The Effective Hiring Manager

9Conducting Phone Screens

The Manager Tools Effective Hiring Process recommends that before you bring someone into your office for a final day of interviewing, spend as much time screening the person as you can. With rare exceptions, do more over the phone to reduce your burden for the final full day of interviewing. Know more about the candidate through the steps listed previously before you invest the considerable resources of a full day of interviews.

Regarding resources, it’s normal to be feeling the pinch of an open position and its associated undone work. It’s normal to want to get someone through to the final step, hoping that he wows you and your team so that you can make him an offer. It takes fewer resources to go faster, to hire a candidate sooner.

Fight these urges. Effective managers know that it’s smart to spend more resources on our most important decisions. Remember: The Second Principle of Effective Hiring: Set the Bar High. Our natural desire to fill an open position must be tempered by our desire to avoid the big mistake: filling it with the wrong person.

So, before we bring someone in for face-to-face interviews, we’re going to conduct one or more screening interviews.

Thirty Minutes Is Enough

Thirty minutes is plenty of time to conduct a phone screen. A screen is not a full interview. It’s a screen—a partial interview. Phone screens are generally conducted following résumé reviews and before a full day of final interviews. This is certainly not the only ...