You’ve just posted a job, and you’re seeing hundreds of applications rolling in. You’re thrilled to see so much interest until you sit back and think, “hmmm. . .someone has to go through all of them and find the best person for the job.” It can be daunting to sort through the noise and find all-star performers among your candidates. But how can you know that an applicant is a right fit for the position? How will you know they’ll fit into your team?
Before you make any decisions, know that an organization that makes good hiring decisions tend to have higher productivity and lower turnover. It’s essential to screen beyond the resume or, at the very least, confirm details on the resume. Screening helps you gauge all candidates fairly and give them an equal chance to exhibit their best characteristics and relate to the open position. Doing this can allow you to understand them better before dismissing or onboarding them.
But even screening can be quite the task for employers and hiring managers. So here are ways to make screening candidates more efficient.
Make Screening Standards for all Positions
Fair hiring practices at any organization are crucial. Employers must ensure any screening test is reliable and valid. If not, discrimination claims are likely to ensue. For legal purposes, it’s important to standardize screening or have a scoring metric to show how you selected the top candidates. Identify what’s required to perform the job, such as education, certifications, designations, etc.
Include questions in your screening such as:
· Can you describe your educational background?
· Can you provide me with some information on professional experience?
· What certifications or licenses do you currently have?
If company culture is essential, behavioural questions can be used to determine the candidate’s workplace preferences to decide whether they’re compatible with the company’s mission, vision, and values.
- What type of leadership style do you respond best to?
- Are you interested in growth opportunities in your workplace?
- Are you looking for long or short-term employment?
Any other questions you believe are essential in your hiring process? Make sure you standardize them for all candidates.
Use Screening to Save Time and Money
As any successful employer will understand, time is a valuable commodity. Finding ways to reduce the length of a task without compromising the quality can be difficult. Every minute you spend shuffling through incomplete resumes and applications with typos, a more efficient company may be hiring the best talent.
Screening candidates for a role you’re hiring for is a great way to save time and money by ensuring that employers don’t have to sit through time-consuming interviews with applicants that are neither qualified nor suited for the job.
Although screening may take some time itself, leveraging technology for your recruiting efforts can help streamline this process. Invest in an applicant tracking system (ATS) to help screen candidates before moving on to the next stage of the application process. The answer to questions provided in the screening process can allow the system to automatically pre-screen and pass on candidates without taking time away from the team.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you do this, ResumeFree™ can help you automate the process to save you time.
Use Screening to Protect the Workplace
Early on, we talked about asking screening questions to qualify whether the candidate aligns with the company’s mission, vision, and values. This is important because, in some cases, new employees can be a destabilizing force in the workplace due to things like poor work ethic, troublesome personality, or an inability to work as part of a team.
Avoiding this is not only an essential part of finding the right employee, but it also keeps your existing staff well-motivated and efficient.
In addition, legal factors come into play to prove that your company’s process is non-discriminatory.
How Screening can Lower Employee Turnover
One of the significant recruitment problems experienced by many businesses is finding employees who will stay on board for any serious length of time. A high turnover in a company means that they must spend valuable time, resources and money running recruitment programs, training new employees, and guiding them once again through the induction phase.
Screening gives employers and hiring managers the opportunity to search out those recruits that seem to display qualities that will keep them at a job for a significant amount of time.
In addition, as we mentioned above, screening can help bring in the right candidate and help keep your current employees happy. The last thing you want to see is one of your high-performing employees try to find greener pastures elsewhere.
Use Screening to Help Focus an Interview
Finally, screening can also make the interviews more efficient. The screening process will allow employers to focus on matters rather than spending valuable time asking questions that don’t go anywhere.
Any information revealed in the screening process should be put to good use and form the basis of further questioning.
The recruitment process can be pretty disruptive to normal business operations for businesses. Most will use several senior employees during the interview stage, taking them away from their regular work and leaving them backlogged. Therefore, it’s crucial to minimize the length of the application process. Minimize disruption, maximize efficiency, and get the right candidate.
