12 Simple Steps to Screen Candidates Efficiently

Every successful and stable company starts with its greatest asset - employees. They are the critical thread holding everything together and helping executives drive and reach their strategic goals and objectives. 

Without workers, most tasks would be incomplete, and projects would progress slowly. Yet, hiring just any job seeker meeting some of the requirements is not enough.  

Instead, a company must ensure these people fit their culture, mission, and values. High-performing employees inherently have the necessary skills and experiences or possess the willingness and ability to acquire them. 

Otherwise, employers would end up with staff that lack the knowledge and capabilities to perform their jobs and actively contribute to the team. That leads to low productivity, disengagement, and employee turnover. 

Choosing the Right People Helps Drive Business Success

So, how do companies ensure they're hiring the right people and growing their workforce adequately? - It all comes down to well-thought-out strategies, collaboration, and effective candidate screening. 

When evaluating resumes and cover letters, recruiters don't only look for matching skills and education. Instead, they must dive deeper and genuinely understand whether a job applicant has a promising profile and characteristics that align with a company's needs and targets. 

Not dedicating enough attention to this stage or not paying attention could lead to hiring incompatible employees. But a wrong hiring decision costs at least 30 percent of the individual's first-year expected earnings.

Hence, assessing your job applicants and their compatibility is among the most important duties you have as a hiring manager or recruiter. 

Here's everything you should know about candidate screening. 

What is Candidate Screening?

Candidate screening represents the process of assessing candidates' job applications, analyzing resumes, gathering insights from cover letters, and choosing the most compatible matches for the role. Recruiters and hiring managers roll out this phase right after concluding candidate sourcing and having sufficient applicants. 

Since they aim to determine who is the most suitable professional for the job opening, they also use written interviews, face-to-face interviews, background checks, and telephone screening. This stage is vital because it allows recruiters to establish a shortlist of skilled candidates with the potential to thrive in the company and contribute to it with their capabilities and ideas. 

Therefore, the goal of candidate screening is to examine hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of job applications to identify the most suitable candidates, nurture diversity, and ensure fair and inclusive hiring practices. However, it's crucial for this stage to be well-rounded and not rely solely on resume evaluation. 

Even though some companies might skip interviews to accelerate the selection process, it's borderline discriminatory to base your opinion only on a candidate's CV. If a job applicant meets the job requirements and passes the initial assessment, it's necessary to tap into another dimension of their candidacy. 

Otherwise, you risk an incomplete and faulty screening process. Thus, this stage is challenging in itself. The following are the most common hurdles recruiters and hiring managers encounter when screening job applicants. 

YOU MIGHT LIKE: The Importance of Candidate Screening for Recruitment in 2023

Most Common Candidate Screening Challenges

Deciding on Key Candidate Screening Criteria

Even though candidate screening criteria play a central role in how this stage will unfold, many hiring managers and recruiters struggle to choose the right ones. They must decide what factors they'll use to identify compatible candidates and what's enough to weed someone out. 

For instance, recruiters must determine whether the location and distance from the headquarters matter, especially if they foster a hybrid work approach in the office. Some employers have decided to eliminate degree requirements due to talent shortages, but that is not an easy decision, and it may impact the quality of hire. 

Because of that, recruiters will often find it hard to decide how to set their candidate screening filters and what to prioritize. While some employers will put technical skills proficiency first, others will be keener on hiring people with sufficient experience. 

Low or High Volume of Job Applications

Candidate screening depends on whether you have enough candidates in the pipeline. And although inbound job applications are not the only way to introduce job applicants to the selection process, they are among the most critical methods. 

After all, if internal recruitment and references didn't result in a satisfactory number of candidates, receiving resumes is your best bet. However, some companies may struggle with a low or overly high volume of job applications. 

If you don't receive enough, that will make benchmarking difficult and also imply your marketing efforts weren't fruitful. On the flip side, if you received thousands of resumes for a single job opening, you will need days to evaluate them all, especially if you don't have an ATS. 

Hence, it's necessary first to establish effective advertising strategies and promote the job ad in places your target audience frequents. You should also add pre-screening questions for candidates that will help you discourage under-qualified job seekers from applying (e.g., ''Describe your experience with a specific software needed to perform this job well'').

Measuring the Potential Quality of Hire

It's recommended to use AI-powered technology to screen candidates. However, remember that most systems can only recommend job applicants that match your pre-defined criteria. 

AI and machine learning can't, per se, measure the potential quality of hire without receiving instructions and guidance. That means that human input is still crucial, and your software's suggestions depend on your candidate screening requirements to a large extent. 

Some recruiters rely entirely on ATS to determine the most compatible candidate but forget that if they misjudge what the ideal job applicant should have, the platform will follow their poorly chosen criteria. 

Hence, you should be beyond careful when deciding the filters that you pre-define in your recruitment platform to boost accuracy. 

Accidentally Excluding Qualified Candidates

Pre-pandemic figures have shown that a large chunk of incoming resumes never get read by a human. Although many companies and HR professionals refuted this claim, screening platforms still weed out a significant number of quality job applications. 

That might happen when candidates are creative and send slightly unorthodox resumes that, despite being accurate and meeting job requirements, have an unusual format or software that can't read the data from it. Thus, that can also happen when they use complex vocabulary or a foreign language. 

Therefore, recruiters should always run a fast check to ensure the platform didn't exclude a potentially good candidate due to, for example, an artistic template or inadequate resume format. Even though that takes time, and they can mostly rely on AI-powered technology, it's better to be safe than sorry.

False Candidate Data and Information

Sadly, not every candidate will be honest and share accurate and factual information. Some will make their accomplishments sound better than they are, and others will write what they believe recruiters would like to hear. 

However, some candidates will go as far as trying to impress the company with entirely false data. For instance, according to Business.com, 93 percent of people know someone who lied on their resume. 

That can severely impact companies and cause them to lose $600 billion annually. Because of that, you must be extra careful during the candidate screening process and check their backgrounds to ensure resumes and reality match. 

Unconscious Bias in Hiring

Humans are not robots, and as such, they're prone to unintentional mistakes. They can have stereotypes and prejudices they're unaware of and let them impact their decision-making. 

Despite not doing it on purpose, people often prefer those similar to them, as they see similarities as green flags. For example, some recruiters might give an advantage to candidates who finished the same university.

However, bias can damage a company's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and lead to unfair hiring processes. That's where AI-driven technology comes in handy, as it can help reinforce objectivity and eliminate recruiters' unconscious personal preconceived opinions.

READ MORE: How Talent Acquisition Benefits from Artificial Intelligence
RELATED: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Recruitment Technology

Lack of Adequate Technology

Even though human input will always be necessary for every stage of the recruitment process, AI-driven technology is becoming just as important nowadays. Hiring managers and recruiters use it to speed up their hiring procedures, increase decision-making accuracy, and reinforce their DEI efforts. 

That's why modern platforms, such as ATS, play a significant role in the candidate screening process. However, if a company has inadequate or outdated technology, it likely won't benefit from its features and possibilities. 

Every tool that recruiters use must be well-thought-out and checked before purchasing. But not investing in any technology and relying solely on manual work will hinder the candidate screening's efficiency and lead to slow processes. 

Here are all the steps you should take to ensure satisfactory candidate screening outcomes and high-quality hires. 

Vital 12 Steps to Screen Candidates Efficiently

1. Check and Ensure Compliance and Legality

Every successful candidate screening starts with compliance and keeping up with the latest employment and recruitment legal requirements and procedures. That includes providing equal employment chances to every job applicant and following your company's rules and standards. 

You must treat every candidate the same and follow the same steps for each of them. Favoritism based on age, disabilities, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, marital status, or religion is highly discriminatory and will take your recruitment in the wrong direction. 

Unless the job description requires specific characteristics of a candidate (e.g., physically demanding jobs will likely need employees with sufficient weight to lift heavy things), you should disregard this aspect of a job applicant's profile. Moreover, refrain from subtly asking for candidates' photos and requiring them to share information irrelevant to the job. 

Some recruiters might try to get around the law, but that will likely backfire, causing them to risk their company's reputation. However, you're allowed to ask for certain information, such as whether a candidate has felony convictions or whether they're eligible to work in the country where the office is located. 

2. Identify the Minimum Requirements that Candidates Should Meet

Before sharing the job ad and evaluating candidates' resumes, determine the minimum requirements they should meet to be shortlisted. The job description should match these criteria and be easy to understand.

Otherwise, you risk attracting incompatible candidates, which could extend the candidate screening process. For instance, entry-level positions will likely require drastically different skills and experiences than senior-level. 

Removing or making some criteria more flexible (e.g., degree requirements) helps boost candidate diversity. But sometimes strict education requirements are necessary as the job requires a specific expertise level. 

LEARN MORE: 6 Ways to Create a Killer Job Description for Recruitment ATS

RESOURCES: Add hundreds of free and ready-to-use job description templates to your HR toolkit.

3. Implement Advanced AI Technology

As mentioned in the challenges recruiters experience when candidate screening, AI-powered technology is becoming a must-have throughout the recruitment process. 

Determine the software type that aligns with your hiring needs and requirements and identify vendors that match these characteristics. Manatal AI Recommendation Engine takes the load off a recruiter’s daily tasks, enabling recruiters to make thorough hiring decisions on behalf of the business. 

4. Include Internal Candidates

Encouraging internal recruitment will accelerate candidate screening, as this opens the way for your current employees to grow within the company. Since they're already vetted and fit the workplace culture, team dynamics, and business goals, you will spend less time evaluating them and more on preparing their upskilling or reskilling. 

5. Review All Resumes and Cover Letters

Even if you have internal candidates, you must give an equal chance to your external candidates if you also roll out outbound recruitment. Therefore, after deciding on the minimum requirements and introducing proper technology, it's time to pass the incoming job applications. 

Use your recruitment software to speed up this step and find faster candidates that match the company's criteria. But double-check that you're not missing out on stellar talents due to unorthodox resume formats.

6. Weed Out the First Round of Incompatible Candidates

The next step is to weed out under-qualified candidates who don't meet the minimum requirements, add false information, or don't pass the pre-screening test. That will leave you with a list of shortlisted job applicants you will meet better in the following stages. 

7. Conduct Phone and Video Screenings

Phone and video conversations can give you more insights into a candidate's experience, motivation, and long-term objectives. But these will also highlight their communication skills, attitude, patience, professionalism, and active listening capabilities. 

8. Run Background Checks

After conducting phone and video screenings, you'll get enough information and context to decide on the next round of shortlisted candidates. However, before rolling out interviews, run background checks to confirm a candidate has no criminal record and that they have relevant experience. That should help you uncover resume omissions, false information, and lies.

9. Contact References

It's also recommended to contact candidates' references and ask them about their experience. They can talk about a job applicant's soft skills, technical skills, and the knowledge they acquired while working in their company, which should help identify the most compatible individual. 

10. Interview Candidates

If you prefer in-person interviews over telephone and video meetings, now it's time for that step. Invite them to the headquarters and discuss their potential future responsibilities, how their day-to-day at the office would look, and how they would help your company meet its strategic goals. 

11. Use Applicant Tracking Systems and All Their Relevant Features

AI-powered technology, such as ATS, can be your best support in finding the best match among the shortlisted candidates. This system can identify applicants with relevant skills, competencies, and experiences and pinpoint those with preferred availability and location. 

Use all its features to your benefit and to ensure the ATS is not weeding out quality candidates. For instance, multilanguage resume parsing can help identify qualified international job applicants, while AI recommendations will highlight the most suitable profiles for the role. 

Plus, you can use candidate scoring to evaluate a job applicant with your entire team and decide together on who best fits the requirements and company culture. 

12. Implement Skills Assessments and Behavioral Tests

Finally, you can give the interview stage an extra layer by following them with relevant skills assessments and behavioral tests. These will help you understand what candidate would perform best in the role and who fits well in your team's dynamics. 

Candidate screening is a demanding stage that can have a significant impact on your company's performance and success in the future. If you do it well and choose a compatible job applicant, you will add to your team an employee capable of innovating, performing their job well, and driving business objectives. 

AI technology will help you conduct this phase efficiently and choose your new worker faster and more objectively. Manatal's ATS possesses the necessary features to perform an efficient candidate screening and find the best match for the role. 

Start your Free Trial now and discover how Manatal can help you evaluate your candidates thoroughly without extensive manual work.