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April 2024
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Candidate screening is an essential part of any hiring process. You may not realise that it requires a slightly different mindset than interviewing. I started my career as a recruiter in headhunting and executive search where screening was one of the most important stages because, in an agency, you don’t get to interview the candidate as thoroughly as your client does. So how can you make sure that you set up the right candidates for interview and even start to think about closing them at the offer stage? Here I’ll share my knowledge and best practices to help you develop an effective candidate screening process. What is candidate screening?Candidate screening is the stage at the start of the recruitment process that decides who goes through to the first stage interview. This is especially common if a recruiter works with the hiring manager as the recruiter acts as a sieve and an extension of the hiring team’s needs. The candidate screening process involves reviewing information about the candidate that is available to you (candidate’s resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile etc.) and deciding whether they could be a good fit. If they seem promising, then the process would also normally involve an initial call between the candidate and someone from HR, called the ‘screening call’, to explore a little deeper and discuss the role. This involves designing questions that are wide enough to give you a snapshot of the candidate without going into unnecessary detail at this early stage. At the screening stage, there is a lot of practice and effort required so as not to make any “mental shortcuts” or heuristics. You need to actively steer your mind from jumping to conclusions based on limited information and try to verify and investigate whatever you can find before making a call. Screening while sourcingYou may not realise it, but a lot of judgment goes (or at least should go) into candidate sourcing. This could be as basic as reading a candidate’s profile on LinkedIn and noticing that they specifically say they don’t want to be contacted for new roles right now (and respecting that wish!). Here are a few things I look out for when deciding whether I should reach out to a potential candidate:
Resume screeningWhen it comes to applicants, the first piece of information you will see about them is their CV or resume (depending on where you are in the world). We are so used to them that it’s actually a new thing now for companies to offer accessible applications without CVs. Here are things that I review for each job applicant’s CV:
That is all—not much, but bear in mind that for the moment we’re looking at the very top of the funnel. A CV only tells half the story, so you don’t want to look too much into it and start making assumptions that often turn out to be wrong. For example, you may be excited that you have an applicant who has only ever worked at a very large company, but then you remember that your position is in a small start-up and you are looking for a sales director that has experience bringing a small challenger product to a new market. You can still interview a candidate from a large company, but you have to make sure you delve deeper into how they would approach your particular situation. Things I don’t give much importance to:
Note on AI CV reviewers ATS companies have I am yet to see an ATS with a well-executed “AI” or even “machine learning” model of CV rating per role. Even roles with the same title can be so different that I don’t see any current tool being able to reliably rate candidate CVs. Most just end up being SEO catchers i.e. looking for keywords and the frequency of their use. Bear in mind the following if this will be your first time reviewing international CVs as they may contain these elements which may seem odd:
Phone screening/Video Call screeningIf, after reviewing their CV, LinkedIn, etc. someone seems like a potential match, the next step of the screening process is a quick call with someone from HR. This is likely the first human interaction the candidate will have with your organization as part of their application, so you want to balance assessing their skills with creating a good overall experience. Don’t let it be a conversation where it’s just a checklist of questions. You have to give potential candidates enough information about the open position and the company culture in an engaging way and also get the information you need from. While it may be the first proper conversation, this is actually where the “close” begins in that you’re preparing yourself and the candidate for a potential job offer. Understanding the motivations of the candidate completes the picture that their skills and experience begin to draw, so make sure you take time to understand them truly. This will help you later on if you end up making them an offer. For example, if a candidate mentions that they currently don’t do much frontend engineering as part of their full-stack role, but they’d really like to focus on that as a next step in their career and this is something you can offer, you can remind them of that in the offer call to reinforce the opportunity. To ensure an effective a call as possible, I always center the initial screening interview around an agenda—just like with internal meetings! I start by giving them an overview of the role and then ask them to give me an overview of their experience plus answer a few questions. I then make sure there’s time at the end for any questions they have. I’ve found that starting with information about myself, the company, and the role settles candidates better than me rattling off questions at them from the start. But, as you want to move over to assessing their skills and motivations, be mindful of how much time you spend giving information vs how much you spend getting information from the candidate. My screens are usually about 30 mins so I spend around 5-7 mins on the intro and pitch and 15 mins gathering information from the candidate. The rest of the time I try to reserve for the candidate’s questions (which at this stage may not be that many). I usually create interview questions based on the areas I want to cover in this first call:
On my side, I talk them through the company, team, role, outcomes for the position, and other essentials that they’d need to know to make a decision. This discovery process on both sides continues throughout the process, but the screening lays the foundation of knowledge on both sides. I’d recommend similar approaches when it comes to phone interviews or video interviews at the screening stage. Setting up your recruiter for successIf you’re a hiring manager working with a recruiter, you play a key role in ensuring that your talent acquisition partner understands what you need. They will be conducting the screen on your behalf, so it’s crucial they understand how you think about the role. An easy way to give guidance is to think about what information you need to consider a candidate suitable for the role, what information isn’t present in the candidate’s CV that you’d like to know, and what information the recruiter can realistically assess. For example, it’s unlikely the recruiter will be able to assess the quality of the code of an applicant. This ensures the recruiter has the knowledge and screening tools they need to turn top talent into qualified candidates to progress through the interview process. Other ways of gathering info
Closing thoughts
As you’ve seen, in all three types of screening I outlined above, I talked about anchoring the screening on objective things and primarily looking for evidence of the candidate’s skill. This is important as unconscious bias can creep in during these early stages.
Have any tips to share? Reach out in the comment or join the conversation in the People Managing People Community, a supportive community of HR and business leaders passionate about building organizations of the future Some further resources to help you refine your hiring process:
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