Interview candidate remotely?
Today, I read an article from Time magazine, and I feel it is pretty funny.
Basically, the article is about how a candidate should act when you are doing interview remotely (using video conferencing).
The funny part of the article is that I believe Time got it wrong on the reason why a company should do interview remotely. Firstly, I don't think it is related to money, if you want to save money and do remote interview, I believe it is wrong. Why? Because I believe it will cost more than you think.
To me, I believe there are the reasons why we would want to do interview remotely.
- There are better non-local candidates, and they can't visit your company to do interview.
- Screening out obvious bad candidates.
If the math Time get it right, it cost like a 1000 dollars to fly down to do an interview, and I assume it take you to on average 20 candidates to get a good hire. It is approximately 20,000 to get a candidate. I believe most of manager will agree with me that, a bad hire will cost you much more than 20,000 dollars.
Firstly, if it is just dead bad, the candidate will probably get fire after 1-2 months, it is not only take up 2 months of the salary, it will cost your project to lose 2 months of time, and the overhead spend on manage the bad candidate out probably will cost you way more.
If the candidate is an average guy, it will bring down the hiring standard of your company, and he may help hiring more average guy. I believe most of the company nowaday want to hire the best guy to run their business, because it is how a company can grow and why it is better than its competitor. So, I guess if hiring ok guy is ok for the company, the cost may be potentially huge.
I am a strong believer in strong hiring, and I believe the up front cost on spending on hiring the right guy is well worth it.
One may argue that there is no one stopping you to hire the best guy remotely. However, as Time itself point out, it is not easy to do interview online. I feel if we are using remote interview to do screening, it probably can help to eliminate bad candidate. If we use solely remote interview to make hiring decision, the interviewers need to be very experience and the candidate should pass through multiple interview loop to ensure the interviewer isn't missing any sign.
Nevertheless, I do agree that there are more and more company doing interview online, well, may be it is a good idea to have some article to talk about how to become a better interviewer regarding this. May be after all interviewers are experience "remote" interviewer, remote interviewing can really save bussiness money.
