Interview Process Archives - Page 2 of 4 - EasyHire.me

How Well Do Your Candidates Interview?

June 23, 2018 Jeremy Hoffman

Grill candidates with video interview prep to cool their nerves and increase confidence on game day

Whether you’re working in a search firm setting or a corporate environment as a contract recruiter, think for a moment how much of your time you spend sourcing, screening, and recruiting candidates. A lot. Now think: how much time do you spend preparing your candidates for actual interviews?

Before in-person interviews are scheduled between the candidates you’ve recruited and the companies you represent, it goes without saying you’ve already done a whole lot of work developing the matches, the “good fits.” However, understanding the role and its context within the company and confirming a genuine candidate is great due diligence, but is it enough?

Question for you: “How well do your candidates interview?” If you don’t know, you need this article.

Preparing candidates for real-life interviewing is critical to your success. Using a video interview platform allows candidates to comfortably practice on their own time and gives you the opportunity to review and provide feedback where needed.

1: Record, Review, Refine…

In the few days, hours, and minutes leading up to the interview, everyone gets nervous. No matter how much coaching you provide, it’s simply how we’re wired. Video interviews can help simulate some of the same pressure felt in in-person interview. Additionally, get used to curveballs. Prepare candidates for questions they may not have thought of candidate can be asked questions they might not expect. Being able to practice this scenario over and over will create flexibility in candidates’ responses.

2: “Why do you want to work here?”

The well-prepared candidate should know the company he or she is interviewing for better than their own resume. If candidates don’t prepare for this question, it will not only be obvious, it may be a dealbreaker for their candidacy. Asking this question and reviewing it in a recorded video interview will help your candidate avoid the longest most awkward silence ever.

3. Ready, Set…

Video interviewing platforms such as Easyhire can simulate the challenging interview environments by prompting candidates with similar questions in a live or pre-recorded scenario. Alongside timed assessment, multiple-choice, extended text, including coding / whiteboarding windows, written response, and others, you can be more confident in your rockstar candidates on their big day.

4. Go with confidence!

Even with years of experience and qualifications a candidate may have, don’t take chances and assume your candidates will do great until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Some may be ready to go off the bat. However, many candidates may have been out of the market for a while or are entering a new industry. With new technology, preparing candidates with video interviews may be innovative to some, but it’s really just common sense.

-Jeremy Hoffman

VP Business Development

EasyHire

10 Questions You Should Never be Asked in a Video Interview

February 13, 2018 Dana Rocha

Having a set of question ready can be handy especially when it comes to video interviews. But it doesn’t mean that you can just ask any question that comes to mind. There are certain questions that should never be asked during an interview and we have here a list of questions that should ensure that you do not ask the wrong questions.

Do You Have Kids?

This is an innocent enough question and does come up during small talk. It may seem like a harmless enough question and some Hiring Managers may even use this question to connect to the candidate and put them at ease. But if you try to analyze it, asking candidates about their kids isn’t exactly related to the job. A candidate’s capabilities do not lie on whether or not they have kids. And if this question is connected with the jobs hours required, then you are better off asking the candidate about availability and stating that the company has rigid about hours.

Do You Speak Another Language at Home?

Again, this may seem like an innocent enough question but when it’s an interview, you need to take into consideration that this can be considered as discrimination. You typically learn their language skills as you conduct the interview and so asking about other languages that the candidate speaks at home becomes a bit redundant.

Do You Have Any Disabilities?

Certain disabilities are pretty obvious and it can be easily seen by the interviewer. But, there are certain disabilities that are not that apparent but it doesn’t mean that you can outright ask about it. Even though, this can be something that the company would, of course, want to know, asking someone about their disability can still be considered a discrimination. Asking the candidate about their capabilities is much more appropriate and if the candidate does have a disability that can affect his/her job, then it should be brought up after a job offer is made.

Funny Questions From the Internet.

Hiring managers sometimes want to make it fun for the candidates and ask questions that they get from the internet. While this kind of questions makes a good reliever of tension, it does not actually help in the process of evaluating the candidate. The questions should be relevant to the job every time. And if your reason the reason is wanting to be able to look into the personality of the candidate, then that should probably be the job of a trained psychologist.

What Did You Hate About Your Last Job?

A question like this may seem reasonable enough but this is also a question that outright opens an opportunity for you candidate to become negative, and that is not very professional. The candidate obviously had some problems with the last job that they have got and that is why they are applying for a new one. So instead of asking this question, you can ask them what their expectations may be in their new job. It is a much more positive approach to finding out what type of environment or job the candidate loves doing.

What is Your Religion?

Asking someone about their faith does not help you in analyzing their true capabilities, so never go there. It may seem like small talk for you, but during an interview, there is no reason for you to ask this. You should only ask about a candidates religion if there are certain events or even a task that will be assigned to them that may affect them or is not allowed in their religious customs.

How old are you?

This is something that can easily found out in the candidate’s resume or bio and it should not ask during the interview. It may be considered as age discrimination and again that is something that should be avoided. Just try to know the candidate’s age beforehand and do not include this in the interview questions.

Have you ever been arrested?

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty and yes, it is illegal to ask someone if they have ever been arrested. Finding out about this info is easy enough and the candidate should still have the right to prove himself or herself because their capabilities aren’t directly connected to their having been arrested in the past.

Have you ever filed for bankruptcy?

Asking someone about their financial status are off-limits. While this may seem like a question that can be asked harmlessly, it may be something of a sensitive topic to the candidate. And again, this is a question that wouldn’t actually allow hiring managers to measure a candidate’s capabilities so try to get more relevant questions instead.

How often did you take sick days in your last job?

If there is a time gap on a candidate’s resume, then it is okay to ask what happened during this period. But asking outright about how many sick days a candidate has taken is not okay because it is still related to their disability and is another question that should not be asked. Asking about pre-existing medical conditions if perfectly fine though once the job has been offered to the candidate to ensure that there are no obstacles in the candidate’s fulfillment of the role.

It can be a bit tricky to pick the right questions when it comes to video interviews but EasyHire.me actually comes with a library of good questions and any hiring manager can use this if in doubt. And you can even make it easier by conducting a recorded video interview and this way, managers can ensure that hiring managers are asking the right questions.

Mobile Video Interviews: New Feature Release

The EasyHire.me Team is thrilled to announce the general availability of its mobile interface for on-demand interviews. Job seekers can now use their iPhone or Android phones/tablets to take on-demand interviews anytime and anywhere. The Mobile Video Interviews are recorded and made available for grading and sharing among the hiring team upon completion.

Benefits of Mobile Video Interviews:

No webcam, no problem. Candidates without a computer or webcam are still able to complete video interview via their mobile device.

Interview anytime, anywhere. Need to interview while vacationing or during your lunch break? Sure! Simply pull out your smartphone and take your interview anytime, anywhere.

High Definition video recording. Modern smartphones have better cameras than most computers. Candidates can reliably capture high definition video.

How it works:

EasyHire.me Mobile Video Interviews do not require candidates to download and install any custom mobile applications. This feature works right from the build-in Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android) browsers, making it taking interviews easier than ever!

Mobile video interviews enable candidates to complete their assessments faster, so the hiring team can accelerate its hiring decision and ultimately the overall hiring process.

At EasyHire.me we strongly believe that mobile video interview technologies give hiring teams the much-needed edge in today’s competitive talent market.

Click the Product Update link to see all of our updates.

3 Surefire ways to ensure candidate drop off

March 16, 2017 Jeremy Hoffman

Who are you? What do you do?

The best candidates are aligned with your mission but how can you ensure the candidate is on board with your goals if they don’t know what they are. The term elevator pitch is often used indicating you have 30 seconds to tell someone what you do and why it’s important and what’s in it for them. Too often you have job descriptions that are written by the legal department. In that case, the candidate is going to judge you not a great place to work and move on. Your brief statement of who you are and what you are trying to do and how the candidate will play a role should be the first paragraph vs. can lift 50lbs, can work weekends etc.

Broken Connections

A link that takes the candidate to your home page of your website or at best /careers is a surefire way to ensure some of the best candidates to abandon. The candidate ideally should be able to go directly the application process right from the source for the job advertised. You should be tracking how many views you are getting vs. applicants. This will give you an idea if you are hitting your conversion benchmark or if something is off the will give you a heads up that something may need to be tweaked.

No credit needed!

An expression of interest in a job is not a mortgage application. You need to ensure you convert the best candidates as soon as possible. The best candidates don’t have an afternoon to fill out their full employment history (which should never be required if the candidate has a resume), the reason for leaving and their home address for the last 7 years. Ideally, you should capture their Linkedin profile and a few questions to qualify. With a combination of smart precise screening and on-demand video interviewing you can have high-quality candidates for the manager to review in no time.

5 recruiting stats that will influence your hiring in 2017

February 5, 2017 Anjana Manian

The recruiting statistics on hiring, employer branding, diversity, and culture will influence and impact your ability to hire top talent. As a smart talent professional, you should watch the recruiting trends to plan and prepare the strategy for the year.

We studied the trends in HR & recruiting and picked a few that matter the most to recruiters and hiring managers to stay ahead in the competitive talent market.

69% of recruiters reported that their company’s hiring has increased in the past year [Source: Jobvite]
As per this stats, hiring is strong and is expected to grow in the year 2017. 95% of recruiters say hiring will be as or more competitive and 35% of recruiters anticipate filling 100 job openings this year, compared to last years 26%.

If you want to win the talent over your competitors, adopt new ways to find passive and active job seekers – scout for talent in social media, Quora, Reddit and quickly move the candidates through the interview workflow. Leverage recorded video interviews for pre-screening applicants and live videos to interview remote candidates. Start gathering analytics on every stage of the interview process and constantly improve the process.
67% of active and passive job seekers say that when they’re evaluating companies and job offers, it is important that the company has a diverse workforce [Source: Glassdoor]
Diversity is an important factor that influences the job seeker’s decision. Job applicants spend a lot of time reading reviews on Glassdoor about the company culture and team composition before even going to the interview.Incorporating diversity into your recruiting strategy is essential to building a diverse workforce. Your talent pool should include applicants from various background and your interview process should not eliminate candidates based on unconscious biases.

This is where the talent management platform like EasyHire.me helps – it provides a framework to conduct a structured interview, defines key criteria based on the job, asks the same set of questions across candidates. It brings visibility and accountability to the whole hiring process and enables you to make evidence-based hiring.
69% would not take a job with a company with a bad reputation, even, if they are unemployed [Source: Glassdoor]
Company brand matters a lot. People often identify themselves with the work they do and the company they work in. A company with a good reputation that is focusing on providing value to humanity in some form and is associated with a social cause is seen as an attractive place to work.

Build an employer brand that identifies your team and company. Promote your company’s brand and promote it in your recruiting process. Educate your interviewers about your company brand and train them to showcase the employer brand talk about it in their interviews. Job seekers evaluate the company based on how the interviewers talk about their job, role, company, and culture. Train your interviewers to showcase the employer brand.
61% of employees say new job realities differ from expectations set during the interview process [Source: Glassdoor]
A job interview is a two-way process. Applicants want to see an attractive job preview with a detailed job description that actually reflects their expected day to day work. During the interview process, the job seekers try to find insight about the work, culture, and team. A transparent recruiting process would help the applicants evaluate if they fit in the job role.

Train your interviewers to be open and transparent with the candidates and share details on expectations and realities about the job. Being open and transparent about the job, company, and the culture sets up everyone for long-term success.
56% of recruiters attribute lengthy hiring practices is holding managers back from filling positions [Source: MRINetwork]
Recruiters attributing lengthy hiring practices is holding managers back from filling positions. A job seeker is typically interviewing at multiple places at the same time. The lengthy interview process may result in losing the applicant’s interest and often times lose out the talent to competitors.

48% of recruiters say they typically conduct 3 interviews per candidate, Conducting 3 interviews per candidate works fine if you are hiring in a small volume. If you are hiring in scale, then this stat is definitely going to make hiring a long and painful process. Instead, leverage video interviews for pre-screening and cut down the number of interviews per candidate.

We hope that these recruiting stats and our analysis on these trends will help you in building the right recruiting strategy.

Why do you need a good interview process?

July 20, 2016 Easyhire Team

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!

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

June 20, 2016 Easyhire Team

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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

June 14, 2016 Easyhire Team

“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.

Reclaim your lunch break

April 21, 2016 Easyhire Team

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.

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