Automate Your Interviewing Practices for Successful Hiring

When the job market is competitive, as it is now, candidates start making judgments about prospective employers from the moment they visit your career site. It’s no longer just about the candidate trying to stand out in a sea of applicants and wanting to make a good impression on you and your hiring team.

This is a job seeker’s market, and employers must also work on their first impressions. Candidates expect to have a positive interview experience that’s insightful, simple, and organized -- this is a two-way evaluation. If your interview process is too drawn out, lacks structure, or candidates get the impression you haven’t been thorough about assessing your needs, they won’t hesitate to back out. So how do you create a candidate-centric interview process that seamlessly incorporates your organizational needs? You implement interview software.

Interview Software is Critical to the Process

Candidates who are in demand and understand their value aren’t willing to jump through hoops to be a part of your interview process. They’ll move on to another opportunity if your hiring process and interview experience are tedious. A thoughtful, well-prepared interview can move candidates through the funnel at a faster rate and help you better identify the right person for the job.

By adding interviewing tools to your Applicant Tracking Software, you can drastically reduce the administrative burden for your recruiting team and also remove the pressure many hiring managers feel when preparing for an interview. Automation means less friction for candidates and fewer internal errors. The less you have to manage, the easier it is for everyone involved. In fact, 60% of applicants will drop out of the interview process if it’s too long or too disorganized.

Ensuring you’re making the most of your interviews also contributes to your success rate. 80% of employee turnover is due to poor hiring decisions. Proper planning, asking the right questions, a thorough evaluation of candidates, and setting appropriate expectations about the role all contribute the best possible data upon which you will make your decisions. Turnover happens, but taking the right measures ahead of time can dramatically reduce the rate at which that happens. Well-defined interview guides can help you rein in the scope of your questions and pinpoint necessary skill sets. Just as you wouldn’t implement a new business practice without a strategy, you should treat your hiring practices with the same care, and tools can help you accomplish a comprehensive, all-encompassing plan for the best possible interview process.

The ClearCompany Interview Toolkit

We all know what’s required to conduct a smooth and effective interview process, but it’s hard to manage all the details and stakeholders involved to get interviews right consistently. That’s why we at ClearCompany have created a specialized software toolkit to automate, streamline and strengthen your interview process from beginning to end for your candidates, recruiting, and hiring teams. Features of the Interview Toolkit include:

One of the most troublesome aspects of the interview process is coordinating the schedule. When more than just the hiring manager is involved in the interviews, accommodating multiple team members’ schedules and the need for different interview formats and lengths for various stakeholders can cause headaches for the organizer. Multi-interviewer scheduling automatically navigates team availability and incorporates interview format flexibility to solve the puzzle for you. Gone are the back-and-forth emails trying to nail down a time that works for everyone involved. The scheduling tool will manage interviewer schedules and candidate invitations, build complete schedules, send time slots to candidates, and send updates and reminders to keep interviewers and candidates up to speed.

2. Interview Guides

Strategic interview guides provide structure and focus to your interviewers' conversations with your candidates, ensuring both parties get the most out of the interview. Questions are automatically customized to the core competencies of the role you’re hiring for, so you know the interview will stay on track, and you’ll get answers that will enable you to evaluate each candidate meaningfully. Even better? These guides are generated using our industry-leading content and information about your top performers, business goals, and culture with no heavy lifting by your team.

3. Automated, Mobile-Friendly Delivery

Before the interview, mobile-friendly schedules and interview materials are sent to both candidates and your hiring team so that everyone is prepared for the interview. This means everyone involved has everything they need available at their fingertips, no matter where they are.

4. Candidate Scorecards

Interview scorecards provide consistent evaluation criteria specifically structured for the role. The system also accesses information stored in the ClearCompany performance module to identify the characteristics of your top performers and builds these attributes into the interview scorecard. In this way, you can be confident you’re evaluating candidates against proven measures of success for your company. Defining scorecard criteria upfront also allows you to qualitatively and objectively measure candidates against one another to ensure your assessments are fair and unbiased. Results can be shared, and team notes can be added to share insights and collaborate so that when it comes to selection, the hiring manager can make a well-informed decision in which everyone involved has the opportunity to contribute their takeaways and suggestions.

With ClearCompany’s Interview Toolkit, the interview process becomes a streamlined, efficient process that allows for a collaborative experience for all with minimal effort. Free from the trappings of tedious tasks, your team will be better prepared, better focused, and better informed when it comes to making the right hire. In addition, interviewing technology also accelerates the hiring timeline and makes the process as smooth as possible for your candidates. It’s a win-win. Interested in hearing more about how the Interview Toolkit can impact your hiring process? Schedule a demo with our experts today.