One of the main challenges companies face during the hiring process is ineffective interview evaluation, or better candidate scoring. The time and effort it takes to find acceptable candidates are offset by manual interview scoring, lost data, and unconscious bias. Oftentimes, that can result in hiring the wrong candidate, which can be detrimental to a business.
In fact, the average cost of a bad hiring decision is 30% of the employee's first-year expected earnings.
Hiring managers struggle to make interviewing quick, efficient, and suitable for both the company and the candidate. While trying to achieve this goal, they may overlook other important aspects of the interviewing process that end up causing a high churn rate.
In this article, we'll discuss three important steps that can be integrated into your hiring system to make interviewing more efficient.
What Is Interview Scoring?
Evaluating a candidate during and after the interview is a complex process. To make sure the interviewer accesses and analyzes as much information as possible without being biased, it's important to have a scoring system.
Many hiring managers use interview scoring cards. These scorecards allow you to score a candidate's qualifications for the position. A typical scorecard has a consistent rating system and includes:
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Specific competencies for the job
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Criteria evaluating how well a candidate fits in the organizational culture
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Reasons and/or areas for concern
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Notes section
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Recommendations (hire/not hire)
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Total score
The main goal of a scorecard is to ensure consistent and objective candidate assessment throughout the interviewing process.
By implementing these scorecards, hiring experts gain clear criteria on how to assess candidates and determine whether they are a good fit. This keeps bias to a minimum while creating a uniform interviewing methodology for the entire hiring team.
How to Improve Your Interview Scoring Process
According to Glassdoor, the average hiring process in the United States takes 23.8 days. A consistent interview scoring system can speed up the process, allowing new talent to contribute to the company's profitability faster.
By improving your interview scoring process, you can decrease the hiring time, reduce the churn rate, and keep top talent from looking at other options. Here are a few effective ways to do it.
1. Ask the Right Questions
No matter how many systems you implement to streamline the interview, questions are always the pillar of the process. The right questions can make it easier to score your interviews, improve the interview structure, and keep the conversation on the right track.
Arranging your questions around certain scoring criteria can help you evaluate the interviewee quicker and improve the efficiency of your scoring card.
Creating the right interview questions can be complicated especially when you need to make them personalized. By taking advantage of an interview question bank, you can simplify the process and boil it down to adding a personal touch based on each interviewer's individual data.
2. Keep Unbiased Records
A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology found that 60% of interviewers know within the first 15 minutes of the interview if the candidate is suitable for the position. Such quick decisions are usually based on unconscious bias and lead to high turnover rates.
Interview bias can stem from:
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Stereotyping
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First impression
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Cultural noise
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Contrast with other candidates
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Body language
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And much more
One of the most common issues is question inconsistency. Instead of asking all candidates similar questions, the interviewer unconsciously adjusts the questions to suit each interviewee, thus missing the whole picture.
Eliminating unconscious bias is tough, if not impossible. If interviewers were to ignore their feelings and hunches entirely, the interviewing process would feel robotic and ineffective. To keep bias to a minimum without taking the human element out of the picture, you can take advantage of an interview platform.
An efficient interview platform allows you to remain unbiased by providing direct insight into:
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Questions asked by the interviewer
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How candidates respond
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The score deserved by the candidate
It also eliminates inconsistency in questioning, giving all candidates an equal opportunity at the role. Overall, the platform stimulates the interviewer to avoid bias while making a correct decision.
3. Use an Interview Scoring Platform
A high-quality interview scoring platform is designed specifically to streamline your interviewing process. One of its highly demanded features is an interview scorecard. The scorecard allows you to collect data during an interview and measure it against selected criteria.
After the interview, the platform helps measure the context and answers to questions, allowing interviewers to make quick and unbiased decisions.
An interview scoring platform doesn't just streamline each interviewing process. It helps you design a stronger interviewing system by implementing consistency, reducing manual work, and minimizing bias.
Simplify Your Interview Scoring Process with interviewIA
While not directly, the quality of interview scoring affects the company's profitability. Improving it could help you simplify the hiring process, decrease hiring time, and ensure the right hire.
An interview scoring platform like interviewIA can help you do all the above while tweaking your entire hiring process, improving your interviewing system, and providing valuable insight into the company's hiring methods.
To learn more about interview scoring with interviewIA, contact our team at any convenient time.
