The Screening Process: Prescreening and Screening Candidates - ApplicantStack
The article explains that manual candidate screening complicates hiring by making it difficult to compare applicants, quickly identify qualified candidates, track applications from multiple sources, monitor candidate progress through hiring stages, filter out unqualified candidates efficiently, and maintain EEOC compliance, emphasizing the benefits of implementing a formalized, automated screening process with tools like application questionnaires and structured workflows to improve quality of hire.
A manual candidate screening process can make hiring harder than it needs to be. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to create a formalized process. Does your candidate screening process affect quality of hire? Absolutely!
What Are the Challenges of Manual Candidate Screening?
Before diving into the details of formalized screening, it's important to understand why manual screening can hinder talent acquisition.
The Problems With Manual Candidate Screening
- No way to compare one applicant from another: Without a screening process and resources, it's difficult to compare candidates. This can allow bias to creep into your process.
- Inability to identify a pool of qualified candidates quickly: Engaging with every applicant, especially those without minimum qualifications, is time-consuming. Application questionnaires are a great automated pre-employment screening tool. Candidates self-filter by completing a carefully-designed questionnaire based on the job description and necessary skills.
- Difficulty keeping track of multiple job boards and sources: Applications may come from various sources—careers page, social media, job boards, employee referrals, internal job seekers, and outside agencies. Without an organized process, you may lose track of great applicants.
- No tool for tracking applicant stages: A candidate screening process is essentially a workflow with stages such as Application Received, Resume Review, Do Not Pursue, Phone Interview Complete, Pending Live Interview, etc. Without a workflow, it's hard to know the status of each job seeker.
- Inability to filter out unqualified candidates: Spending time with unqualified applicants leaves less time for top candidates. Automated screening during the first pass gives you a head start. Using a formalized method for phone screens and interviews keeps you on track.
- EEOC compliance risks: Without documentation of a fair evaluation process, you risk an EEOC challenge if a rejected job seeker suspects bias. A formal screening method reduces the likelihood of a biased process.
- Difficulty collaborating with the hiring team: If each decision maker uses their own evaluation criteria, it's hard to identify the most promising candidates and increases the risk of bias.
What is Prescreening?
Prescreening is the first step in candidate screening. It refers to evaluation that happens before any communication from the hiring team. This step can be automated. Using the job description, create a questionnaire for candidates to complete when they apply. Include elimination questions to filter out those who don’t meet minimum qualifications.
Should you review resumes as part of prescreening? It depends on the position. For entry-level openings, the questionnaire may suffice. For high-level positions with fewer applicants, reviewing resumes may be beneficial. An applicant tracking system (ATS) can help organize resumes and applications. However, don't base decisions solely on resumes unless hiring a resume writer.
ATS search functions can help with resume review. For example, if you have 100 applicants and want to identify those with particular skills, use keyword and boolean queries to narrow your applicant pool.
Social Media Screening
Should you look at applicants’ social media sites? There isn’t a consensus among talent acquisition specialists. Many employment law experts recommend waiting until after interviews if you choose to do social screening. Social media reviews reveal demographic information that shouldn't be used in hiring decisions. If a rejected candidate accuses you of bias, it's easier to defend your decision if you interviewed all top candidates, including those from underrepresented groups. For more protection, don't have a decision maker do the social review. Seek legal counsel to design a policy.
The First Screening Interview
Most hiring teams conduct the first interview as a phone call. The purpose is to isolate the group of candidates to move to the next step, verify skills and qualifications, and evaluate communication skills.
Useful questions for the phone screen include:
- Tell me about yourself.
- Why are you applying for this job?
- Why are you leaving your current position?
- What are your salary requirements?
- (For jobs that require travel) Are you willing to travel?
- What type of work environment are you looking for?
You can eliminate even high-quality candidates if their salary expectations don’t match or if they don’t want to travel and the position requires it.
Additional Screening
Every company has different hiring needs. Some perform verification before the first interview, such as:
- Calling references
- Background checks
- Credit history checks
- Education credentials
- Prior work performance
To determine which screens to perform before the interview, review previous hiring experiences. If many candidates have failed a particular screen in the past, move that step earlier in the process. If something in a candidate’s application raises a red flag, such as educational experience, check it out.
In-Person or Video Interview
At this stage, you should have a pool of great candidates:
- 1.They weren’t eliminated by the filtering questionnaire due to lack of qualifications.
- 2.They weren’t eliminated in the phone screen.
The best practice for all interviews is to use structured interviewing scripts. This allows you to compare candidates using the same criteria and provides legal protection.
Summary of the Hiring Series Steps
- Create a Job Description
- Define Your Hiring Criteria
- Post Job to Job Boards
- Candidate Screening
- Schedule Interviews
- Collecting Team Feedback
- Making Your Selection
- Extending The Job Offer
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