3 Things for Better Quality Screening

This is a guest post from our marketplace partner Weirdly

Congratulations! You’ve launched your sourcing campaign, and the candidates are flooding in. But how do you manage the flood? The answer is simple: candidate screening.

The screening step is all about reducing the initial volume of candidates down to something more manageable. You can quickly and efficiently establish which candidates are worth considering for a particular role. This way, you won’t waste time wading through resumes of applicants who are not the right fit for your role.

Recruiters all screen in different ways. It often starts in the initial application process with the collection of “deal breaker” data – things like eligibility to work or a specific qualification. But lots of recruiters are STILL manually filing through resumes at this stage. Thankfully, you can use a growing number of smart screening tools that will help you filter down to a shorter qualified candidate list. You can do less manual screening, and more actual recruiting!

Often, the screening approach you choose is determined by the size of your company or the type of role you’re filling. However, there are a few tricks recruiters could all be using – no matter who we’re recruiting for – to streamline the screening process and get us to the holy grail: A better quality shortlist in less time.

Want to get that better shortlist in less time? Here are three tricks you should know:

1. Screen for culture as well as skills.

Many recruiters make the mistake of limiting initial screening steps to just skills or an experience based assessment. Any consideration of culture or character is limited to what you can glean from a resume or (groan) a cover letter.

We at Weirdly believe that culture and fit are too important to leave to the hints candidates might drop in their resume. If you were faced with two candidates – Candidate A with 100% of the required skill set but no culture fit, or Candidate B with only 80% of the required skill set, but who will complement your culture perfectly, which would you pick? We know we would choose the 80% candidate with the perfect culture fit. That last 20% skills-gap can be taught, but a great fit can’t.

By adding a layer of culture assessment early in the recruitment process, you’re won’t eliminate those 80%-ers right at the beginning. You’re also sending a clear message to candidates that culture is important to your company. This often gives them the opportunity to self-eliminate if they realize the fit isn’t right for them.

2. Make sure your screening tools integrate with your ATS.

Integrations are a hot topic in the HR tech world these days (and getting hotter as every month passes it seems). Screening tools are no exception. Finding ways to screen candidates that integrate seamlessly into your ATS just makes sense. Collecting data in different places make your data a little less reliable, and you only have to interact with one dashboard.

As a recruiter, your time is your most precious commodity, so seeking out screening tools like Weirdly (which assesses culture fit) or HackerRank (which assesses technical skills) helps save you time. Not to mention the that an integration with an ATS like SmartRecruiters means you can take advantage of these clever new volume-screening approaches without having to leave your ATS dashboard. Results are automatically added to candidate profiles, and at a glance, you can see whether they’re a candidate worth pursuing for that role.

3. Be decisive.

This is perhaps the easiest, yet most often overlooked advice: effective screening is about being decisive. When candidates come into your ATS, decide quickly whether they’re worth sending through to the next step in the screening process and if not, hit pass immediately.

Then, everyone who is a “maybe” can move onto the next screening step – whether that’s a culture assessment, a skills test, or just a deeper probe into the candidate’s resume and social presences.

The key is not to make the mistake of opening a candidate’s application or profile over and over again before actioning. Open once, make a decision, and move on.

Making sure your screening phase includes these three steps will save you loads of time in the long run, as well as making each step more informed and streamlined.