Once you have a pool of candidates that have the desired skills and experience on paper, you will be filtering candidates for interviews. Many partners start by calling candidates and asking preliminary questions over the phone. If you do need to do this, be clear on your filtering criteria.
Telephone interviews
When conducting telephone interviews, it is useful for companies to go through employment history to understand why the candidate is looking to make a move. For candidates, telephone interviews are a good opportunity to ask questions to understand the role and remuneration on offer.
Face to face interviews
At Jola, we use a set of behavioural questions for face to face interviews. They generate real examples and allow us to probe further into the experience of each candidate. Can you tell me about a time when you…? How did you handle this? We look for evidence of each of our criteria and note down the positive, negative or no evidence presented. We avoid hypothetical questions and use probing questions to drill down further into answers given.
Values
As part of our recruitment process we also look for our own core values in potential candidates. How well does each candidate demonstrate the customer first value? We create a matrix, so we can note down answers to each question and give each answer a score. We assess each candidate based on our criteria and rank top candidates for second interviews.
Give them a task
Some candidates have excellent verbal skills, they demonstrate the values, they have great examples to hand to validate relevant experience and core skills. We set our candidates a task to complete. The task is always relevant to the position advertised for and is a great way to evaluate second round interview candidates. How well did they understand the task? How much research did they do? What questions did they ask/assumptions did they make? If this was done on the job, how happy would you be with their performance? How do they receive feedback?
Jola is a wholesale provider of internet connectivity, hosted voice and 4G solutions to the voice and data channel. To find out more about us…
