Do you dread getting on the phone with candidates?
Traditional phone (or video) interviews are time-consuming and involve an internal engineer and a candidate collaboratively coding. They can take forever to schedule and take away your engineering team’s time they could be spending on building your product.
It’s clear that having a step before a candidate comes onsite is crucial…but is the dreaded phone interview the right answer?
Many leading organizations are actually moving away from manual phone interviews into automated technical interviews using a coding assessment platform like CodeSignal.
Why?
It saves your engineering team time, reduces scheduling headaches, and can reveal much more data than traditional phone interviews.
Of course you care about candidate experience right? You might have the built-in assumption that candidates, especially senior candidates, won’t want to take an assessment. Even Tigran Sloyan, our co-founder, had this assumption!
But, what’s incredible is that some of the organizations we’ve been working with have set up an experiment. They ask the candidate whether they’d rather do a traditional phone interview or the automated technical assessment. It turns out that more than half of candidates choose to do the automated option, even more senior candidates.
It actually makes sense when you think about engineering personality types. Most engineers are introverts, so live person-to-person interviews can be daunting and stressful. An automated setting enables the candidate to take the test in whatever environment gives them confidence.
Plus, traditional phone interviews typically involve “thinking out loud” which is not something engineers traditionally have to do. They don’t have to code and explain in the job, so why should they have to do it in the technical interview? It creates unnecessary stress!
Candidates should not be spending time learning how to interview! This is not their skillset. Instead, providing an automated technical interview enables them to showcase their skills in an unbiased way!
Candidates don’t want to waste their time or get frustrated. That’s why having a professionally designed assessment is critical. You don’t want to introduce bias or have questions that don’t make sense in your assessments or you will turn off candidates.
Automating technical assessments can totally replace phone or video interviews and transform your hiring process.
This blog post is based on the thirtieth episode of the data-driven recruiting podcast hosted by CodeSignal co-founders Sophia Baik and Tigran Sloyan. You can find and listen to this specific episode here or check out the video version embedded above.