Maintain eye contact with job candidates. Have a prepared list of questions to ask. Ensure positive body language the entire time. Arrive several minutes early. Have multiple copies of resumes for leads. Be ready to ask job seekers for their point of view on certain work styles and approaches.

These are all good interview preparation tasks to keep top of mind when speaking with prospective hires. That said, regardless of the type of job interview you conduct, these are admittedly more of the (comparatively) minor details. You also need to think about your overall interview techniques too.

9 interview techniques and tips from the experts

Your interview techniques will differ from other employers. But, the goal of said techniques is the same:

So, how do you ensure that you secure the details required to ensure you hire the right candidates?

By taking advice from experts who regularly conduct a variety of types of interviews with job seekers — and know a thing or two about fine-tuning their respective interview techniques.

1) Use behavioral Interviewing and active listening

Teach your hiring team the foundational element of behavioral interviewing: the order of an answer.

For example, what were the pros/cons of your last role? Tell me about a major challenge in your career and the outcome. What was a piece of advice you still follow and would tell others to run away from?

The answers are important. But, the order, context, and storytelling of the answers are more telling.

Where does someone start? The pro or the con? (This can be biased, based on how you phrase the question, so mix it up.) How often does someone go to a negative example or how willing is someone to share authentic challenges and faults vs. providing the G-rated version of the answer? 

Teaching a team to actively listen (and even digging deeper with follow-up questions) can increase the value of an interview and lead to greater insight into future behavior.

Stacie Baird, Chief People Officer, Community Medical Services

2) Promote an open dialogue with job candidates

I allow them to speak. Oftentimes, interviewers will bombard candidates with questions, without letting the candidate elaborate on their point or get through the interview jitters.

Once a question is asked, I make an effort to listen to the interviewee, allowing them to have their say and think of an answer properly, rather than feel rushed and forced to give a reply that they think we want to hear.

Even if a candidate appears to have finished speaking, I let a couple of seconds of silence go by. This is to allow the candidate to gather their thoughts and add anything that they think they might’ve missed before I ask another question.

Piotrek Sosnowski, Chief People and Culture Officer, Life And My Finances

3) Coordinate with interview panelists beforehand

The most effective tool in assessing candidates at our company has always been the prep work around identifying what behaviors and skills are needed to perform the role, and identifying who, throughout the interview process, will deep-dive into assessing those aforementioned areas. 

Before any interview cycle, a recruiter will sit down with the hiring manager in an intake session and flesh out what the ideal candidate looks like.

In addition, before any “team fit interview,” we will gather all the participants in the interviews and break down “who” will cover “what.” It allows us to coordinate, and efficiently get the answers we need out of the conversations and improves the candidate’s experience!

Zak Michalyshyn, Senior Talent Acquisition Lead, Knak

4) Provide a task-based assessment to job seekers

One of the best techniques I’ve found is to allocate tasks based on specific candidate experience from their CV and past roles. 

It helps to analyze their approach to a specific task based on their experience, and you can learn how to potentially allocate this to the vacant role or learn if there’s a “fit” for future role expansion.

Wendy Makinson, HR Manager, Joloda Hydraroll

5) Share scenario-based situations to candidates

Instead of asking the same questions, look at the specific experience of the candidate and create a scenario or requirement for them to showcase their skills specific to the role. 

You can actually discover whether there is scope to bring someone with “outside of the role” skill sets as a means of role market expansion, and you can do so by actually seeing how this “fits” with your scenario or task within the hiring process.

Tracey Beveridge, HR Director, Personnel Checks

6) Use open-ended questions to identify strengths

One of our big beliefs when it comes to talent is that it’s more valuable to know what an employee is great at than to focus on what they don’t excel at.

For strategic hires, I manage the initial screening calls with potential candidates, and one of the first questions I ask the candidate is “What is the hardest you’ve ever worked on something?”

This question allows an open-ended space for the candidate to tell me something they’re passionate about, something that motivated them, and something that they did well. 

Based on this information, we can start to form an opinion of where this person’s strengths lie and how they can be channeled into success for our business.

Brett Ungashick, CEO and CHRO, OutSail

7) Closely assess job seekers’ critical thinking skills

Asking applicants questions that will measure their problem-solving skills and critical thinking is a highly efficient and effective way to assess your candidates.

Critical thinking is a good indicator of an applicant’s performance and productivity potential as it shows his ability to think, analyze, judge, and produce results or answers under pressure. 

It will also show their decision-making process which is a very important part of working in a company. One good question to ask is: “How will you do a task if your manager gave you incomplete instructions and information?”

This question will show how they will solve the problem at hand and show their process to acquire all the needed information to finish the task.

Steven Mostyn, Chief Human Resources Officer, Management.org

8) Use competency-based interview techniques

I’ve found that structured, competency-based interviewing is highly effective for many roles.

Based on the key competencies required for the job, the hiring team designs interview questions that align with each competency. Interviewers then ask every candidate the same set of questions.

For example, you could assess for cross-functional collaboration by asking, “Can you share an experience where you worked with a colleague in a different department to solve a problem? How did you approach working together? What was the outcome?” 

Using predetermined criteria, interviewers can decide how each candidate’s response aligns with what is necessary for the role. Not only is this technique scalable, but it allows you to evaluate candidates more consistently and objectively.

This also ensures the entire hiring team remains calibrated while making important business decisions.

Alex Lahmeyer, Founder and DEI Consultant, Boundless Arc

9) Address negatives on leads’ resumes head-on

When interviewing a candidate, I always want to tackle any negatives head-on. There is no such thing as a perfect resume; everyone has a job that ended badly or a past project that went off the rails.

How candidates describe these experiences is incredibly important. I’m looking for someone who can admit their faults and explain how they’ve improved over the years. If it’s experience or a skill set that’s lacking, I want to hear how they intend to upgrade.

The biggest red flag? A worker who is unable to recognize that every journey contains struggles. If they can’t or won’t admit their own weaknesses, they’ll have trouble in any company.

Tim Walsh, Founder, Vetted

Ensure successful interviews and strong hiring team collaboration in every recruiting cycle with help from Jobvite’s advanced ATS. Schedule a demo of our recruitment platform today.

The post What Are the Most Effective Interview Techniques? first appeared on Jobvite.

Hiring in today’s labor market is complex and requires the best strategies, processes, technology, and services to keep up with uncertainty that exists in finding enough quality talent.

Recruiters can spend hours manually screening candidates just for one open requisition — job seekers they may never see or interact with — and still not find the right person.

Multiply that by the number of open roles, and remote candidate screening is one of the most time-consuming, repetitive, and detached tasks that recruiters or hiring managers have to perform.

So how can hiring teams effectively screen remote candidates and instill confidence in the hiring process? The good news is that there is a better way — no matter your size of company — to find a high volume of candidates and to evaluate the most qualified individuals.

Let’s break down five strategies that can help your company screen remote candidates.

How to execute a more efficient screening process for remote candidates: 5 tips for talent teams

The tight labor market has made it more difficult than ever for recruiters to source, screen, interview, hire, and onboard remote talent. Enterprise employers, in particular, are hard-pressed to increase efficiencies within talent acquisition to better compete for and convert top talent.

Yet, the most agile teams have found ways to save time and find more qualified remote candidates at the same time. These best practices empower recruiters to deliver more predictable hiring results.

1) Let candidates aid your screening process

A favorite time-saving screening tool of recruiters is asynchronous video. This software lets hiring teams send interview prompts to remote candidates where they can record and submit their answers on their own schedule.

Recruiters can even provide a deadline for completing the video screening, allowing the automated system to send out reminders.

2) Limit the “deal-breakers” with hiring managers

With today’s highly competitive labor market, candidates have their pick when it comes to employers and job offers. Long gone are the days when recruiters could screen out hundreds of applicants with a job description’s wording or long lists of required skills for a role.

Encourage hiring managers to limit their list of “essential” skills that they list under requirements when screening candidates. This helps keep the candidate pool larger and more diverse past the screening stage and through onboarding.

3) Save time with candidate skill-matching

Candidate skill matching is a strategy that helps companies to find the right qualified talent without eliminating too many candidates early in the process.

It’s an efficient way to ensure applicants have the necessary skills or certifications for a role — and recruiters are focusing more than ever on hiring for soft skills like leadership and communication.

Leading recruitment software, like Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite, enables hiring teams to screen this way, while also reducing unconscious bias in the hiring process.

4) Leverage automated sourcing capabilities

Imagine opening your laptop in the morning and having dozens of qualified applications ready to review. Employers looking to streamline remote candidate screening do this with automated sourcing software.

Effective sourcing tools can save recruiters dozens of hours per requisition, leading to improved recruiting metrics like time-to-hire and even improved quality-of-hire.

5) Stay engaged with passive talent

Some of the best candidates in your network are ones who previously interacted with your company.

Make sure to keep interacting with and engaging previous applicants or passive talent as a great place to source quality candidates. Use automated messaging tools to communicate with candidates, provide updates, engage with “silver medalists” and invite new applicants to roles.

Streamline your screening process and advance candidates more quickly and efficiently with our Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite. Contact our team to learn more about our ATS.

The post 5 Strategies for Screening Candidates Remotely first appeared on Jobvite.

With top talent considered a scarce resource for enterprises today, many recruiters at large-scale organizations like yours are having to determining the best candidate screening approach to use:

Traditionally, screening out — or eliminating candidates because they don’t meet specific criteria — has been the default practice of hiring teams and recruiters.

But, with recent discussions on how quickly this can decrease the talent pool of incredibly competent candidates, industry leaders are trying a new approach.

Let’s examine both more closely to help you determine how to use one of the or both candidate screening processes to your advantage in what remains a challenging hiring environment.

Candidate screening option #1: “Screen out”

There is a time and place for screening out:

• Physicians obviously must have a medical degree.
• Accountants definitely need CPA certification.
• Truck drivers need a commercial driver’s license.

In some cases, it’s completely necessary to have firm, non-negotiable requirements for applicants.

To waste time on the interview process without them would be a disservice to you and the candidate. So, it’s entirely plausible to rule out leads without these specs at the application stage.

There are two occasions where screening out is entirely necessary:

• The first is in the search for candidates for a highly technical position as listed above. An ATS can filter out applications without these specific criteria. However, there’s a distinct difference between roles that require specific accreditation and roles that technically don’t require a certain degree or level of education.
• The second occasion where screening out is relevant is when a candidate cannot meet the basic needs of the role. If the role would put the candidate’s safety at risk, or they cannot meet the required physical demands of a job, they would likely be disqualified from the position. Likewise, if your role requires the candidate to be in person in California, but they’ve noted that they live in New York and are unwilling to relocate, then disqualifying or screening out a candidate makes sense. As long as your qualifiers aren’t discriminatory, screening out a candidate can be strategic move.

The biggest downfall to screening out is eliminating qualified candidates using the wrong metrics, which is a common mistake. There’s a difference between not having a commercial driver’s license (which is a requirement by law) and not having a bachelor’s degree for an entry-level position.

Unconscious biases can sneak into this process and cause talent acquisition teams to use criteria, such as gender, ethnicity, or other factors irrelevant to the job description to screen candidates.

These biases can not only prevent you from finding the best candidates, but they can also stifle innovation, productivity, and employee engagement. Luckily, there’s an alternative to this approach.

Candidate screening option #2: “Screen in”

Screening “in” is commonly misunderstood and underused. This process, at its core, is a more inclusive approach to hiring that considers candidates who may bring refreshed experience, enthusiasm, and energy to your organization through their unique experiences.

Screening in versus screening out may simply involve broadening your criteria, such as indicating, “We’re looking for someone with a degree in Public Relations, but will also accept degrees in Journalism or Communications.” Furthermore, you may accept related experience in lieu of a degree altogether.

Perhaps your usual candidates possess a degree in sales, business, or economics.

If you limit your search results to only those particular degrees, you are likely to miss out on someone with a degree in engineering who could offer a fresh perspective.

If you’re concerned the candidate’s background doesn’t correlate seamlessly to the work at hand, consider a screening question within the application or a screening interview for further clarification and offer the chance for the candidate to illustrate their unique experience.

Rethinking the conventional criteria in which you screen job applicants and sourced talent is often the first step in increasing your quality of hire, saving time in your hiring process, and meeting specific hiring goals laid out by leadership during strategic planning sessions before the year began.

Using the right applicant tracking system to screen for suitable candidates now essential

From cover letter and resume screening and the initial phone interview with your sourcer, to in-person interviews with panelists and skills tests toward the end of the recruiting process, there are countless tasks that must be tackled just to advance prospects of interest all the way to the offer stage.

Sure, there are other talent acquisition tools you’ll need to integrate with your ATS of choice (e.g., background check tools, HRIC/HCM systems, workplace collaboration and communication platforms).

That said, leading applicant tracking systems offer built-in capabilities that aid with nearly all facets of recruiting and hiring today — including and especially screening job candidates.

Consider Jobvite customer Noble Network of Charter Schools. The organization’s candidate screening efforts prior to investing in our TA suite left a lot to be desired. Notably, its talent specialists were forced to spend the bulk of their time screening using a mix of disparate tools.

That meant less time they could spend proactively sourcing talent on social media and other career communities, nurturing candidates already in their database, and analyzing their recent TA performance.

“Looking back to life before Jobvite, we would spend 70-80% of our day screening applicants,” said Michele Ybarra, the former Manager of Selection and Hiring at Noble.

“Today that has dropped by at least 30%,” Michele added. “Now, I can focus on critical work that can move the needle for Noble, allowing my time to be more strategic and impactful.”

Less time spent on video and phone screens, and more time spent on work that matters. That’s what TA teams get when they use our powerful ATS as their primary full-cycle recruitment software today.

Find out how you can streamline and speed up your candidate screening process with Jobvite.

The post The Two Types of Candidate Screening Approaches first appeared on Jobvite.

A recent Harvard Business School study found that African American and Asian-American job applicants who mask their race on resumes get more job interviews.

To help answer this, we asked hiring managers, recruiters, and business leaders for their insights.

From training hiring managers and teams against recruitment bias to conducting blind skills challenges, there are several tips that you may follow to implement an effective talent acquisition process that reduces hiring bias in your entire recruiting function.

Train hiring managers and teams against recruitment bias

Eliminating bias in the recruiting process is essential to improving the number of candidates from underrepresented groups. One way to eliminate bias is to ensure that all hiring managers receive training and are held accountable if they incorporate bias during the interview process.

In addition, companies should implement inclusive hiring guidelines to ensure that interview panels contain racial and gender diversity.

If your company struggles with putting together a panel that reflects this level of diversity, you have additional problems to solve. While masking resumes are one way to solve the challenge of eliminating bias, it does not address the systemic issues within your organization.

Ensuring all hiring managers receive training to eradicate bias and incorporate conscious inclusion is one crucial step to removing this obstacle.

Tawanda Johnson, People and Culture Thought Leader at Sporting Smiles

Ensure job requirements are genuinely free from hiring bias

Defining and agreeing to the requirements of a position you are hiring serves as the foundation for a non-biased hiring process. Determining the position includes answering these questions:

• What does success look like for this role for your industry, organization, or team?
• What are the “must-haves” and the “nice-to-haves” concerning the skills, talents, behaviors, and experiences for this role?”
• Which are the areas where a steeper learning curve is acceptable?

Ensuring that a position’s requirements are clear will allow the best practices for minimizing biases in the hiring process to work!

Etty Burk, President of Leading with Difference

Use gender and other neutral descriptions in job postings

The recruiting department is obliged to write an inclusive job description. Avoiding gender-coded words and using gender-neutral descriptions can help widen the reach of your recruitment ads. 

Research also shows that women are less likely to apply for jobs with a very long list of “desirable” attributes because they don’t want to waste their employer’s time if they don’t fit perfectly. Gender bias can also be avoided by masking names and gender while screening resumes.

Debbie Meeuws, Owner and CEO of Nature’s Arc Organic

Conduct work sample tests

The work sample test is one of the ways where you can reduce bias in the hiring procedure. It is the process where the candidate has to pass the task that he will be assigned in real-time.

These are considered indicators of future job performance. Evaluating work sample tests from multiple applicants helps you calibrate the best candidate.

In a way, asking the candidates to work on the real-time work or the problems arising due to that yields a more important sight for the employee.

Standardize this way of the hiring process and efficient candidates can be hired rather than other illogical criteria set such as gender, experience and personality.

Scott Krager, Owner of WODReview

Implement software to anonymize candidate profiles

Companies that are serious about mitigating bias in their recruitment efforts should consider investing in software designed to do just that.

In my former role leading Diversity Talent Management for a global Technology company, we implemented software to anonymize candidate profiles to remove gender and ethnicity indicators.

This software also enabled us to gain insight on how candidates from various backgrounds progressed at each stage of the hiring process. It also led to us implementing targeted initiatives to address bias at the phone screen and onsite interview stages.

While no technology is perfect, having the ability to systematically offset bias in your recruiting process is an advantage to candidates and ultimately helps companies select the best hires from a more diverse applicant pool.

Regina Lawless, DEI Consultant at Regina Lawless Consulting

Train your hiring teams to practice equity

Don’t mask your applicants. Build accountability and reporting matrices of the applicant pipeline. Develop your hiring teams to practice equity. When you mask your applicants you are not allowing for the individual DEI development and training of your staff.

You cannot mitigate hiring bias if you do not have the opportunity to expose and correct them. The global workforce is diverse. It’s time to accept that reality.

Wanda Lee Florestine, Talent & Acquisition Director (DEI) GRID Alternatives

Use AI-based resume scanners

Many human resource departments are becoming aware of the (sometimes) unintentional biases which occur during the hiring process.

The beauty of using artificial intelligence to review resumes is that the software is blind to the physical appearance of any applicant. The technology focuses on recognizing candidate qualifications to filter through top talent.

This removes human involvement in applicant selections, at least for the initial round of interviews.

However, if hiring bias seems prevalent within the department, it may be time to consider having an organizational conversation about the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Brian Nagele, CEO of Restaurant Clicks

Conduct structured interviews to provide fairer assessments

Most hiring mistakes can be traced to poor interviewer judgment. The main issue is that when evaluating other people, we are impacted by various biases. For example, we unconsciously prefer candidates that remind us of ourselves.

A common human error that we can do little about, but it’s horrible for diversity.

We switched to structured interviews to better guide interviewers in giving fair assessments of candidates, and we haven’t looked back.

In structured interviews, all candidates are asked the same predetermined questions, and what’s even more important, their answers are rated against the same pre-determined criteria.

Interviews are consistent so every candidate gets an equal opportunity to perform, and every candidate’s rating needs to be based on evidence. This forces a stronger, positive emphasis on what the candidate actually said, and not their accent, looks, or handshake.

Max Korpinen, Co-Founder and CEO of Hireproof

Mask relevant items on candidates’ resumes

Our recruitment department masks certain things on the resumes that may give away a person’s ethnicity and religion. One of those things is the college or university attended.

While many attend standard public universities that wouldn’t identify their race or religion, others attend black colleges and universities, all-girl schools, or universities tied to a religious denomination.

All of these things could present a bias, so my HR just masks the university and leaves their college career highlights and achievements for hiring managers to see.

Amruth Laxman, Founding Partner of 4Voice

Conduct anonymous assessments of prospects

Equality and diversity are central to our culture and we truly believe that we do not have an issue with any biases in our hiring process. However, to ensure that candidates for open roles are assessed purely on talent, we begin the application based only on the candidate’s email address.

This means that in the vast majority of cases, HR is unaware of the candidate’s race. On successfully completing the assessment, the interview is held by a multi-cultural panel, ensuring that race does not become a matter of consideration in the final selection process.

Colin Palfrey, Chief Marketing Officer of Crediful

Serialize your applications before reviewing

The one thing that we do in our organization is to serialize job applications before reviewing them. This means that the names and pictures of the persons associated with the applications are removed to only retain the candidates’ qualifications and competencies.

This ensures that the recruiters don’t engage the process with a clouded judgment based on the applicant’s identity. It is a great way to mask applications and eliminate biases that occur when conducting one-on-one recruitment.

yongming Song, CEO of Imgkits Photo Editor

Hire candidates through LinkedIn

LinkedIn has emerged as a crucial platform to hire people without any prejudice, straight based on their networking skills and the qualities they have been endorsed for.

LinkedIn generates scores that show how active people are and how they can be better marketers in the digital world. Through these real-time scores, you can easily list out those who are most suitable for the job and then can start going through the further levels of the recruitment process.

It would be fair enough to leave it to the professional application as the scores can not be forged. When there are real-time stats in front of you, the result could become crystal clear.

Steve Sacona, Legal Writer at Top10lawyers

Conduct blind skills challenges related to an open role

Remove details in a CV that can lead to biased decisions, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, age, and gender. Have someone black out all these details from CVs before handing them to HR. 

You can also try doing away with CVs altogether so that even names and email addresses are unknown. Conduct blind skill challenges related to the position being hired for instead.

This puts applicants on equal footing as a starting point. Besides guarding against unconscious bias, you will also discover which applicants have the proper skills and talent you need.

Peter Hoopis, Owner and CEO of Peter Hoopis

Find out how your enterprise talent team can minimize hiring bias — and enhance your hiring quality, speed, and efficiency — with Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite.

The post How Talent Teams Can Minimize Their Hiring Bias first appeared on Jobvite.

Ensuring your hiring team collectively provides a positive candidate experience to each and every individual you reach out to and speak with for open roles is one of the most critical areas of your company’s recruitment strategy today.

In short, if it was evident before reading this guide, improving your candidate experience efforts regularly should always be a top priority for recruiting staff, hiring managers, and interview panelists.

How to provide a consistently positive candidate experience to every job seeker you engage

Of course, saying you want to take action to create a positive candidate experience for all prospects in your funnel is one thing. It’s quite another to actually put a plan in place to improve your CX approach.

With that in mind, here are five expert ways you can go above and beyond to make sure your candidates enjoy every aspect of the recruitment process — even if they don’t end up being hired.

Keep candidates informed every step of the way

When seeking to create positive candidate experiences, communication is key. No candidate likes to be in the dark. They want to stay informed and updated about where they are in the hiring process.

Unfortunately, too many recruiters and employers treat the hiring process as a one-way street, requiring prompt answers and updates from candidates, without offering the same thing in return.

Let them know when their applications have been received and are being reviewed.

Even send rejection letters to let them know they will not be moving forward in the hiring process, offering insights into the reasoning behind your decision instead of a form letter.

Let your job candidates know what to expect

Hand-in-hand with keeping candidates in the loop regarding their place in the hiring process, it’s equally important to let candidates know what to expect if they are hired.

Today’s job candidates understand the importance of company culture. In fact, 88% of surveyed job seekers said they believe that a good company culture is essential to business success.

Demonstrate the things that make your company culture stand out from the crowd (read: other employers) using Jobvite’s fully customizable, premium career site building toolkit.

Reduce unconscious bias using AI software

One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of improving any hiring process is unconscious bias. Even when we tell ourselves we’re not being biased during candidate selection, there may be ways our bias peeks through even without us knowing it.

Not only can perceived bias negatively impact your candidate experience, but it also is very likely preventing you from making the best hiring decisions to benefit your business.

Jobvite’s built-in AI capabilities are designed to help recruiters accurately identify the experience and qualifications they need most, then zero in on exactly which candidates best satisfy those needs.

Maintain relationships with “runner-up” candidates

When does your candidate experience end? After you decide not to hire them, right? Wrong. Just because a candidate isn’t right for the position you currently need to fill, that doesn’t mean they won’t be right for a different role in the future.

With Jobvite’s CRM, you can get ahead of new requisitions and make sure you have the right talent identified and engaged before your business needs them. Instead of starting over from scratch, you may already have dozens of prime candidates sitting in your recruitment pipeline.

Leverage automation to take care of some TA tasks

The days of having to manually execute every single recruiting- and hiring-related activity are (thankfully) over. That’s because talent acquisition automation software now can take care of (once-tedious) tasks for just about every member of your recruitment org.

“In automating these high-volume tasks, you’ll create a better candidate experience and be able to spend more time on strategic decisions,” Corey added.

Learn why so many enterprises leverage Jobvite’s Talent Acquisition Suite to improve their candidate experience efforts — and take their hiring strategies to the next level.

The post The Keys to Providing a Positive Candidate Experience first appeared on Jobvite.