Topgrading Career History Form. In this phone call, I’d like to tell you a bit more about the company and job and answer your questions. I’d also like to ask you questions about your background and goals. Ultimately, before a job offer, we’ll ask you to arrange personal reference calls with bosses. Okay?”
- Describe the company and position to the candidate.
- Invite the candidate to ask questions about the job.
- Review the following for the most recent two jobs (start with the second to last and then ask about the current or most recent job):
- Successes
- Failures
- Boss’s appraisals of your strengths, weaker points, and overall performance
- Reasons for leaving
- Add two questions each from three competencies.
- If you and the candidate want to move to the next step, it’s time to explain Topgrading:
- As a Topgrading company, our hiring practices at Acme are unusually thorough. There are Competency Interviews but also a chronological Topgrading Interview in which we ask about your entire career – all your successes, mistakes, key decisions, and key relationships. And finalists are asked to arrange personal reference calls with former managers and others. The benefits to high performers who apply are many: (a) if you’re hired, you’ll go to work in a company with almost all high performers, (b) career opportunities with Acme are unusually good because so many high performers grow the company, (c) 90%. of the people who join us are happy on the job a year later and rated High Performer, and (d) within a couple weeks of joining us you will receive comprehensive coaching to help you assimilate smoothly into the company, perform very well quickly, and begin formulating your Individual Development Plan to help you grow.
Rating Candidates
- After the Telephone Screening Interview, you can go to the Job Scorecard and update your tentative ratings, which are far from the final ratings.
- After initially analyzing the Career History Form and Topgrading Snapshot, you entered an early set of “best guess” ratings.
- Now, after conducting the Telephone Screening Interview, you’ll no doubt change some ratings, because this is how the hiring process works: after each of the Topgrading steps go to the Job Scorecard and revise your ratings.
- As you get more and more revealing information, your ratings will be closer and closer to reality.
- As long as your ratings exceed the Minimum Acceptable Rating, you will continue going through the Topgrading steps.
