What do you do when you’re faced with hundred of resumes and need to find the perfect candidate? No one wants to sit and scan through resumes for hours on end. Not to mention how this can take weeks to finish. But how do you possibly go from hundreds to the one best candidate for your role? A common issue heard from recruiters is the overwhelming feeling associated with narrowing down their massive candidate pool. Hiring teams must ask the question of how to get from hundreds of applicants to a smaller group without losing the quality candidates.
Reviewing lots of resumes gets boring and tiring. Further, they can only give you so much insight into what a candidate is like. How much can you really learn about a candidate through a sheet of paper? Making a switch from reviewing resumes to something newer, more efficient, and engaging can make a huge difference in your hiring experience. Speed interviews provide the perfect solution to this problem!
What is a Speed Interview?
Speed interviews offer employers the opportunity to get to know their candidates in a short amount of time. Employers meet with a candidate for 5–10 minutes to get to know them and chat about their experience. After, the employer jumps right into the next interview with the next candidate. The short, consecutive nature allows for a much more engaging yet efficient screening.
Interviewers can use this short time frame to ask candidates a couple questions to get to know them. Ask questions that focus on determining the candidate’s level in soft skills. That way, candidates aren’t regurgitating information already found on their resume.
Save Time Narrowing Down Your Candidate Pool
Using speed interviews can help your company reduce your large candidate pool in an effortless and quick way. Since they provide you with a better way to get to know your candidates, it can make it much easier to choose who moves forward in the interview process.
Conducting speed interviews in your initial round of screening can shorten your time spent on deciding which candidates to move forward. Seeing where candidates line up in terms of their skills compared to what’s expected of the ideal candidate makes it easy to qualify or disqualify candidates. By using speed interviews, your hiring team can make fast decisions and find the perfect candidate without spending a week looking through resumes.
Speed interviews can also help you reduce the amount of time lost to no-shows. With a huge pool of candidates, the hiring process is already long enough. Waiting for candidates who never show up can further lengthen your interview process. Speed interviews ensure that you will not be dealing with this problem. As soon as you’re done with your current interview, you can hop into the next one with whichever candidate is next in line. Having a queue of ready candidates ensures you’re not wasting time, and helps avoid backlogs caused by missed interviews.
Finding the Best Quality Candidates
When working through a massive pool of candidates, you obviously have lots of options. It is important to ensure that when choosing who moves forward those people are truly the best of the group. Otherwise, you risk losing out on some of the best people for your role.
Some applicants are stronger resume writers than others. A candidate can have the perfect skill set needed to succeed in the job position, but may portray their abilities poorly on their resume. By meeting candidates and interviewing them, you can see their true abilities, especially in their soft skills. When you meet each applicant, you can rest assured that you didn’t miss any top quality candidates.
This could also be an issue the other way around. A candidate may over exaggerate their own skills in their resume. So while they may seem like the perfect candidate on paper, they could actually be less than qualified in reality. There’s no way to catch this other than meeting the applicants and speaking with them yourself. Using speed interviews is the most effective and easiest way to find the top talent in your pool of applicants.
Speed Interview vs. Resume Scanning
Speed interviews offer the chance to see the applicants’s skills that reviewing resumes cannot. Employers want candidates who showcase enthusiasm and commitment for the role. These type of traits are difficult to gauge through a candidate’s resume. By using speed interviews to conduct your initial screening, you’ll be able to see if they have that kind of enthusiasm you are looking for.
Speed interviews also offer a more consistent process in evaluating your candidates. When you have multiple recruiters looking at resumes, there can be lots of inconsistency in the evaluation. Recruiters may have different ideas on what the ideal candidate looks like. By using speed interviews, you can have multiple interviewers ask the same questions and use the same applicant rating system. This ensures all candidates are evaluated in a fair manner. Consistent evaluation ensures that you truly are finding the best candidates. You won’t have to worry about skipping over top talent due to inconsistencies in criteria.
Using speed interviews in your initial stages of screening can ensure that you’re finding the best talent in your candidate pool, while saving you time and stress from screening a large number of candidates. If you’re currently facing an overwhelming number of applicants and want to try something new and effective, try out Hellohire. Hellohire offers an easy-to-use speed interview platform, perfect for screening lots of candidates. Learn more about the platform by requesting a free demo.