Many people will agree that there are some aspects of a job that lend themselves well to telecommuting. But they will also tell you that other aspects do not. Near the top of that list of “difficult tasks to perform virtually” for all but the most experienced of telecommuters is the job of interviewing a potential employee or team member.

Well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this blog post.

I do agree that in general there is a lot of benefit from a live, face-to-face interview. You can learn a lot from the other person’s body language, eye contact, etc. And this information can be valuable in determining the person’s comfort level with the topics they are discussing, as well as their general social skills and how well they interact with others.

However, I will say that even interviewing potential team members is something that can be performed effectively by phone if need be. I have participated in many such interviews myself due to the globally distributed nature of the team I work on. In fact, we’re so comfortable with this mode that we often even interview local candidates by phone rather than coordinating schedules to have them come into the office.

So what are the best ways to deal with interviewing a candidate by phone?

Well really, it’s not much different than any other important interaction that, as a telecommuter, you must handle by phone. 

• First, when you start the interview, if the person seems uncomfortable with the lack of face-to-face interaction you can take a couple minutes to chit-chat and break the ice a bit. A small chat about the big game last weekend or the local weather can give you both a few minutes to warm up to each other.
• Don’t be bothered by the silences. Interviews can be uncomfortable, or downright awkward for some people. When you’re face-to-face, a pause in the conversation can seem pretty natural. But on the phone it sounds as awkward as dead air time on the radio. Don’t rush to interject a comment just to fill the void. Give the other person the time to finish thinking through whatever they were going to say. Continue to talk and act comfortably so the other person knows you are not judging that silence.
• Without the body language to interpret, you might have a harder time judging the comfort level a person has with particular questions you ask. So you need to be a bit more explicit in how you ask them. For instance, if you ask the candidate if they’re comfortable managing a customer escalation and they pause and say yes, you can’t tell if they really are. So ask them how many escalations they’ve handled in the past, or ask them to describe their most difficult escalation and how they handled it. Or if they tell you they’re comfortable learning a new technology independently without much assistance, ask them to describe the process by which they would teach themselves.

Of course, if you’re interviewing for a job where the candidate needs to have really good people skills, and/or exceptional phone skills, you shouldn’t have to do any extra work to put them at ease or help interpret their comments – they should do all that work for you. And if they can’t, they’re probably the wrong person for the job.

However, performing interviews by phone is not all downside. In fact there is one big advantage I’ve come to discover. Often when there’s a couple of us on the phone interviewing a candidate together, we’ll use Instant Messaging (IM) to communicate during the interview. We can suggest follow-up questions to the team member who is talking, compare thoughts on how the candidate answered a particular question, even lead each other a bit on the direction we want to go with the interview as we learn more about the candidate. It can be quite useful and help make the limited time we may have with the candidate that much more effective in learning what we need to know.

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