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Author: Easyhire Team

Video interviews for college recruitment

Video interviews for college recruitment

College students are a great asset to the workforce – for both established and start-up companies because of their excitement, smarts, and innovative ideas. Whether meeting students at campus career fairs and information sessions, or through job and internship postings on a university’s career website, it is inevitable that students need to be interviewed to see if they are a good fit. EasyHire.me is a great tool in your college recruitment toolbox to ensure that you find the best students quickly and efficiently.

Interviews with college students for entry-level positions should typically not be held the same way as interviews with folks who have been part of the workforce. College students are often more nervous, less aware of their skills, and lack work experience.  It is important to focus on behavior-based questions, like “Tell us about a time when a team project went well and a time when a project didn’t go well”  to identify transferable skills. You need to ask about their experiences within their limited college experience, like “How did you balance multiple assignments and projects, as well, as your part-time job within a busy week?”.

With EasyHire.me, recruiters can design specific sets of questions for the student population and even a different subset for interviewing students applying for an internship. This allows the recruiters to learn the most from their younger applicants by asking the most suitable questions, take notes for each question, and share notes with hiring managers for quicker decisions.

College recruiting season typically means visiting multiple universities, utilizing multiple interviewers, interviewing in various locations (both on-campus and on-site), and meeting dozens of students over the course of a stressful few weeks a couple of times a year. Imagine having a web-based software that would host a schedule, contain various sets of interview questions based upon the different positions being hired, save recorded interview videos (which means you can more easily remember the many faces you see!), and compile notes from each interview in an easy manner. No more struggling to remember which student was which or deciphering your notes (or worse, someone else’s) to jog your memory about what you thought about the candidate. With EasyHire.me, companies are no longer constrained by their HR/Manager availability. They can now engage more employees to take part in the recruiting process, even from home. Once all interviews are completed, they can allow stakeholders to review together and collaborate on making an informed hiring decision.

On the flip side, EasyHire’s virtual interviews are also great for the student candidates. Taking time off for interviews with multiple companies can be nearly impossible for a busy student focusing on exams, school assignments, and other academic commitments. The opportunity to interview remotely with EasyHire  saves time and allows a student to interview with multiple companies, located anywhere in the world while bettering their chance of scoring a great summer internship or full-time job after graduation.Whether smaller companies are scaling up or large companies are hiring in volume, EasyHire.me provides the structure, professionalism, and confidence that the interviews are done fairly.

Why do you need a good interview process?

Why do you need a good interview process?

I landed my first entry-level inside Sales Associate job working in the cubicle trenches for a subsidiary of a massive global corporation. I was so thrilled! The interview process? All it took was a phone call and interview with the Inside Sales Manager (plus a meeting with the HR Manager of course). “Wow! that was almost too easy!” I later found out that it was, indeed, way too easy. I was too excited to really notice and he was as enthused as I was. The initial in-person 1:1 interview took the tone of a conversation between friends rather than what I imagined would be a high-pressure situation where I was to be seated in front of a tribunal full of people in highly professional attire firing questions at me about my SAT scores and college GPA. “Weird,” I thought, “but maybe my interpersonal skills are so good that a ‘real interview’ isn’t necessary!” Looking back – was this really the case? Nope.

Anyone reading with hiring experience will recognize my former manager’s hiring process was not only lacking, it was nonexistent! Is this freestyle type of interviewing good practice? Not by a longshot. People who’ve done research into the history of job interviews (they actually exist!) describe what I experienced as a laissez-faire interview. Essentially, where there should have been a process, there was a void. And it had serious repercussions.

It wasn’t until we, the company’s first Inside Sales team (all five of us hired in the span of a week), started our work when I realized something was up. We all had the same orientation, same training on an advanced technology product, and the same objectives. Off the cuff there were two others beside me doing amazingly; successfully making appointments off cold calls within a week, collaborating with the remote sales representatives, setting up demos and conference calls, and dutifully logging all communication in our CRM. We were the “A Team.”

However, while the A-Team garnered considerable traction, I started to notice (and I’ll put this politely) a severe divergence in the quality of work performed by the other two in our cohort; both had dread of making outbound calls, they did a mass send to twenty-five customers a day to keep their CRM activity log somewhat up to par, but the dollar signs speak for themselves, and it didn’t take long for the Sales Department to recognize that these two hires weren’t ready, willing, or capable of doing their work.

So who’s to blame here? The Inside Sales Manager who hired people he thought would make good pals? The two hires who didn’t work out? The company? Answer: none of the above.  This isn’t politics, this is business. Instead of wasting our time blaming people, let’s take a closer look at what were the systemic problems in this particular hiring process.

I found out later that the Inside Sales Manager, along with his own quota and sales responsibilities, was simply given a budget and orders to hire an Inside Sales team and to do it fast. That’s no easy task – especially for someone with no previous hiring or interviewing experience. Without enough time for screening, a hiring team, or methodical process for interviewing, it was impossible to build a consistent high-caliber sales team.

Solution? Outfitting your hiring teams with a Talent Management Platform ensures a consistent structure in your interviews. EasyHire.me, for example, provides the ability for hiring managers to conduct Live and On Demand video interviews that can be recorded for later review by fellow team members. There’s no room for the laissez-faire style interview in a situation when a dedicated and focused hiring team (not just a single individual) plans and collaborates around the most relevant questions to ask or projects to give. If the two Sales Associates who didn’t work out were made to do mock cold call for mock product demonstration, surely things would have taken a different direction.

For those of you reading who’ve been in a similar experience or are getting too many of the “wrong fits,” we’d  be more than happy to show how EasyHire.me can enable talent acquisition teams to conduct efficient, consistent, and meaningful job interviews!

Should phone screening be the interviews of past?

Should phone screening be the interviews of past?

You pick up the phone and eagerly dial the number of your next promising candidate. Their resume and cover letter are stellar and their application looks impressive. This should be easy- they have all the credentials, skills, experience, and knowledge to make a great fit for the position. Let’s get to know them on the phone and see if they might be a good fit for the company.

Except it isn’t as easy as you thought. Phone calls are a tough way to get to know someone.

Although the statistics vary about what percent of communication is based upon non-verbals, it can certainly be agreed upon that a phone call means you might miss the following as compared to a video interview:

  • Facial expression. During a video interview, whether it be live or recorded, a hiring manager or recruiter can see someone’s face, their reactions, both positive and negative, and glean a lot of insight into the candidate. Is the smile genuine? Are they making “eye contact”? Are they looking confident?
  • Body language.  During a phone interview, you can only guess what the candidate is doing on the other line. On a video interview, you can see whether the candidate is leaning forward intently, suggesting interest. You can see if their arms are cross, if they are excessively yawning, or have their feet on the desk.
  • Professional appearance. Is the candidate dressed professionally? Of course, a video interview is the only way to know!

How can recruiters and hiring managers move from the classic phone screening interview to a video interview process while still keeping the convenience and low-cost? EasyHire.me is an all-inclusive interview management platform that addresses the needs of assessing the non-verbal cues a candidate provides with both live and on-demand interviews, as well as a scorecard to objectively rate aspects of the candidate such as genuineness, professionalism, and interest. Put down the phone and pick up EasyHire.me to find better candidates.

The many layers of interviewing: Unfold the process with EasyHire.me

The many layers of interviewing: Unfold the process with EasyHire.me

You are using EasyHire’s interview platform to interview new candidates. You are consistently going through each question, listening intently to each answer, and carefully rating responses. But what are you actually listening for? How do you take subjective answers and make them objective, allowing you to compare apples to apples? 

Let’s investigate what employers are thinking when candidates are answering questions and how EasyHire can help incorporate these concepts in their interview process in a structured and objective manner.

  1. Likeability. Do I like this person? Will they get along with the rest of the team? Can I spend 8+ hours a day with them? What is the cultural fit? By including “cultural fit” and/or “likability” as measures on the scorecard, employers can rate candidates on a 5-star rating system.
  2. Genuineness. Is this person who they say they are? Do their experiences and language seem congruent with their application? Does the candidate genuinely want to work here? Can I trust this person? Ask in your interview process “Why do you want to work at Company X?” Genuineness can be measured from the candidate’s answer.
  3. Competency. Can the person do the job for which they are applying? Do they reference skills and knowledge relevant to the position? EasyHire.me allows employers to internally list skills, knowledge, and other competencies to be rated for each candidate in the platform, allowing for easy comparison of candidates.
  4. Positivity. Does the candidate seem to have a positive outlook? Do they speak poorly of their previous position or supervisors? When speaking of situations that didn’t go well, does the candidate focus on the negatives or do they express the things they learned to improve for next time? Include “positivity” as a measure or ask questions that get to the heart of a candidate’s outlook.
  5. Uniqueness. Is this candidate memorable (for the right reasons!)? Would they bring something new and different to the company? Are they better than the rest and stand out as someone you want on your team? Simply asking “tell me what makes you unique” or “why should we pick you out of all the other candidates” can yield some telling results related to uniqueness. Additionally, the way a candidate presents themselves, their variety of experiences, and how they tell a story might give them a 5-star rating in the “uniqueness” measure.
  6. Employer knowledge. Did the candidate spend the time to get to know the company and what they are about? Do they know the job description well and understand how they will contribute in the position? Do they reference company projects and initiatives while relating their skills? Including “employer research” as a measure can help employers compare candidates who took a cursory look at the website against those who really spent some time understanding what the company is about.

Although objective answers to questions in an interview are very important, subjective concepts, such as genuineness and uniqueness cannot be forgotten. Let EasyHire help you navigate both objective and subjective scores and find the best candidate for the position.

Why and how employers ask the questions they do

Why and how employers ask the questions they do

“Tell me about yourself”

“Why should we hire you?”

“Why is a manhole cover round?”*

“Tell us about a time you worked on a team that went better than expected and a time that went worse than expected”

“Please use the whiteboard to write the Java code for……”

There are many types of questions employers may ask in an interview and there are reasons for each:

  • Get to know you questions. These are asked with an intent of learning about the candidate, including their goals, education, and past experiences. Interviewers learn more about the candidate’s personality, their credentials, and motivation for interviewing.
  • Behavioral questions. Questions centered around past experiences or hypothetical situations have one goal in mind: past behavior predicts future behavior. If a candidate describes what they’ve done or would do in a situation that doesn’t mesh with the mindset of the company or the goals of the interviewer, there’s a good chance the interview process won’t move forward.
  • Brainteaser questions. You probably don’t know how many gas stations there are in the US (Microsoft interview question) or the annual revenue of the Starbucks in Times Square (Morgan Stanley interview question). Interviewers are less interested in the right answer, but more curious to know your creativity, thought process, and, perhaps most telling, your ability to think under pressure.
  • Technical questions. For candidates applying for technical positions, employers not only want to hear about knowledge, skills, and experiences relevant to the field, they want to see it with their own eyes. Candidates may be asked to code in Java or create something in Photoshop. EasyHire’s in-built code-editor makes it super easy to conduct technical interviews

Integrating the variety of questions in a meaningful and structured manner is important for both employer and candidate. EasyHire’s interview management system is one way to keep interviews on track.

Employers can structure interviews by specifying the skills, knowledge, and abilities required for the job. They formulate the evaluation criteria when compiling interview questions and a rating scale before the interview. Once the interview is in a process, employers ask questions while making notes and rating the candidates’ responses. Keeping questions consistent and structure is also important for employers because discrimination and hiring bias may be reduced, ensuring a more fair hiring process.

Candidates benefit from structured interviews in a number of ways as well. A candidate might feel the process is more professional and consistent when an employer uses EasyHire (don’t forget: interviews are also a time for a candidate to decide whether the employer is a good fit for them!). Additionally, one of the features of EasyHire, the interactive platform that puts the question on the screen, allows a candidate to read the question, reducing the chance of mishearing the question.

Although the interview process can be cumbersome and intimidating for both sides of the conference table, interview questions are a necessary way for employers to get to know a candidate beyond the information in a resume and cover letter. Do we like this person? Are they a good fit? Can they do the job? Pick the best candidate with EasyHire’s easy-to-use interview management platform.

*A manhole cover is round because it cannot fall through its circular opening and is easily moved and rolled.

Rise in temp workforce: EasyHire interviews to the rescue!

Rise in temp workforce: EasyHire interviews to the rescue!

According to The American Staffing Association, in 2014 there were on average 3.2 million temporary workers each week, working for an average time of 11 weeks, in over 35,000 establishments nationwide. Additionally, with 20,000 U.S staffing and recruiting agencies operating 39,000 offices, industry sales grew to nearly $136 billion in 2015. Eighty-eight percent of those sales come from temporary and contract staffing.

With numbers like these, one can only imagine the preliminary work that temp agencies must perform in order to find great employees that fit the needs of their clients. Enter EasyHire.me, an interview management platform that would streamline and simplify the hiring process for temp agencies. Typically agencies have resumes, computer assessment scores, and employee availability on file. If agencies use EasyHire’s on-demand and live video interviews, they will have a record of the interview session, along with the questions asked  in the file that they can review when a new job becomes available to fill.

Imagine a busy law firm needs a front desk administrative assistant for six weeks while the permanent staff member is recovering from a surgery. The law firm is seeking someone computer savvy with strong customer service and time management skills, preferably with some law office experience.

Temp Agency A might send the first available employee who loosely meets the client’s criteria based upon poorly-written notes from a recruiter interview 3 months prior.

On the other side of town, Temp Agency B has interviewed folks with EasyHire’s interview platform when they signed up for employment. They can now reap the benefits of adopting a structured interview process:

  • The interviews are recorded and archived in the EasyHire platform for easy access
  • A candidate’s answers to questions are easily separated throughout the video, making it easy for the agency and the client to narrow in on what they need to know to determine the best fit
  • The recruiter can review the  recorded interviews to find the top three temporary employee candidates, send the videos to the law firm for review, and allow them to pick who will be the best fit for them.

Which temp agency has the best likelihood of sending a great employee to their client, thus securing future business? Temp Agency B, of course! With incredible numbers of job-seekers using temporary and staffing agencies to find work and earn a paycheck, and more companies relying on the expertise of an agency to fill positions with stellar candidates, EasyHire’s interview platform and unique features can make the process easier for all parties.

How do you fight bias in your hiring process?

How do you fight bias in your hiring process?

Hiring bias is something that affects everyone whether you are a candidate being overlooked or an employer unconsciously making a biased hiring decision. Fighting bias is a choice and more companies are starting to make that choice in their recruitment process and reaping the rewards of a team built on diversity.

Hiring bias can take many forms: the way the job posting is written; the effect of the name, age, and pedigree of the applicant;  what questions are asked in the interview and more. Employers need to be aware of their hiring bias whether it is conscious or not while asking themselves the bigger question – what aspect of the company culture is fueling the hiring bias in the first place?

Today many resources are available to the companies to reduce unconscious biases which in turn will bring diversity into the workforce. EasyHire.me recognizes that the interview process is potentially the gateway to many of the biases that influence the hiring process which in turn shapes the company’s culture. EasyHire.me’s interview management platform helps employers to conduct a more consistent interview across all applicants ensuring that every candidate gets a fair chance. Hiring managers can create pre-defined questions to evaluate the candidates which help the interviewers to stay on track during the selection process, put their biases aside and discover the best candidates.

In technology industries specifically, knowledge and skills create a strong candidate. Many a times employers have been less likely to interview a female candidate, an LGBTQ-identified applicant, an older applicant due to biases of who should “represent” the tech world. EasyHire.me’s interviewing tools and processes can help companies take the first step forward in hiring people based on “who can do the job well” and not “who they are”. This will not only help the companies find strong candidates but also bring diversity to the workplace. In a time of a technology boom, combined with an increasingly diverse community of technical applicants, it is important to face hiring bias and stop denying it exists.

Reclaim your lunch break

Reclaim your lunch break

Have you spent one too many “working lunches” at your desk, just to make time in your schedule for Skype and phone interviews? Have you spent half an hour watching a candidate struggle through your questions, wishing you’d taken a proper lunch and seen the light of day for once during the week instead? Time is money, time is a proper meal. Let EasyHire’s new on-demand interview feature put interviews on your time.

Let EasyHire.me do the hard work for you in the initial screening of candidates. Once you’ve selected a pool of candidates that match your criteria, an email goes out to each interviewee with a link to take EasyHire on-demand interview. There, the candidate will record themselves answering a pre-selected set of questions. You’ll get notified upon the completion of their interview and you and your team can watch at your convenience. You can fast forward and rewind. You can watch early or you can watch late, not having to work around the candidates schedule or different time zones.

Use EasyHire’s interview management to complete the interview process, whether it’s video, phone, or in-person, with those you’ve decided to make it onto the next step in your interview process. Hire great people. Reclaim your lunch break.

Structured interview – an easy upgrade to your hiring process

Structured interview – an easy upgrade to your hiring process

1. Understand the job requirement

Specifying the job requirements clearly is the first step in the hiring process. Not only can it help dictate the open dialogue between you as an interviewer and the candidate, but also save your staffing team valuable time in their sourcing efforts.

Writing a good job description requires an understanding of company’s roadmap and timeline, both from a business and product perspective. In other words, address today’s needs, while also envisioning what the role would be a year from now.

For example, let’s say, you are looking to hire a Sales Development Representative. Your current need may be to generate more leads and revenue. However, you envision this hire to transition into a marketing role down the road. What would be the job requirements? Are you looking for someone to setup drip campaign or are you someone to do social marketing,

It may be wise to create a generic job description that emphasizes on expectations and accountabilities, rather than specific tasks, thereby encouraging employees to focus on results rather than job duties. We would suggest that you understand the role and responsibilities and write a more wide-ranging job description. A little extra time spent in compiling a good job description would help your recruiting teams efforts in finding the right candidate, faster!

2. Identify the key competencies 

Identify the most important competencies that should be evaluated during the interview. Define the key competencies that are must have and good to have. It is important that the hiring team understand the skills that are important for the job. Ideally, it would be great to get a candidate who has all the desired key competencies but most often you have limited time and so would have to compromise and pick the best available candidate. It would be helpful if the team has a prioritized list of key competencies that you are looking for in the candidates. Next step is to develop a list of questions to evaluate the competencies. Three to six competencies are typically assessed, and one to three questions might be developed around each competencies.

3. Develop questions around each competency

The next step is to develop questions to evaluate each of the identified competencies. All candidates should be asked a similar set of questions to bring consistency in the interview and evaluation process. For example, a key competency for manager often entails the ability to resolve differences within the team. Plan on asking questions that would give an insight on the candidate’s approach in solving such conflicts. The questions may include something like “Describe a time when you had conflicting ideas about the strategy of a project. Describe the situation? How did you help the team to resolve this conflict?” If it is a software engineering position which requires specific language skills, plan to have a specific question on coding that entails the candidate to write a snippet of code.

4. Define the metric scale 

Metrics are essential in today’s labor force. Not only do they help gauge overall performance, but can also be the driving factor for making hiring decisions. As you structure your interview process, it is important to identify the types of specific behaviors and descriptors that can be used to evaluate the candidate’s actions. These anchors are typically developed around a three or five-point scale. Define the metric scale and format to capture the factors that are important to the job position as well as for the company. Next, define the standards for rating so that all the evaluation across interviewers are normalized. Here are two factors to keep in mind:

  • Relevant metrics to a role: Measure a candidate on similar metrics to what their role entails. For example, if you are interviewing a Marketing candidate, your objective may be to read a sample writing a piece on the spot.
  • Qualitative vs. Quantitative: Being able to reduce subjectivity in the interview process is important. We are a product of our environment and as such, do bring our personal biases in the hiring process. We can reduce these biases by quantifying the candidates on the set of objectives with a well defined metric scale 

In the end, a structured approach to interviewing and decision-making process will help you in scaling the team, faster.

Webinar – 5 ways to accelerate your interview process

Webinar – 5 ways to accelerate your interview process

We had a webinar session (on March 24) where Soham Mehta (Founder of KickStart) and Alex Vendrow (Co-Founder of EasyHir.me) talked about the challenges in hiring and building team, what are specific challenges when you are hiring in scale and how can you bring consistency and accountability in the interview process.

We also demoed the EasyHire.me interview platform showcased how it addresses the challenges mentioned by Soham and Alex:

  1. Bring consistency in the interviewing process
  2. Make objective assessments based on job requirements
  3. Reduce personal biases in the evaluation process
  4. Bring transparency and accountability in the selection process
  5. Increase the effectiveness of the interviews