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There's a semantic gap getting in the way between us. Phone calls with candidates: very good. See "Warm up candidates" in the post we're commenting on for my thoughts about that.

A phone screen is a call whose purpose is to select out candidates. It's a call whose outcome can be "stop talking to this developer". They're very common, and I think uniformly evil.

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Understood. I know that at least my second example was a phone screen: if that interviewer didn't like me, the interviewing process would have ended.

I don't know how you avoid that. If you have 1000 candidates per open position, you probably can't afford to do in-person interviews with all of them, or even all the ones with decent-looking resumes. What's the alternative to phone screens? An automated remote work sample system, maybe?

The whole point of work-sample tests is to minimize time wasted on subjective interviews, and to collect objective facts instead. You definitely don't want to do thousands of in-person interviews! Interviews are terrible.

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