A common cause of ineffective interviews and technical screens is something that many interviewers don’t think about: failing to strategically combine job descriptions and resumes.

This failure can lead to hiring candidates who don’t have the necessary skills or experience to perform given jobs, and turning away—or turning off—candidates who do have sufficient qualifications.

In this post, we’ll show you a three-step process for using job descriptions and resumes to conduct effective and candidate-pleasing interviews. First, however, let’s take a look at what can go wrong if you make the mistake of interviewing from just job descriptions or just resumes.

Problems with Interviewing From Just Job Descriptions

1. It’s bad for both the candidate experience and your employer brand. Since you’re not referencing candidates’ unique skills and experiences, interviews come across as impersonal. Candidates may wonder if you’ve even read their resumes, question whether you’re company, is actually serious about them, and have doubts about whether they want to come work for your company.

2. You can get an incomplete picture of candidates’ job-relevant qualifications. Sometimes candidates have experience that doesn’t match the experience sought in the job description, but is applicable to the position. A candidate’s resume, for example, might show that he or she has experience with various databases, but not with the particular database in the job description. That experience, however, would make the jump to learning the new database much easier.

Problems with Interviewing From Just Resumes

1. You could mislead candidates. If you ignore the job description and just focus questions on candidates’ resumes, you’ll make many believe those skills are what they would use at your company, whether that’s true or not. This can also inflate their idea of how likely they are to get the job.

2. You might not find out whether candidates’ have all of the skills they need to have to succeed. This is because you’re not determining if they have the qualifications present in the job description.

3. You’ll struggle to round out an entire team’s skillset. If you don’t use the job description, you may really like candidates and their skills, but they might not complement or augment where you have weaknesses in your existing team. You want to make sure their skills help fill in those gaps.

Using Job Descriptions and Resumes Together: a How-To
Here are the steps that we recommend for getting the most value from job descriptions and resumes in your interviews.

1. Begin by reviewing the job description

Identify core roles and responsibilities, and create a separate category for each (around five is a good number). Then for each category, identify the individual skills and experience that are necessary to perform well.

Here’s an example to show how this looks like. Imagine you are looking to hire a Java Engineer. You identify data structures/algorithms, Java language features/frameworks, design patterns, toolset and enterprise Java as a few of the categories.  You would then break down each topic individually and delve into how candidate accomplishments (from resume) in these core competencies and what is required for the job (from JD).

2. Align questions to identify candidates’ qualification in the tactics that are critical for achieving the role’s core objectives.

For each tactic, you want to determine if candidates have relevant knowledge, skills and accomplishments. Create questions that address them as fully as possible, but don’t go overboard—keeping interviews to an hour or less is an important best practice.

Approach your questions by category. Plan to start with a warm-up question—using our example, something general about candidate’s relevant experience as a Java Engineer.

Then begin the conversation by discussing data structures/algorithms.  These questions are designed to determine candidates’ qualifications in the associated job functions (tactics). The discussion will give you a better sense of the candidate’s skill level and allow you to determine the direction of the interview. If your assessment of the initial discussion was positive, you can plan on moving on to more advanced skill assessment.

Close the questions for each category by asking candidates if there are any relevant skills or experiences they want to mention.

3. Before meeting with individual candidates, review their resumes, and use them to personalize your questions to them.

At least an hour before a scheduled interview, examine the candidate’s resume for the job-relevant skills, experiences, and accomplishments they claim. Adjust your questions to reference these claims, inviting the candidate to discuss them. Also consider highlighting digitally or physically the most recent or complex experience related to each tactic, skill or tool.

Let’s say a candidate’s resume stated that he or she was responsible for managing IBM’s website. Your question might be, “What is the most complex website that you’ve been in charge of?” If the candidate responds with “HP’s site,” you could say, “I saw that, but I’m also interested in this IBM I see on your resume.” That way not only could you get two behavioral examples—one the candidate wants to talk about and one you find interesting—but you also show that you’ve taken the time to review the candidate’s resume and are taking the hiring decision seriously.

More Advice for Interviewers

It might help you to think of job descriptions and resumes as helping you create customized strategic plans for interviews. When you’re writing a strategic plan, you determine the objectives are and your tactics for accomplishing them. Your job description is a strategic plan for filling a job role with a successful new hire, and to do so you outline the objectives for the position, and the tactics and the tools necessary to carry those out successfully. Resumes, in turn, allows you to customize your interviews to best determine if individual candidates have the necessary qualification in those tactics and tools, while also delivering the candidates strong candidate experiences—which is also critical for achieving your strategic plan.

Also, we recommend recording interviews on video if possible, allowing for review. During your review, focus on where each candidate excels and falls short. Use this in creating a summary of how well or poorly each candidate’s qualifications align with the job description.

Lastly, remember that an interview—including a technical interview—is just one factor of many in the hiring process. So if you’re not making the hire/no-hire decision, refrain from stating whether a person should or shouldn’t be hired. Instead limit yourself to discussing the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they align with the role.

If you’re an IT manager, when it comes time to make new hires, you likely want more than anything else: a clone.

After all, while hiring, you still have to meet work and project deadlines and manage your teams—and perform all of the other tasks that more than fill up your workday. It sure would be nice to have another you to handle the extra workload hiring takes (often 30%), so you wouldn’t have more stress and less time to spend with family and friends.

The last thing you want, meanwhile, is to waste your time interviewing unsuitable candidates. That means you need recruiters to consistently deliver quality candidates, which in turn means they need to use an effective candidate screening process. As we will see, the human factor—live technical interviews with qualified technical interviewers with relevant experience—is a must for effective candidate screening.

The Screening Automation Trend
The importance of the human factor seemingly flies in the face of one of the biggest trends in recruiting’s digital transformation – automation of candidate screening. Bullhorn’s Top Staffing and Recruiting Trends for 2020 report found “a major variance in the interest level (26%) in digital transformation depending on company size and role.”

See how eTeki had a pulse on the business drivers and satisfaction factors associated with decoupling the expensive, yet essential, the human-centric step of the hiring process. Their solution provided elastic interview capacity that’s transformed how India and the rest of the world hire IT, teams.

It’s easy to see the motivation for automation: speed. As the LinkedIn report makes clear, recruiters are under pressure to deliver more candidates in the same or less time. And with today’s computerized screening tools (such as personality and skills assessments) being smarter and more effective than ever at filtering out weak candidates, we agree that it makes complete sense to use them.

The problem is, these tools can’t—and likely never will be able to—filter candidates at the level IT hiring managers demand. To achieve that level of candidate screening, prior to delivery to hiring managers, candidates who’ve advanced through automated screening must go through live, rigorous technical interviews with trained technical interviewers who have relevant technical experience. In fact, these technical interviewers, in a way, act as the clones that IT hiring managers are seeking, asking tough, probing questions and evaluating answers as the hiring managers would.

5 Reasons Live Technical Interviews Are Essential
Live, rigorous technical interviews provide five benefits that make them essential for quality candidate screening.

1. You learn whether candidates have the relevant experience to succeed at a given job. Computer-based tests can evaluate candidates’ high-level competency. Screening challenges, such as coding exercises, meanwhile, can show whether candidates can do the work. But only live technical interviews reveal details about candidates’ true levels of experience with key tasks, challenges, tools, etc.—giving a far more complete picture of how successful they are likely to be at given roles. The reason: interviewers understand the job requirements and how the skill or tool is used to fulfill a specific responsibility. This gives them a keen ability to probe candidates about their key job-relevant experience in ways that computerized tools simply can’t (such as through follow-up and clarification questions based on candidates’ answers to initial questions).

2. You learn about how much supervision candidates would likely need. Learning about candidates’ job-relevant experience is an important indicator of how much managerial supervision they are likely to require. For example, if screening shows that one candidate is technically competent but has minimal experience, that candidate can probably handle the task but would likely require close supervision and additional training. Meanwhile, if a second competent candidate has lots of experience, that person would only require light supervision. Clearly, it would be easiest on a hiring manager to hire the second candidate. Knowing the amount of supervision likely to be needed could even impact whether to deliver one or both candidates.

3. You learn about candidates’ suitability for virtual teams.  More and more teams today are virtual—89% of respondents to a 2018 survey reported being members of virtual teams. Virtual teams create leadership, communication, cultural and skills challenges, and it’s important that members be able to do their work with a minimal amount of handholding. As a result, it’s important that recruiters deliver candidates with the necessary experience, which is best revealed by live technical interviews.

4. You learn about candidates’ relevant problem-solving experience and capabilities. While tests can evaluate problem-solving ability, learning how candidates solved real-life challenges is far more valuable for evaluating how they are likely to deal with future challenges. In technical interviews, interviewers can probe candidates about instances where best-laid plans went awry, to learn how candidates solved specific types of problems. This will reveal whether candidates merely have knowledge about relevant challenges, of if they have experience actually solving them.

5. You learn a variety of other candidate information that could impact whether candidates should be delivered. Live video interviews are revealing in other, miscellaneous ways that computer-based tests simply aren’t, and the insights gleaned can be valuable for candidate delivery decisions. Truthfulness, or lack thereof, is one example. Sometimes candidates use odd body language and provide other non-verbal cues—such as not giving eye contact—that are signs of embellishment or lying. Some candidates even use proxies for screening tests, challenges and technical interviews. With the latter, candidates often get caught because of situational factors, such as audio feedback caused by multiple audio inputs in the room.

Keep IT Hiring Managers Happy
For recruiters, it’s critical to keep IT hiring managers happy—which is why combining quick and quality candidate delivery is important. Today’s automated candidate screening tools are terrific, but using technical interviews at the end of the screening process is essential for delivering the quality that hiring managers demand. Fortunately, technical interviews using on-demand freelance interviewers can be conducted in 24 hours or less, meaning there’s no need to sacrifice speed.

In other words, the end result of using technical interviews properly is exactly what recruiters want: happier IT hiring managers. Not only are the hiring managers able to spend less time interviewing unsuitable candidates, and more time managing their teams, working on critical projects, and with their families and friends, but they also are more likely to make better hires.

And if in doing so stronger recruiter-hiring manager relationships are built, it can make a profound difference in talent acquisition (TA) results. According to Bersin by Deloitte, “Our research found the most influential predictor of TA performance outcomes is a strong relationship between the recruiter and the hiring manager; in fact, this relationship is four times more influential than other TA performance drivers.”

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Holding panel interviews, thought for decades as a time-efficient practice to qualify tech professionals, works better for some companies than others. Hiring teams long believed this to be a simplistic practice of employees interviewing applicants in a group setting, which is inline with responses we’ve received to a Twitter poll about unnecessary hiring practices. Instead of conducting multiple one-on-one interviews, panelists meet applicants (virtually in most cases today)—and evaluate the people they could be working with at once. 

If you’re considering modifying the tech panel interview step in your hiring process, it’s important to consider the pros and cons.

Technical Panel Interview Pros

Although these interviews are conducted in a formal setting, it is ideal that they are also conversational. Panel interviews are great opportunities to demonstrate a culture of respect within the company around diversity of mindset between prospective co-workers. A technical interview must be conducive to dialogue and should never be one way.  Use world class interview methodology such as SCOPE, a technical project based interview, grounded in decades of scientific research and makes good business sense.

A less biased selection of candidates should also be good for employee morale. Though bias cannot be fully eradicated—as panel interviews involve people who differ in opinions and positions—said format can help keep the hiring process’ objectivity in-check. Tech panelists get a clear, first-hand account of candidate experience and competence.  Employee morale increases when the panel identifies and agrees the options for potential hire have promise. Panel interviews allow future co-workers an opportunity to interact directly pre-hire instead of through second-hand information. Oftentimes, panel interviews commonly use set rubrics to help interviewers objectively score their candidates.

Aside from project based technical interviews and rubrics, panel members with relevant skills  contribute useful insight when assessing candidates. An article called ‘The 3-Step Software Developer Hiring Process’ from Medium points out tech panels use scenario based interview questions to probe applicant technical acumen and assess soft skills like capacity to learn or critical thinking. 

However, a tech panelist who is a role and/or tech stack match is required to confirm and continue to expound on candidate fitness for the open position.  Any business with gaps in available expertise should seek a trusted interview service partner to guide these conversations.

Cons for Technical Panel Interview

One major disadvantage of panel interviews lies in scheduling delays that extend the hiring process by days or weeks. Interviewing is not anyone’s full-time job. Already over-extended panel members lose an average of two hours productivity per candidate for the first round technical interview.  This includes distractions associated with scheduling, preparing an interview agenda for the job, reviewing the candidate’s resume, conducting the conversation, summarizing interview performance. More time may also be needed if the panel interview involves paired programming exercises, reviewing code challenge results, or additional rounds of technical panel interviews.  Multiply that times the number of candidates and the departmental bottomline sees significant disruption.

Another con of panel interviews?  False negative results caused candidate anxiety or bad experience with an ill-trained interview panelist. Facing multiple interviewers—from team leads to executives—can turn even a high-functioning professional into a bundle of nerves. North Carolina State University’s piece on tech interview anxiety notes that stressful setups, like solving problems and explaining it to a panel, can overlook a candidate’s competency. Interview panels who grill candidates only on conceptual theory, versus understanding competency through past experience, also put potential hires under duress unnecessarily.  Rejecting people from the tech recruiting cycle based on panel presentations or conceptual Q&A alone can result in the loss of solid software engineers or business analysts, for example.

During a panel interview, a risk of people bringing up protected class topics may occur. The interview agenda must stick to questions about a candidate’s professional history and ideally relate to the job opening at hand. This means no intrusive questions about their personal life, race, sexual orientation, or family background among other key points mandated by law. All interview panelists need training to stay above board legally when leading panel interviews.

Furthermore, discriminatory hiring practices can result in a bad hire. In fact, Maryville University’s guide to risk management specifies that many hiring processes are prone to discriminatory practices and are highly likely to miss out on the right candidate due to prejudice. Some of these bad practices include making hiring decisions based on factors outside the job requirements like sex, gender, and race or on initial impressions like if they arrive late.

Given all the cons and an economic understanding of their impact, why do companies continue to invest in tech panel interviews? Talking peer to peer is THE best way to identify quality candidates attracted to the role by talent acquisition (TA) experts during the hiring process.  Every company may define quality a tad differently, but essentially this means weeding out false positives from exaggerated resumes, separating the pretenders from the contenders, and identifying fraudulent behavior like proxy respondents or bait & switch candidates   

Some of your tech team may even refuse to be a part of interview panels because of the frustration experienced in the past while participating in the hiring process.  Keep reminding those tech experts their insight and first-hand experience in the role ultimately are required to confirm the candidate and their skillset is genuine.  

Don’t have the time, training, or bandwidth to conduct technical interviews with an internal panel of tech experts? Engage eTeki’s vast, global talent pool of tech interview experts on-demand with a single click.  

Written by Riva Juno

Submitted to eteki.com