4 Types of Candidate Interviews and their Challenges!

Eventually it’s always the interview that takes you closest to hiring decisions. While for many years telephonic and video interviews have been used, seldom have they been able to replace face-to-face interviews. 

Now the biggest challenge within hiring has always remained Interview scheduling and ensuring that interviews are done in the defined time-frame. In the 80s and 90s, interview was considered to be the most holiest of the commitment by a jobseeker. Being before time, well prepared, all documentation, right attire etc was sacrosanct. No candidate would ever dare reaching late or not prepared about the role, company and with clear answers on why they were keen to seek a job in that particular company. Fast forward this to the 2000s and then post 2010; things have gotten significantly deteriorated. Interview is no longer the holy grail that candidates want to respect or commit to.

This indifferent and casual attitude towards interviews have made the entire process highly unpredictable and with full of surprises and shocks; especially to recruiters who are responsible for ensuring interviews happen.

While selling our Interview Scheduling solution in the market, we have been exposed to several stories of horror and despair that we have heard from recruiters and their bosses. This blog attempts to list down some of our findings.

There are essentially 4 types of interview scheduling, arranged by their degree of difficulty:  

1. One-on-one Hiring Manager-Candidate interviews
2. Multiple-dates, time-slots Interviews
3. Mass Single-day Interviews
4. Digital Interviews 

One-on-one Hiring Manager-Candidate interviews

By far the most painful from scheduling perspective. Because, for recruiters they have to deal with moving targets at both the ends; Hiring Manager as well as Candidates. This type of scheduling is so unpredictable that no full-proof technology solutions are available. Unpredictability comes in because of last minutes schedule changes from both hiring managers and candidates without and prior warning. If even there were opportunities to give advance notice, neither the hiring manager or candidate would make extra efforts to update such changes. Human characteristics of forgetfulness or dishonesty further makes this scheduling the most painful in the hiring world.

Mass Single-day Interviews (Drives, Walk-ins etc)

By far the most used scheduling model by high-volume hiring companies. In the recent past, this model has also been adopted by low & medium volume hiring companies, because of its process simplicity and considerably lower effort. One of the biggest advantage here is that one side of the process is guaranteed; that is availability of the hiring manager on the scheduled day. Then the uncertainty only remains on the candidate side. However, the average footfalls on such drives and walk-ins have largely hovered around 50%. This is the percentage of people who confirmed they would be participating in the drive. This also means there is an average No-show rate of 50% and which is very high. Drives & Walk-ins are more expensive to conduct than other forms of scheduling. Because a lot of coordinating, hiring manager time, infrastructure, premises and pre-planning effort of recruiters is consumed. Attempts have been made by recruiters to enhance the footfalls, by doing rigorous multiple follow-ups, re-confirming, cajoling, requesting, pleading, begging etc candidates to show up. But candidates have their own reasons for not showing up; they have their priorities too…well a few genuine ones; most not making it due to laziness, casual attitude, indifference; all with no remorse whatsoever.

Multi-dates, time-slots interviews

This is relatively simpler scheduling process; whereby the recruiter first seeks 2-3 three dates from the hiring manager and then seeks 2-3 time slots each day. Once this schedule is available, the recruiter check the preference from the candidates to choose from the available dates and time-slots therein. The probability of finding a mutually favorable date & time then becomes fairly high. Although the last minute change could also impact this model, the impact on the process is not so severe; as the next best available date & time is already available to the recruiter for a quick re-schedule.

Digital Interviews

Since the 8-10 years availability of digital technology has reduced dependence on face-to-face meetings for the initial stages of the assessment. Many digital tools for Recorded Audio, Recorded Video, Live Video etc are being used for pre-screening the candidates before scheduling them for face-to-face interviews. However, since the recent past, even these methods have starting showing a lot of scheduling challenges. Most of these tools (except Recorded Audio interviews), connect to the candidates inviting them to do the interview via emails, SMSs or mobile apps. Due to over leverage of tools like Emails & SMSs, which have been extensively leveraged for promotional activities; their open rates have gone down significantly. Today most email reaches Spam folder further decreasing the chances of candidate seeing the recruiter’s email in the first place. Eventually the recruiters have to resort to picking up the phone and calling the candidates requesting them to open their emails and attempt their pre-screening video interviews.

All of the above scheduling are not only wasting huge productive hours of the recruiters, but impacting the turn-around-time of the hiring result. This in turn impacting the quality of hire and cost of hire.

While all is not gloom within the interview scheduling domain. Smart tools like Callify.ai, a recruitment voicebot have built solutions after gather huge amounts of candidate insights and behavioral data that helps it recommend the right channel, right time, frequency of follow-ups and algorithm based reminder systems that increase the footfalls and decrease no-shows on almost all forms of the Interview scheduling methods as described above.

A quick demo of Callify.ai may just help you address your ongoing interview scheduling challenges; because you will have to interview before hiring