The Manager Tools Effective Hiring Process recommends that before you bring someone into your office for a final day of interviewing, spend as much time screening the person as you can. With rare exceptions, do more over the phone to reduce your burden for the final full day of interviewing. Know more about the candidate through the steps listed previously before you invest the considerable resources of a full day of interviews.

Regarding resources, it’s normal to be feeling the pinch of an open position and its associated undone work. It’s normal to want to get someone through to the final step, hoping that he wows you and your team so that you can make him an offer. It takes fewer resources to go faster, to hire a candidate sooner.

Fight these urges. Effective managers know that it’s smart to spend more resources on our most important decisions. Remember: The Second Principle of Effective Hiring: Set the Bar High. Our natural desire to fill an open position must be tempered by our desire to avoid the big mistake: filling it with the wrong person.

So, before we bring someone in for face-to-face interviews, we’re going to conduct one or more screening interviews.

Thirty Minutes Is Enough

Thirty minutes is plenty of time to conduct a phone screen. A screen is not a full interview. It’s a screen—a partial interview. Phone screens are generally conducted following résumé reviews and before a full day of final interviews. This is certainly not the only way to conduct an interview process, but it is the most likely to be used by most organizations. It would be considered “normal” by organizations where the hiring manager and his directs are co-located.

The purpose of a phone screen is to reduce the burden to your staff and cost to your organization of face-to-face interviews by reducing the number of candidates being considered. It is not to conduct a full and complete interview, but rather to provide another gate in the process.

There would be nothing surprising in conducting a series of phone screens and eliminating all candidates from contention, and therefore not conducting any final face-to-face interviews.

Remember: the purpose of any interview is to say no. More broadly: the purpose of the hiring process is to say no. If that doesn’t make sense to you initially, you’re normal. Most managers think, no, my purpose is to find my next hire. My purpose here is to fill my opening.

But that is a mistaken purpose, leading to a dangerous confirmation bias in your interviewing. If you are looking for reasons to hire someone, you will find those reasons. As long as you’re “looking to hire,” as long as you “need” to find someone, your bias will be confirmed, and you’ll see things in people that make you want to hire.

Our purpose in the hiring process is only secondarily to hire the right person. Our primary purpose is to not have the wrong person. If you’re pausing right now, trust us: You’re not hearing us wrong. We need to have a counter-intuitive approach when we interview. We need to guard against our subtle tendency to give ourselves what we want. If we start focusing on making a hire, as opposed to avoiding a hiring mistake, we start overlooking weaknesses. We find a hire . . . who comes with problems we probably should have seen.

So in the case of phone screens, more gates to have candidates go through is better. We want the candidates who want hiring to be easy to go away. We want those candidates who persist because they know that great companies set high bars to entrance.

Because we usually can’t spend the time to conduct multiple full behavioral interviews on all of our possible résumé-screened candidates, but we want to start talking to them, phone screens are the perfect in-between gate before we go to face-to-face final interviews.

Again, it’s been our experience that 30 minutes is plenty of time for most phone screens. Remember, we’re looking for reasons to say no to someone. If you don’t have a reason to rule someone out after 30 minutes, you probably won’t find one after 45 minutes. If you still haven’t found it at that point, and you figured you’d go to an hour-long phone call . . . the problem becomes that most people will struggle to get through a phone interview of an hour or longer. Phone behaviors start to deteriorate once we reach an hour’s worth of time.

The bottom line with phone screens is you won’t have enough time to cover enough questions to decide whether you want to make an offer to someone. That means you’re going to have to balance time with results/value. Thirty minutes works best against those two opposed objectives.

And if you run long, even to 45 to 50 minutes, that’s fine.

You Make the Phone Call

Many managers are surprised that we recommend that you, the manager, call the candidate. But this is simply how it’s done among companies that set and maintain high recruiting standards. Recruiters and hiring managers want to send a message that “My time with you is important to me, and I care enough about it to be prepared and prompt.”

Do you have to do this? No. It’s not a black and white situation. There are plenty of managers who say, “I’m going to give them a time to call, and if they’re not professional enough to call me at that time, that’s a reason to say no.” That certainly is a reasonable application of the underlying purpose of this process: to find a reason to say no.

But you making the call sends a message about your interest. And it also helps you control the interview.

Give Them a Brief Process Overview

Of course, all interviews start with brief introductions and some brief chit-chat. [You can find our guidance about the beginning of an interview in chapter seven.] In a phone screen, that might last perhaps 1 or 2 minutes. If nothing else, it’s polite human interaction. You can’t have the candidate answer the phone and have your first words be, “Tell me about yourself.” It might be efficient, but it will affect your ability to hire (which makes it ineffective).

One of the hallmarks of effective interviewers is their forthright communication of the process candidates are going through. There is already enough stress in the process (more on this later). That stress isn’t helpful. Candidates don’t think that added stress beyond their own performance anxiety is professional. Further, it doesn’t improve our ability to make good choices.

Finally, it’s not enough that we feel our process is effective for us and our firm. It’s important to acceptance rates and future relationships that candidates feel that the process was fair and reasonable. Candidates who are told no and believe the process they were exposed to was fair handle the rejection far better than when they feel the process was unclear, unfair, biased, insensitive, or capricious. Candidates who are told yes are more likely to accept.

So tell them what’s going to happen. If you follow the Manager Tools recommended process, it might sound like this:

Before I ask you my first question, I want to explain how this process generally works. This phone screen is our first step. It will only be roughly 30 minutes long. I may only ask you 1–2–3 questions. I’m going to probe/interrupt periodically for more information. That’s normal; don’t worry about it. I won’t have time to ask for your questions. We’ll save those for an in-person interviewing day, if we take that next step. I probably won’t be able to give you a yes/no answer about an invite for a personal interview during this call. I’ll want to think about this and other interviews, and I may share my thoughts with others here internally. That said, you will hear from me one way or another within a week at most.

Start with “Tell Me About Yourself” (TMAY)

Then you ask the core question of the majority of phone screens: Tell me about yourself. We have to start somewhere . . . and in some cases, you have never spoken to this person before, and this will be the first interview question you ask. This is probably when the candidate would say the interview started.

Keep in mind that there’s a difference between the actual interviews we conduct with candidates and the overall evaluation we are in the process of making. Effective managers are constantly evaluating and measuring as this process unfolds, even when they are not conducting a proper interview.

“Tell me about yourself ” (TMAY) is a great first significant interview question. For the vast majority of candidates, it requires no preparation specific to your organization or role. [Of course, to an exceptionally well-prepared candidate, perhaps 10% of the answer would change depending on the opportunity for which he is interviewing.] It relies on a person’s knowledge of himself, about which there can be no better expert.

Further, it’s expected by most candidates, and certainly any who have done any basic preparation. They can’t do an Internet search of interview preparation and not come across it. [Though they can certainly find a lot of very bad guidance on how to answer it.]

Even though it’s a question that responds well to preparation, and most candidates don’t do much of that very well, it still is a reassuring question to hear. It reduces somewhat the chance that fear and nerves detract from the candidate’s performance. Always remember that, although our purpose is to say no, we don’t want to say no to hiring a great engineer because he can’t ride a unicycle. An interview is an artificial reality designed to keep people out of organizations. It’s an artificial reality. The effective interviewer uses an interview in a professional way. There’s no need to intentionally elevate stress, or play tricks, or ask the hardest questions first. Those techniques don’t provide data that’s useful.

Most importantly, TMAY creates numerous opportunities for probing about decisions and behaviors, which are the data that effective interviewers are looking for to compare to the requirements of the role.

Don’t be surprised if an answer takes a minute. That’s an insufficient answer (though you can likely blame bad Internet guidance). If that’s the case, probing is required, unless the answer is disqualifying on its face.

Also don’t be surprised if an answer is 10 minutes long. That may be good, though it probably isn’t.

Most importantly, don’t be surprised if, once you have probed repeatedly, the answer may have been 1 minute had you not interjected, but with your interjections you’ve consumed 25 minutes of the interview.

Ask One or Two Behavioral Questions, Time Permitting

If you have time following TMAY, there are no better questions than behavioral ones. This of course presupposes that you have previously prepared the interview that you will be conducting when you bring these candidates in for a final in-person day.

No Need to Share Your Decision at the Time

When finishing a phone screen, we have no data which shows that asking for questions will help you gather useful data for the decision you are making. That said, this is probably much more a function of the limited time and the assumptions that candidates make about the limited time and the “incomplete” nature of a screen versus an interview.

So end the screen by thanking the candidate, and telling her that you will be either comparing your thoughts with HR (if HR did a screen) or you will be considering how to proceed and sharing your thoughts with your team to make your decision about an in-person interview.

Phone screening is a great way to further narrow down the candidates who will go through a final full day of interviews. The planning and logistics time and expense justify adding an additional screening filter between résumés and final interviews. The process to do it is simple.