5 Ways Digital Interviewing Can Speed Up Your Screening Process

In a fast-paced recruiting world where candidates are behind the wheel, a strong time-to-hire rate is more important than ever. But according to a recent Glassdoor study, the average time-to-hire rate in the United States is 23.8 days, up almost one full day since 2014.

Longer time-to-hire rates put a burden on candidates—they’re less likely to stick around waiting if they don’t hear back from you, or they may hear from a competitor first. Sluggish hiring also puts weight on your bottom line, as positions remain unfilled for up to months at a time.

To improve your time-to-hire rates, it’s best to start making some key changes at the beginning of your interview process—the screening. This is where recruiters face the biggest influx of candidates and the biggest risk of losing top talent to the infamous “black hole.”

At Take the Interview, we use digital interviewing to help hundreds of companies speed up their screening process and get the right candidates in for those in-person interviews. This allows candidates to answer and record their responses to specified interview questions in their own time. Here are five things we learned along the way:

1. Standardizes Screenings & Big Time Savings

Traditional phone screenings typically last anywhere from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours, and that adds up if you’re focusing on high-volume hiring. That time may not always be well spent: conversations could end up lagging on, leaving you with not enough information to properly evaluate candidates the way you need to. Furthermore, it’s easy to wander from the path of a structured interview and ask each candidate different questions, which has been shown to be far less effective in evaluating performance.

Digital interviewing allows recruiters to stick to the questions that really matter during the screening process. By identifying your interview questions and setting time limits for candidate answers beforehand, you can ensure your team gets the information they need while creating an even playing field for all your applicants. Setting time limits on candidate answers also allows you to evaluate candidates on their communication skills and ability to express ideas succinctly.

2. Provides Scheduling Flexibility

You call or email a candidate to schedule an interview and leave a message. They respond the next day while you’re away from your desk, meaning you have to touch base yet again to get a screening on the books. That’s three rounds of communication (at least) just for one interview. Sound familiar?

Recruiter phone and email tag is a burden that can set your time-to-hire back for weeks. Digital interviewing allows candidates to complete interviews on their own time—on their desktops or mobile phones—wherever they may be. Once they’re done, recruiters can access their answers for review when it fits their schedule, and share them with the rest of their team. This is especially effective for hiring remotely or looping in managers across different offices that may work off-hours.

3. Allows You to Get Creative

Whether you’re hiring for entry-level roles, internships, client-facing positions or roles that require strong presentation skills, project-based interviewing is a great way to evaluate candidates beyond what’s written on their resume. Instead of waiting for an in-person interview, recruiters can ask candidates to provide a demonstration, complete a task, or answer a timed quiz during the screening process, ultimately weeding out unqualified candidates during the first-round stages.

4. Facilitates Collaborative Feedback

Phone screenings are typically one-on-one interviews between a candidate and a recruiter. When hiring at high volumes, recruiters may speak to several candidates throughout the day — meaning tons of notes, and some information inevitably getting lost in the process. Digital interviewing allows recruiters to share their screening interviews directly with hiring managers, allowing for more precise feedback, comparison, and collaboration that stays tied to the candidate as they move through the hiring process.

5. Keeps Everyone On Track

As candidate experiences becomes consistently more data-driven, keeping track of your numbers to measure success is key to developing stronger hiring initiatives. Digital interviewing allows you to accurately measure your interview completion rates, as well as how many candidates you interviewed for a particular position—allowing you to keep track of the numbers that matter most when calculating your time-to-hire and cost-per-hire rates.