For years, the standard hiring process consisted of posting a job opening, collecting and sifting through resumes to select qualified candidates, and then interviewing the top contenders.
In recent years, as automation has increased the number of applicants and resumes have become increasingly inflated and unreliable, a growing number of hiring managers realized they needed to add another step to the process—prescreening.
Prescreening sets up criteria to filter out applicants before a hiring manager gets to the resume review and interview selection process. Though prescreening may not be able to predict the optimum candidate for the job, a good preliminary screening process should help to filter out the costliest mistakes, such as employees who are toxic, dishonest, unreliable, violent, or extremely unsuitable to the role.
At its best, prescreening can cut down on churn and make sure you are more likely to find employees who are a better fit for your organization and more likely to stay and contribute.
Prescreening comes in many forms, depending on the job. For example, if you’re looking to screen for past criminal conduct or motor vehicle infractions, a public record search can get you the answers you’re looking for, and help is available from the FBI or other state or federal law enforcement agencies.
If you want to implement drug testing, it must be announced in the job description or in the application process before it’s called for. If you want to prescreen by credit history or past worker compensation claims, this information can be publicly attained. Such initial screening can be in-house by hiring managers, outsourced, or automated.
But what if you want to filter out candidates whose work style, skills, or knowledge aren’t well suited to the role you’re looking to fill? Many companies employ applicant questionnaires designed to test specific job skills or cognitive ability to filter large pools of job candidates down to a more manageable number.
Creating and assessing automated screening tools can be in-house, through the use of computerized applications, or outsourced entirely to an HR management system, such as MightyRecruiter.
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Getting Started
If you’re employing prescreening for the first time and you aren’t using an application tool, then have the job description in front of you and use parts of the resume that make the comparison easy, such as a professional objective if the candidate has provided one. Add up the years of experience on the resume and see if they line up with the minimum required.
Another approach would be to have applicants fill out a 3- to 5-question online form that focuses on key skills needed for the job, translating the list of qualifications into a series of yes and no questions. In other words, if you’re looking for at least four years of management experience, then you should craft a question that asks, “Do you have four or more years of management experience?”
As you craft your questions, be careful to comply with EEOC laws, as well as state and local laws. Have a lawyer or your legal team review your questions before you implement the questionnaire into your process, and make sure you ask every candidate the same questions.
A Word of Caution
Though using psychometrics before resume filtering can cut down on the cost of hiring, missteps can be costly. For example, a prescreening process that unintentionally violates the Americans with Disabilities Act or other nondiscrimination laws could result in expensive litigation.
Many companies adopt prescreening systems with high hopes that such “blind” hiring processes will lead to a more culturally and racially diverse applicant pool. This isn’t always the case. Hiring managers should be aware that prescreening algorithms are created by humans and therefore subject to the same biases.
Prescreening applications can be useful tools, but they’re not a perfect solution to complicated employment challenges like gender and racial bias. Like all HR tools they need to be used with caution and periodically adjusted for optimum effectiveness.
To get started, here are 5 prescreening questions that can be incorporated into almost any hiring process:
- Why are you currently looking for a job?
- Why do you want to work for this company in this role?
- What additional skills not listed on your resume do you possess that would contribute to your success in this role?
- What motivates you?
- What kind of leadership style do you respond best to? What kind of leader are you?
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MightyRecruiter is an end-to-end recruiting solution that makes previously manual, time-consuming tasks easy, quick, and effective. Attract, source, recruit, and hire the most relevant candidates to your jobs in no time at all.
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