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Are you looking for a job? Are you looking for the right consultant?
During the COVID-19 crisis with the stay-at-home order, remote interviewing has become a requirement, not a luxury.
And if you are the job candidate or consultant, you need to brush up on your remote interviewing skills too.
For advice on the subject, I turned to two hiring experts that hired me remotely to edit books for them in the past.
Tech tools for hiring such as Zoom, Skype and Go-to-Meeting, just to name a few, have been a boon to remote job and consultant interviews. Seeing the candidate is so much better than just interviewing them by phone.
When asking questions, focus on understanding their past experience about working from home as it is a different experience, advises Dana Borowka, author of the books, Cracking the Personality Code, Cracking the Business Code, and Cracking the High-Performance Team Code. He is the CEO of Lighthouse Consulting Services.
“If you need workers, using remote interviewing will help with the social distancing that is needed during this time,” says Borowka. “You can successfully screen candidates remotely with the right process and tools and limit the in-person interaction.”
However, remote interviews are more troublesome than in-person interviews.
“Most companies do a terrible job preparing managers and executives to hire effectively, including remotely interviewing candidates, says Barry Deutsch, a partner at IMPACT Hiring Solutions and co-author of the book You’re Not The Person I Hired.
“In most companies, hiring is not a process, it's a random set of arbitrary meetings where each individual manager does interviewing in their own misguided way,” says Deutsch. “The minute you turn hiring into a process, train all your managers, and put some rigor behind it, then hiring accuracy starts becoming more reliable.”
For more reliable interviews, beware that sometimes the technology goes awry.
“One company we help had a bad interview session with a candidate because the technology was not working right,” said Borowka. “They were just going to throw out that candidate. That is a huge mistake. With our assistance, they re-interviewed the candidate when the technology was more cooperative.”
Deutsch says the most difficult part of interviewing through video is that the process of conducting testing where you ask them to do something to validate the skill they are claiming, such as welding, electronic soldering, physical use of hands in a manufacturing, construction, or assembly role.
“This is now missing unless you bring them in a for a final test before hiring,” says Deutsch. “For all other roles, especially at the professional and managerial level, written tests, role plays, case studies, and situational examples are still important to validate, verify, and vet the candidate responses.”
Since you’re not meeting people face to face, the use of assessments becomes even more important.
“Never hire another candidate, especially a remote candidate, until you put them through an in-depth workstyle and personality assessment,” says Deutsch.
He advises that it doesn’t matter the level of the position. You should test every final candidate.
Both hiring experts agreed that hiring for attitude, behavior, and cultural fit is just as important as measuring whether the candidate can perform to your expectations.
“Anything less than five hours of effective interviewing is nothing more than closet psychology,” adds Deutsch. “You’re just guessing what’s behind the curtain.”
