There are many places where the process/policy is that HR conducts phone screens in the place of managers. This is, in principle, a good idea, because it’s yet another gate, another screen, another set of eyes looking for reasons to say no. And in the case of HR, versus you and your directs and perhaps one or two peers, they’re going to have a different perspective. That’s good.
But . . . there’s a huge misunderstanding that occurs when HR conducts phone screens as policy. What happens is many managers think that HR conducting “A” phone screen means that HR is therefore conducting “the only” phone screen. That HR “owns” the phone screen process. In most cases, we’d guess, managers assume that HR is doing some special, different, HR-informed, previously trained phone screen of which the manager is incapable, and for which the manager is unauthorized.
This is a laughably wrong conclusion in 90% of situations. Don’t assume that HR is doing the phone screen (as if there is such a thing). Don’t assume that HR is therefore doing the only phone screen. Don’t assume that HR is the phone screener of record for your firm.
BTW: What is HR doing in a phone screen? It depends on the experience of your HR professional. Almost every HR phone screen includes some obligatory information about the company (meaning the HR person is talking—briefing the candidate, versus evaluating the person). There are probably some assertions regarding equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. There are probably some comments about company values and principles designed to differentiate your company from the competition and marketplace.
But as you might imagine, HR listens differently to most candidate answers. Except in the case of an experienced HR professional with whom the hiring manager has a solid relationship (about which more below), the typical HR phone screen is about screening for cultural and organizational fit. Is this person right for our company? Does this person have the values we look for? And in most cases, HR is evaluating communication skills during the phone screen and “tell me about yourself” question (if they ask it).
What does this all tell us we should do? Let’s assume the most likely situation: a moderately experienced HR representative, with whom you have a good but not extensive relationship, and who doesn’t have the background in your area to be evaluating job skills.
Here we have three choices. The most common situation is you let HR conduct “the” phone screen, and you accept their input to narrow your field of candidates (assuming they do). You don’t conduct your own phone screen and go right to taking whomever they “passed” to a final set of face-to-face interviews on site.
This is the wrong choice.
The combination of a lack of a strong relationship and the lack of your HR partner’s knowledge of your work means that solely relying on the HR screening process is misguided. The likelihood that HR is calibrated to what you’re looking for is very small, so their evaluation of candidates is not related to your role and biases about skills, abilities, traits, and characteristics. Their opinions will not be predictive of a candidate’s success.
That leaves us two options: (a) phone screen everyone that HR does or (b) phone screen only those candidates that your HR partner passes on to you. If you feel you can do it politically (meaning HR won’t act as if it truly is only HR’s role to phone screen and try to “forbid” you), Manager Tools recommends you phone screen everyone that HR did.
If you need verbiage for HR, it would sound like this: I really appreciate the phone screen, and I’m sure you’re right about everyone. And I’m a relatively inexperienced interviewer, so me getting a sense of more candidates would be very helpful to me. Also, your criteria are of course different from mine, and while I’m likely to agree with you, us both interviewing will give us a chance to calibrate on this role and my preferences. Finally, I may be able to screen further, so there’s less burden on my team when a smaller group comes in for final interviews.
If you’re not comfortable with the potential politics or tension there, we recommend you choose to conduct an additional phone screen on those candidates that HR recommends you continue to interview. The downside of this technique is that if you’re working with an HR partner that you don’t have a well-established relationship with, you won’t have the opportunity to calibrate your evaluation with his . . . and you may end up stuck with a perpetually low-value relationship.
You could say this in that situation: Thanks for doing the screening. Just so I can get to know the candidates that you’ve recommended, I’m also going to do phone screens on each of them. That will help me share some information with my team—who will be interviewing the candidates as well—before they have to sit down with them for a more in-depth interview.
As an aside, you may end up hiring someone that HR screened and passed and surmise from that that you are calibrated. But we can’t really know that without knowing whether or not there were candidates whom they said no to who might have been a fit as well.
If you do have an experienced HR partner, she knows your role and has screened or even interviewed for it before, and you have developed a strong relationship with her over time, first: Well Done! HR partners like these are some of your most important colleagues. Let them do your phone screens.
And of course, there’s a possibility that you don’t have an HR organization, or even if you do, this is not something they are involved in. That’s common and not problematic. Conduct phone screens on every candidate who made it through your résumé and application culling. Or if you have a great relationship with a stellar HR person, and he’s presently not involved in your screening and hiring process, why not include him? If he knows your role and knows your needs and team, he can often either add additional perspective or some labor sharing, or both.