How Candidate Scoring Improves Your Recruitment Process

Hiring happens everywhere. However, a whopping 87% of HR professionals report little to no qualified applicants for the positions they are trying to fill.

This is exactly why finding the right people for each role is one of the biggest challenges in any HR team. But while it is much harder to control who actually applies for each job, there are ways to start internally, by ensuring that your own candidate scoring process is at its best.

Having proven candidate scoring methods to qualify and categorize talent ensures that you do not waste your time on the wrong people, while being able to categorize candidates for future job opportunities.

And in this article, we will be covering everything you need to know about the different methods of candidate scoring, where it applies in the hiring process, and how to use them to your benefit.

Read on to see how you can apply these methods below.

What is candidate scoring?

Candidate scoring refers to any form of ranking or merit-giving system that you use to rank candidates during the recruitment process. Think of it as a means of giving representative “scores” for desirable skills related to the job opening, such as the ability to multitask or code in different languages.

These methods of scoring are normally used as collaborative tools to standardize the qualification process, so that everyone involved in your organization’s recruitment and hiring will have a common point of reference when they take the wheel.

The most common types of candidate scoring

1. Resume parsing

Resume screening happens at the earliest stages of recruitment, when applicants send in their applications with their resumes attached. As opposed to manually sifting through hundreds of resumes at a time, recruiters can now use tools that automatically organize resumes.

This feature is called resume parsing, and it refers to automatically scanning, analyzing, and extracting information from each resume. 

Manatal, organizes information in candidate profiles that include each applicant’s name, age, contact information, address, skills, experience, education, and spoken languages, among other criteria.

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The first “scoring” happens during this stage, where a recruiter or hiring manager typically decides which of the applicants are suitable enough to pass on as candidates, based on skills, experience, and other criteria that are pertinent to the job.

2. AI-driven candidate recommendations

The next type of candidate scoring involves using artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend people from your talent pool–both those from your existing database and the candidate profiles from resume parsing.

Modern AI-driven candidate recommendations suggest people to you based on a percentage of likeness to your specified criteria, which can be used as a score to compare those in your talent pool. The score is typically a reflection of a candidate’s similarities to the role’s requirements in terms of skills, work experience, and current address.

In an applicant tracking system, the recommendations should look something like this:

With these AI-driven scores, recruiters and hiring managers will be able to speed up their candidate scoring process and select the best talent to pass on to the next stage.

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3. Candidate scorecards

Candidate scorecards are most commonly used by HR or recruiting personnel after or during interviews, to assess candidates with predetermined criteria. They are often treated as a collaborative tool for everyone on the team, as they help standardize the candidate qualification process.

Scorecards come in handy when multiple recruiters need to recruit for several positions at once. And although they were traditionally printed out or kept in separate files on a computer, modern tools now allow for candidate scorecards to be used within applicant tracking software.

For example, here is a screenshot of what the candidate scorecard feature on Manatal’s system looks like, and how they can be sent to recruiters on the team to fill out: 

Why is candidate scoring needed in recruitment?

Statistically, it takes 33-49 days to hire someone on average, depending on the industry. If you are hiring for several positions at a time, you can imagine the time recruitment and interviews take out of your day.

Combined with the other HR functions that are on your plate on a daily basis–payroll, benefits, employee development, compliance, and documentation, to name a few–there is only so much you can fit into a fair work week.

This means any effort to standardize the hiring process, both by means of time-saving and quality enhancement, is crucial. 

Candidate scoring was developed to decrease the time taken per hire, by organizing all information relevant to each hiring decision, so the user can make more well-informed decisions.

And as such, any HR or recruitment professional who does not use at least some form of candidate scoring will likely fall behind in the battle for top talent. Specifically, here are some of the biggest disadvantages:

1. You run the risk of losing top candidates. 

Around 60% of candidates lose interest in a job if the hiring process takes too long, in their opinion. This is why the candidate experience you generate for each favorable applicant must be swift.

This means that if you take several weeks–or even months–to make an offer to preferred candidates, they will likely take another offer that was already given to them. You can speed things up from the interview process itself by introducing scoring methods, like candidate scorecards, which help turn interview data into numbers that you can use to score candidates quickly.

2. You could lose value as a professional in the industry.

In the professional world, most people would prefer to be taken seriously. And as global best working practices are starting to shift towards being data-driven, more and more companies are measuring success based on numbers, in all departments.

This means if you are constantly unable to hire the best people in time for your organization’s needs, you will risk losing value as an HR professional. As of to date, recruiters typically deal with 30-40 open requisitions at one time.

Such workloads are more likely to be seen with out-and-out recruiters in recruitment or staffing agencies. But the key takeaway for internal hiring managers and HR personnel is that there are people already working at this level of productivity–some even pushing their capacity higher than this standard.

HR professionals in the modern era will thus need all the help available to them to ensure they do not lose out to other recruiters when it is hiring season.

Time management aside, tools like applicant tracking systems and candidate scorecards also help improve the quality of each hire. And considering it could cost up to twice an employee’s annual salary to replace them, you will most likely be more valued if you can hire the right people, in addition to finding them quickly enough.

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3. You will miss out on opportunities to collect documentation related to the hiring process.

According to this New York Times article, some Fortune 500 companies have allegedly practiced forms of discrimination when they hire. In some cases, this could lead to candidates taking legal action if they feel they are wrongfully dismissed as a candidate for the position.

While it is not likely to happen in organizations that truthfully do not practice discrimination, having documentation ready for any issues that may arise will prevent things from getting ugly.

This is why it is better to be ready with demonstrations of how your organization tackles the hiring process. And if you use candidate scoring methods like candidate scorecards, for example, you will be able to prove that your decisions are points-based, and not preference-based.

Overall, candidate scoring provides you with a centralized and repeatable process to ensure these risks are avoided in your daily workload.

And in the section below, we will be covering how you can already start using forms of candidate scoring in your recruitment and hiring processes.

Standardizing your candidate scoring process with recruitment technology

We have briefly covered tools like candidate scorecards above, as well as how they can benefit you as an HR professional. The next step for those who are looking to improve the way they hire, however, is to understand the role technology plays here in general.

Modern software like Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) help automate candidate scoring practices throughout all stages of the hiring process. A good way of explaining this will be to separate the scoring methods into two stages: before the first interview with a candidate, and after the interview has already been conducted.

1. Before the first interview: Turning applicants into candidates

At this stage, candidate scoring is used to save time that would otherwise be spent going through several application forms at a time. As mentioned above, you can use an ATS that provides you with the following features to help you filter for the best candidates:

a. Resume parsing

A reliable ATS should be able to take information from multiple resumes and sort them into different candidate profiles, which will be uploaded to the ATS’ database–also known as your talent pool. You can then select these candidate profiles based on a desired skill within the database itself, for instance, instead of manually looking at each resume in a hard copy or PDF format.

Furthermore, this also eliminates the possibility of wasting time with duplicate applications from the same applicants.

b. AI-driven candidate recommendations

With an ATS such as Manatal, you will have access to candidate suggestions from your talent pool and other sources, such as LinkedIn. The artificial intelligence-backed recommendations serve as an extra hand to help you make the best hiring decision possible.

This method of candidate scoring helps you find favorable candidates during the vetting process more accurately and in less time. The system shows you the candidate profile, along with a percentage of likeness to the criteria you selected for the role.

Keep in mind, though, that these are just recommendations. They should be treated as a tool to improve your final decision, not replace you as the decision maker on who is and is not qualified for a role.

c. Passing them through the pipeline

Once you have chosen candidates to contact for your job opening, the next step is to put them in an automated candidate pipeline, where you can drag and drop your talent into different stages as you qualify them.

This method of scoring ensures you save time that would otherwise be spent looking at complicated spreadsheets to see who you have already contacted.

Here is an example of a fully-functioning job pipeline from Manatal’s ATS, so you can see how the system looks as a user:

You can freely move candidates according to your interviews later on, until a hiring decision is made. Specifically, Manatal also allows you to customize your pipelines, meaning you can change pipeline titles to fit your number of interviews, among other stages that are unique to your organization.

So now that we have covered candidate scoring before the first interview, let us move on to how you can use recruitment technology to qualify candidates after the interviews have been conducted.

2.After the first interview: Qualifying candidates and making hiring decisions

In this stage, technology will be focused on further qualification based on information gathered from the first interview, such as an initial phone call to ensure the candidate has the potential to be the right fit for the job. Here are some of the options available for recruiters:

1. Sending assessments to candidates

Assessments are used in several industries to qualify candidates, such as digital marketing optimization tests or trial assignments. But while many of these assessments require a physical location, modern tools now allow for effective remote assessments, too.

Remote tests, such as coding assessments or web development exercises, are commonly used in hiring for jobs with specialized skills. This comes in handy when the recruiter does not have the skills to qualify niche skills like software development, for example.

Manatal’s ATS, for example, allows you to send candidates any suitable assessment within its platform. The assessments will be graded by the companies that integrate with ATS–such as Codility–which means the recruiter can qualify candidates on a deeper level before sending them over to their clients.

Here is how assessments can easily be sent within the candidate pipeline on Manatal, for instance:

Such assessments can be sent either before or after the first interview, depending on the qualifying preferences of each recruiter or firm. 

However, for a positive candidate experience, an initial call or phone interview is recommended to establish a good relationship with each candidate, before asking them to complete assessments.

2. Completing candidate scorecards

After interviews and assessments are completed, the next method of tech-assisted candidate scoring is the use of candidate scorecards.

Scorecards are normally used by recruiters to rate candidates’ skills and answers once all the information is collected. By using scorecards in an ATS (like we covered earlier in the article), recruiters who are finding candidates for the same position can collaborate with each other through the different scores they rank.

Once again, they can also be sent and requested by recruiters within the same platform. Recruiters can also create candidate scorecards by customizing fields that are unique to a job opening, such as having a driving license:

When you think of fields for candidate scorecards, consider these three main topics to start:

1. All hard skills required for the role: Engineering, coding, for example 
2. All soft skills required for the role: Analytical skills, teamwork
3. Cultural fit: Company values, alignment on company vision and mission

Without tech-assisted candidate qualifying, recruiters would be spending several days just to get all of the above done for a single candidate. So to ensure you can compete in the war for talent, consider improving your candidate scoring process with the tools we have mentioned above.

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Discover tech-assisted candidate scoring with Manatal’s free 14-day trial

Manatal’s ATS is currently offering a 14-day trial for recruitment professionals who are looking to transform the way they recruit.

The complete software also includes AI-driven candidate recommendations, remote assessments, and candidate scorecards, along with several more features.

For example, this is how to create and customize candidate scorecards on Manatal:

To find out how Manatal can help improve both the time you take to acquire candidates and the quality of your candidate shortlists, sign up for a 14-day free trial today!