How to ACE the Recruiter Interview
Unicorn Talent is a community of Recruiting Leaders from Fortune 500, FAANG, and Unicorn tech companies. As a collective, we've completed over 1,000,000 first interviews with candidates for every position and watched our hiring managers do the same. This article serves as a guide for candidate best practices when navigating their interviews.
CLICK HERE to Download our Interview Prep Template
What to expect in a recruiter phone screen.
The reason a recruiter is talking to you is because they ultimately believe you can do the job. This is because the information you've presented on your resume leads them to believe that you both have the skills to do the tasks of the job, and are a person who will be successful in executing those tasks. Recruiters look for alignment in your job title/task responsibility as much as they look at your job progression, pedigree, and impact on the businesses you've served. For more information on how to write a resume recruiters will respond to, click here for our overview of writing the perfect resume.
While the Interview Prep Template is helpful across all steps of an interview process, it’s main value is to increase your conversion rates at the “top of the funnel”. This includes the recruiter screen & hiring manager screens, which are commonly referred to as “Screen Out” interviews. They cannot offer you the job at this point, but they can prevent you from getting to the next step.
How to pass a Recruiter Phone Screen (RPS)
There are three main goals of the recruiter phone screen:
Learn About Your Experience: The first goal of the call is to extract information about your experience as it relates to the interview rubric they agreed on with a hiring manager (for examples of these interview rubrics, click here to see examples of competency-based interviews). This helps build a case for you entering the next step while also providing a baseline of information that the next interviewer can build from. The interview prep template helps you consolidate all of your key value points so that you are quick and concise in answering questions instead of relying on "on the spot thinking" to navigate the call. If Mike Tyson's "everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face" could be applied to this process, I would reframe it as "everyone knows what they'll say until they're thrown a curveball in the interview."
Endorse You as a Viable Candidate to the Hiring Manager: The second goal of the call is to determine whether or not they can endorse you with their credibility for the hiring manager interview. If they pass you forward and you bomb, it makes recruiters look bad. This endorsement is based not only on your skills (that you've done the job and can excel) but also on your interview performance (being concise, articulate, and able to navigate the interview). The interview prep template helps you stay focused and concise. This not only makes you look good but also allows recruiters to share more about what they are looking for in a candidate.
Ensure You're a COMPANY Fit: The third goal of a recruiter is to ensure that if you are the perfect candidate, you'll accept the offer the company intends to give. This is called the pre-close. Some recruiters are better than others at navigating this part of the call, but it usually involves discussions about role scope alignment, salary alignment, location, WFH rules, etc.
Once these three goals are achieved, they'll pitch you to the hiring manager. The hiring manager call has similar goals to the recruiter call but is more focused on the specifics of the job versus your overall fit as a candidate. It is also a "screen out" call. The next step after a hiring manager screen is typically a team interview, where other team members assess if you're the right addition to the team. If you bomb the team interview, you'll make the hiring manager look bad.
What a Hiring Manager covers in their first round interview
There are two main goals of a hiring manager interview:
Learn About Your Experience: This goes one level deeper than the recruiter screen. They may have specific examples of problems they are trying to solve or may ask you more technical questions, but it will never be as technical as a focused interview from the team interview stage. This is where the interview prep template shines. They want to be convinced that you can handle each competency they will measure in-depth in the technical screen at a high level. What did you do? How did you do it? How did you overcome obstacles? How did you measure success? Is your work still relevant?
Endorse You as a Candidate for the Team Interview: Team interviews require hours of commitment, so hiring managers can heavily gatekeep the next steps based on this interview. Hiring managers assess skills, team fit, and culture. They may also have a broader vision for the progression or growth of their team and want to see if you have the potential to grow beyond the role they are hiring for today.
The Unicorn Talent Interview Prep Template guides you through the most common questions in your first round interview
The interview prep template has three main goals. The first is to nail key 30 second summaries about your career, your recent roles, and key accomplishments. The first interview questions from recruiters set the stage for follow-up questions that are the real goal. Second, this template helps you answer key questions about the bullets in your resume. For example, if you advertise a stat in your resume, you should have the math that backs it up in your interview template so you can recall it easily during the interview. Last, and perhaps the most important thing our template does, is it frees up your “on-the-fly” thinking during an interview, so any curveballs or unexpected questions have the maximum focus from being prepped elsewhere. Let’s expand:
The 30-Second Summary
Interviewers will often start with a "tell me about yourself" style question to gauge your background and interests. The most common mistake is overusing time on these questions to tell your story, without letting the interviewer guide you to the areas they care about. A 30-second summary allows the interviewer to focus on what they need to know, helping you actively listen and respond to their focus areas.
Bullet Expansion
We advocate for one-page resumes, which means omitting details that need expansion during the interview. Competency-based interviewing is often used to assess your background. If your resume and interview responses reflect the answers to the questions in their interview guide, your pass-through rate at every stage will be higher.
On-the-Fly Thinking (Managing Curveballs)
While curveball questions in screen-out interviews aren't ideal, they do happen. The interview prep template helps you cover essential information without exhausting your mental energy, allowing you to handle unexpected questions more effectively.
Stop winging your Recruiter Screen
If a recruiter is talking to you, they WANT you to pass their interview. Here’s how you do it
Be succinct: Answer open ended questions in 30 seconds
Let them come to you: Let the recruiter ask the follow ups they want instead of trying to cover everything at in one answer
Back up your data: Be able to speak to your bullets (ESPECIALLY THE METRICS)
Be Relevant: Know why your experience correlates
Know your gaps: Explain your gaps
Know your compensation: Have an answer for compensation questions