How to Phone Interview Candidates For Your Recruiting Agency Clients

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It's Inevitable! You have to conduct phone interviews of candidates that you've sourced for your clients! It's a must. You can't just send over resumes blindly of people responding to your craigslist ad to the client and call it good. It doesn't work that way. If you want to win and win fast and efficiently you've got to phone screen your candidates before they ever make it into an interview at the client's office. PERIOD/NO EXCEPTIONS.

The three main lines of questioning/discussion that I utilize on any given phone interview. This can be modified for any call as all phone interviews are unique and have their own flow to them.

Your main goal here is to identify, IS THIS SOMEONE THAT I WANT TO REPRESENT TO MY CLIENT? That is the question you're asking yourself the whole time you're conducting an interview, and the way I see it is that you're building them up. You're starting from the bottom up building this person in your head to be a qualified sturdy foundation candidate or a flimsy and unreliable fall over candidate. You're going to get one or the other by the end of the call if you've done things properly.

Never approach this like you're a friend, you're not a friend, you're doing business. You can ACT like a friend, and be cordial, which is completely appropriate but this is totally strategic and you are here as an investigator to get information on behalf of someone that's paying you a fee to find the best candidate. Remember it is 100% in your best interest to send the client the best candidates. Sending them candidates you have a feeling will fail is an absolute mistake, as is sending them candidates that you know are not qualified.

Below are the elements I utilize to determine if a candidate is foundationally sound or not.


GENERAL DEMEANOR: So this is all the small stuff. How they pickup the phone, what they talk like, are they tired, are they excited, happy, are they half listening, are they talking over you. Find out if they understand proper grammar and use words correctly. Do they let you ask questions or are they trying to interview you? Do they come across as approachable or unapproachable and rude or cold. Judging an applicant's general demeanor will tell you A LOT about them and a lot about how the rest of the phone call will probably go. Remember you're judging general demeanor throughout the entire call pretty much.


JOB SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE: Okay, so here's where we're just asking the candidate some questions, specific to the job they're applying for. So we're going to want to find out if they're highly familiar with the software this position uses, or if they've never touched a computer. Do they know how to drive or will this be their first time hauling a load in a CDL truck? Ya know....the basic stuff. We want to dig deep here and get THEM talking. It always means more when it comes from them and not us. We want to find out if they really know what they're talking about, and shoot maybe even teach me something I didn't know about the forklift they've driven, that'll show me a good candidate.

PAST JOB HISTORY: So as the conversation goes on, usually its a narrative about their resume, so I like to basically just go line by line down the resume and discuss what it was like to work at X,Y,Z companies, and why they left. This is pretty much the easiest thing ever. Ask, what it was like to work there, what they did there, what they liked about it, if anything was bad about it and why / on what terms did they leave. If there are lots of job hops on their resume (5+ more jobs in a year or two) that's a red flag so ask a bunch of questions, about why they had all of these moves. A yellow flag is someone that's had jobs in like 5 cities around the nation in two years...USE COMMON SENSE, ask the hard questions, you'll never meet the candidate, just ask, you need to find out if this is a quality candidate to send to your client.

TRIGGER QUESTIONS: There are questions that can be asked to reveal A LOT......

Some employers in general labor ask these on a standard basis, ESPECIALLY if you're employing heavy duty machine employees or drivers etc. Other positions ask these questions as well if someone is going to working in an office, handling lots of money or access to credit card information etc.

1. Would anything come up on a full criminal history background check?

2. Would you be able to pass a drug test currently?

These are FAIR GAME questions when it comes to private companies that have policies in place that engage in drug testing and background checks.