Consumers are getting more and more used to IVR systems in their daily lives (checking bank account and credit card statements, et cetera), but a study from the International Journal of Selection and Assessment reports that job applicants don’t have a problem with IVR systems either.

Researchers from Portland State University, Kenexa and Purdue University collaborated to understand how job applicants reacted to different selection screening methods.

By different methods, I mean face-to-face, telephone or IVR. The researchers created an identical script for each method and performed the screenings on a sample population to see how the applicants took it.

What they found was that it didn’t seem to matter so much to people whether a company called them in for a pre-screening interview, just called them over the phone or did it through an IVR.

…what is encouraging is that there were no differences between these labor-intensive and costly technologies and IVR…

According to the researchers, traditional hiring advertisements cost an average of $3,295 per hire, while online hiring only costs an average of $377 per hire.

Therefore, there does not appear to be any major negatives in terms of structural fairness among alternative screening devices, implying that organizations can make choices between screening methods based on other factors such as recruitment strategy or cost.

Which is a key point to make—the more options a company has for initial screening, the better off they are. It’s more costly and time-consuming for human resource departments to pre-screen applicants over the phone or especially to bring them in for face-to-face interviews.

According to the study, use of the Internet for screening applicants is the most cost-effective because companies can screen hundreds or thousands of applicants automatically. One knock was that older members of the workforce aren’t as Internet-savvy as the younger ones, limiting the field of respondents.

Regarding IVR, the study knocked IVR in “openness, treatment, two-way communication and reconsideration opportunity,” predictably. But IVR did just as well in every other category.

Click on the link if you’d like to read the report yourself