“Crunch questions” – tips for successful telephone interviews!
Telephone interview advice
Are you finding it difficult to balance your existing work load to enable you to interview candidates for urgent vacancies? Then perhaps you should review your selection process and refine your telephone screening interviews.
The benefits of a telephone interview:
Easier to cover more ground, and screen a wider range of candidates often discovering talent that would have been filtered out if using a face to face interview process.
Easier to “bail out” of the interview process if the candidate is not proving a close enough match.
Speed, candidates can be screened sooner (no need for them to book time off work or to travel to the interview).
Time saving, when moving to a face to face interview a well conducted pre interview via telephone will ensure that you only meet with candidates that have the essential skills that your organisation requires.
Telephone screening interviews – a structured approach.
The success of any telephone screening interviews is based upon ensuring a structured approach is used. This includes organising a well-planned 10-15 minute telephone conversation using competency based questions (at Sigma Recruitment we call these “crunch questions”), which focus on the essential requirements of the position as agreed with the line manager.
Examples of good competency based “crunch” questions to ask could be:-
If recruiting for a Shift Manager with strong lean skills, then possibly the first “crunch” question should be “please explain your three most significant lean improvements made in your current position, explaining which lean tool you utilised”.
If Siemens PLC programming skills are essential, then a “crunch” question could be “please explain how much Siemens PLC programming you have done, which version of Siemens PLCs was this for, what process was automated by the program you wrote”.
In a Production Management position a “crunch” question could be “please describe the most difficult people issue you have dealt with, commenting on the outcome and how you managed the issue through to conclusion”
Using such a structured approach with well selected “crunch questions” will ensure that the correct talent is invited for face to face interviews, leaving more time to complete other urgent tasks.
How Sigma Recruitment can support
Why not work with us to produce a specific set of competency based “crunch” questions for each vacancy and let Sigma Recruitment conduct the telephone interviews, providing you with the candidates answers adding value to your recruitment process. Sigma Recruitment have 10 plus years’ experience of conducting effective telephone interviews.
