In this article we discuss recording hiring interviews conducted over a phone call for interviewers (and not interviewees). Hiring interviews carried out face-to-face with candidates have their own subtleties and are not covered in the ambit of this article.

While interviewing potential hires to fill a position, it is advisable to have a framework, a common score card. Comparing each candidate with the same measuring stick will help you carry out an objective comparison at the end of the interview exercise. For example while hiring for a digital marketing position, if you focus one interview on SEO and another on leadership skills, then there is nothing to compare these two interviews on.

This score card should be developed and perfected by your company or by your department continuously incorporating the wisdom gained from hiring and how these hires eventually turned out for your organization. Here is a starting point.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer lack of structure in formulating a score card, but unless you start somewhere you will never perfect it. If you feel hiring should be driven by gut and intuition, read in The Checklist Manifesto how investors who invest in a scientific method of evaluating start ups to invest in, consistently outperform investors who rely on “gut and intuition”.

Using such a score card or even a checklist, it will be easy to eliminate those who underperformed noticeably. However this is the pool of irrelevant candidates. You are likely to end up with a few candidates who came close to each other in most parameters, making it difficult to choose from among them. This is a time when you wish you had an exact record of each candidate’s responses so that you would be able to assess them all over again. You would have taken notes, but the loss of information from an hour-long interview to one page of notes is massive.

Moreover we fall prey to numerous cognitive biases. Primacy effect and recency effect occur when you remember more about the candidates you had interviewed first and towards the end while those you had interviewed in the middle fade to a blur. If one candidate impressed you immensely then you compare every other candidate afterwards with her – that’s Anchoring bias. If you think you are less prone to biases than others in your office, then you should read about Bias Blind spot.

Hence it is imperative that you maintain an accurate record of each interview. At the end of the exercise, when you have finished interviewing say, 15 candidates, these recordings should be consulted so as to make the most of the interview process.

It is extremely easy to record your phone interviews using tools such as Recordator.com (This is our tool to record phone interviews. We also offer generating machine transcriptions of your call recordings.). But there are considerations other than just the technical ease or affordability of recording phone calls. Below we discuss a few of these factors and provide some ideas to gain consent from the other party for recording the call.

Advantages

1. You have a record of the interview that you can consult later. This makes it easy to compare candidates who performed close to one another
2. You can circulate it among other stake-holders in the filling of the position. More stake-holders could mean a better hiring decision.
3. You can avoid cognitive biases such as recency bias, confirmation bias and anchor point bias

Disadvantages

1. It could make the candidate speak less freely. If there’s a sensitive discussion point then the candidate might shy away from speaking about it altogether.

Suggestions

1. Take consent of the candidate. Offer to not record the interview if the candidate is not agreeable to the recording.
2. Justify the recording – Tell the candidate that it will be used solely for the hiring decision and it does not create any legal obligations whatsoever.
3. You can offer to share a copy of the recording with the candidate.

Got anything to share on this topic? Please comment at the bottom and help our readers.