My Phone Screen Process

Here's a description of my phone screen process that I wrote a while ago.

Situation

• Hiring people into an established team is different from hiring people to start a team. With an established team, the new hire can rely on the team to provide the coaching, the training, and any other general help. On the other hand, people hired to start teams will need to be much more independent, be able to think on their feet, and be able to solve problems on their own.
• The eventual team will be a reflection of the intial team member(s). If you have medicore initial team members, chances are the team will be mediocre. Ideally, proven, experienced people should "seed" the team, to increase the chances of building a solid team. Without this seed, it will be a gamble, even if you find really good candidates to hire (they won't be proven yet).
• Given the situation, we still have to build the team up with good people. Never start from anything other that "A" people.

Goals of Phone Screening

• Figure out whether you like this person
• Briefly figure out if the person is genuine, or is just listing a bunch of buzz words on the resume
• Figure out if the person knows the basics
• Determine if you would like to work with this person, and if his/her personality would be a good fit with the team
• Weed out the obvious fakes, prima donna's, unmotivated, low energy, etc. people

NOT the Goals of Phone Screening

• The purpose is NOT to do a thorough evaluation of how good the candidate is
• The purpose is NOT to come to a decision on whether or not you should hire based on the phone screen
• The purpose is NOT to spend too much time on anything that could be done better face to face

The main purpose of a phone screen is to figure out if the person is interesting enough to bring in to do an actual interview. Nothing more.

Because of the cost in time of doing interviews (not only your time, but the team's time, HR, upper management, etc.), I usually don't like to bring people in unless I think they are interesting. If I'm not sure whether a person is interesting enough, I will usually pass. One might argue that we'd be letting potentially good candidates fall through, but if you look at the % of people that we interview in this company that we actually want to send offers to, it is a very low %. On the other hand, if you bring someone in (because you didn't do a good enough job at the phone interview or if you are not confident enough in your own judgement), then you end up spending much of your team's time and HR's time that day on a low percentage gamble.

Guidelines

• Pay as much attention (if not more) on how the candidate answers a question as the answer itself. The level of responsiveness and confidence will reveal a lot about his/her intelligence and maturity
• Try to find out what is important to a candidate, what he/she is passionate about. But don't ask it directly because you will get prepackaged answers. If you can figure it out, you'll have a much better sense of whether or not the candidate will be motivated when working in your group. If her passion is aligned with your group's work, she will be motivated. If not, she won't.
• Pay attention to how ambitious this person is. The more ambitious the person is, the less you'll have to do drive the person to improve.
• Do not spend more than 1/2 and hour total on the phone with the person. It should not take you longer than that to figure out if the person is interesting enough to bring in. Sometimes it takes longer because the candidate takes too long to answer questions, in which case you should cut the candidate early anyways.
• For basic engineering questions, pick 2 or 3 that will give you a good feeling of how "senior" this person is. Do not attempt to scope out the breadth or depth of his knowledge.
• Ask them how much they want. No sense in spending more time with this candidate if you cannot meet his minimum requirements. (only if you're the hiring manager!)

Normal Flow

1. Introduction, tell each other about yourselves
2. Get to know the person a little better, what's important to him/her, etc. (if feeling not good, wrap up early)
3. Quiz (briefly) on the basics (if feeling not good, wrap up early)
4. Sell the company, sell the team, get the candidate more interested in working with us
5. Answer questions
6. If you're pretty sure you want the person to come in for an interview, ask for salary expectations (only if you're the hiring manager!)

Common Questions

• What interests you about working in this field?
• Where do you see yourself 1, 3, and 5 years from now?
• What is the most important thing to you in a work environment? (If they ask you to be more specific, just ask them to tell you the first thing that pops into their head when you asked the question)
• What is the difference between a good engineer and an exceptional engineer? A lot of people will interpret this as a question of the difference between an average engineer and a good engineer, but that's not what we are looking for