Top Tips For Recruitment Consultants Telephone Screening

By John Steven Bult

Telephone screening may not be the most enjoyable part of the recruitment consultant’s job. However, done well, it achieves a couple of key objectives which will contribute to strong fee generation. Poor screeners end up wasting hours on pointless interviews. On the other hand poor screeners can miss candidates than could earn them a fee.

Here’s my top tips for telephone screening.

Aim for a decision within around 10-15 minutes.

Seek to establish that the CV is an accurate representation of the candidate, take care to check that dates are consistent and there are no undisclosed gaps.

Request a commentary for the candidates CV. Question to establish the reasons for movement, future decision making will reflect passed decision making. Be wary of candidates with negative reasons for movement, poor results, fall outs with peers and superiors.

Use a mixture of open questions to invite conversation and closed and direct questions to home in on specific and relevant hard facts.

Score the client against a list of requirements supplied by your client.
If you are uncertain about the quality of a candidate, there are some general tricks you can use to ascertain their general qualities, for example,

Suggest a few improvements to the CV and request they make them and return it by the deadline. Whether or not they respond appropriately will tell you how they are likely to respond to request whilst in a job.

Explain you will be speaking with the client and request they call you back at a specified time for an update. You should immediately question the credibility who are unable to manage this (you may be surprised how many don’t)

Give them 24 hours to research their potential employer and ask them to call you at a specific time for a quiz. See what lengths they go to excel at the task. If they just take a 10 minute browse over the website, don’t expect wonders if they get the job!

As a general rule, if in doubt, interview, or you’ll run the risk of missing someone who may earn you a fee.

Good luck
This article is written by John Bult of Recruitment Vacancies