When the job market is competitive, as it is now, candidates start making judgments about prospective employers from the moment they visit your career site. It’s no longer just about the candidate trying to stand out in a sea of applicants and wanting to make a good impression on you and your hiring team.
This is a job seeker’s market, and employers need to work on their first impressions, too. Candidates expect to have a positive interview experience that’s insightful, simple, and organized — this is a two-way evaluation. If your interview process is too drawn out, lacks structure, or candidates get the impression you haven’t been thorough about assessing your needs, they won’t hesitate to back out. So how do you create a candidate-centric interview process that seamlessly incorporates your organizational needs? You implement interview software.
Interview Software is Critical to the Process
Candidates who are in demand and understand their value aren’t willing to jump through hoops to be a part of your interview process. They’ll move on to another opportunity if they find your hiring process and interview experience tedious. A thoughtful, well-prepared interview can move candidates through the funnel at a faster rate and help you better identify the right person for the job.
By adding interviewing tools to your
Applicant Tracking Software, you can drastically reduce the administrative burden for your recruiting team, and also remove the pressure many hiring managers feel when preparing for an interview. Automation means less friction for candidates and fewer internal errors. The less you have to manage, the easier it is for everyone involved. In fact,
60% of applicants will drop out of the interview process if it’s too long or too disorganized.
Ensuring you’re making the most of your interviews also contributes to your success rate.
80% of employee turnover is due to poor hiring decisions.
Proper planning, asking the right questions, a thorough evaluation of candidates, and
setting appropriate expectations about the role all contribute the best possible data upon which you will make your decisions. Turnover happens, but taking the right measures ahead of time can dramatically reduce the rate at which that happens. Well-defined interview guides can help you rein in the scope of your questions and pinpoint necessary skillsets. Just as you wouldn’t implement a new business practice without a strategy, you should treat your hiring practices with the same care, and tools can help you accomplish a comprehensive, all-encompassing plan for the best possible interview process.
The ClearCompany Interview Toolkit
We all know what’s required to conduct a smooth and effective interview process, but it’s hard to manage all the details and stakeholders involved to consistently get interviewing right. That’s why we, at ClearCompany, have created a specialized software toolkit to automate, streamline and strengthen your interview process from beginning to end, for your candidates, recruiting and hiring teams. Features of the Interview Toolkit include:
1. Frictionless Interview Scheduling
One of the most troublesome aspects of the interview process is coordinating the schedule. When there’s more than just the hiring manager involved in the interviews, accommodating multiple team members’ schedules and the need for different interview formats and lengths for various stakeholders can cause headaches for the organizer. Multi-interviewer scheduling automatically navigates team availability and incorporates interview format flexibility to solve the puzzle for you. Gone are the back-and-forth emails trying to nail down a time that works for everyone involved. The scheduling tool will manage interviewer schedules and candidate invitations, build complete schedules, send time slots to candidates, and send updates and reminders to keep interviewers and candidates up to speed.
2. Interview Guides
Strategic interview guides provide structure and focus to the conversations your interviewers have with your candidates, ensuring both parties get the most out of the interview. Questions are automatically customized to the core competencies of the role you’re hiring for, so you know the interview will stay on track and you’ll get answers that will enable you to meaningfully evaluate each candidate. Even better? These guides are generated using our industry-leading content and information about your top performers, business goals and culture with no heavy lifting by your team.
3. Automated, Mobile-Friendly Delivery
Before the interview, mobile-friendly schedules and interview materials are sent to both candidates and your hiring team so that everyone is prepared for the interview. This means everyone involved has everything they need, available at their fingertips no matter where they are.
4. Candidate Scorecards
Interview scorecards provide consistent evaluation criteria specifically structured for the role. The system also accesses information stored in the ClearCompany performance module to identify the characteristics of your top performers and builds these attributes into the interview scorecard. In this way, you can be confident you’re evaluating candidates against proven measures of success for your company. Defining scorecard criteria upfront also allows you to qualitatively and objectively measure candidates against one another to ensure your assessments are fair and unbiased. Results can be shared and team notes can be added to share insights and collaborate so that when it comes to selection, the hiring manager can make a well-informed decision in which everyone involved has the opportunity to contribute their takeaways and suggestions.
This article was originally published on the ClearCompany blog by Ellen Wilson.
About Sara Pollock:
As the head of the Marketing department, Sara makes sure that ClearCompany’s message, products, and best practices reach and assist as many HR practitioners as possible.
