3 Ways To Improve Your Candidate Screening

In recruitment, we are always striving to improve how we attract candidates and clients, but one area that many consultants forget to improve is their screening process. In terms of pre-employment checks such as assessing someone’s eligibility to work in the UK the consultant is bound by law, but in terms of CV and interview screening for example, a good consultant should be consistently striving to make it as efficient as possible. Here are three ways to improve your screening process.

CV screening

Specialist recruiters in niche markets may have a relatively small number of CVs to screen whereas recruiters in more general employment areas may have to deal with hundreds of applications for a single vacancy. Either way, it is important to have an effective process in place to ensure that you can sort the star candidates from the ‘also ran’s’.

Every job is unique and should be treated as such, but you should know from the discussions with your client that amongst the criteria that they have specified, which are the ones that are non-negotiable. For example, you may have three key criteria to work with:

– Degree educated in a particular subject

– Recent, relevant experience in a similar role with a minimum time g. 6, 12, 18 months

– A professional qualification

Instead of looking at each CV subjectively, you can now look at each one in terms of these three key points, and you’ll be left with three groups of people. Those that don’t meet any of the criteria, those that meet two and those that meet all three. If you’re still left with lots of candidates, it’s a case of repeating the process with what the client sees as the next set of key skills and attributes they need in a candidate.

Interview screening

The interview is the next phase of the screening process and one where you can not only find out more about them, but one where you can drill down into areas of their CV that need clarifying.

Don’t go into an interview without having clearly defined objectives and questions that you want answers to. You need to have a set of questions that each and every candidate is required to answer. That way, you can score each answer and the candidates can be compared equally. A good way is to group your questions under the following headings:

– Technical — does the candidate have the necessary skills, training and education?

– Experience — have they worked in a similar role before? Have they managed staff or budgets successfully before?

– Personal — what makes them different from other candidates?

This last point is perhaps the most important. This is the question that gives the candidate their chance to shine. If interviews are too prescriptive, you don’t get an all-round view of the candidate. An open-ended question such as this lets them open up and you could very well find things out about the candidate that may not otherwise have been revealed.

Social Screening

If you’re not screening your clients socially, then you should be. Searching for them on a variety of social media networks should be an integral part of your recruitment process and look for different things on each different network:

– Linkedin: Are they using it? If so, do they come across as professional? Are they members of industry groups and do they participate?

– Twitter: Do their tweets show an understanding of the medium they are using? Are they posting anything that is unprofessional, offensive or illegal?

– Facebook: What does their Facebook profile say about them? Do they come across as someone who is suitable to be a representative of your company?

Social screening is an illuminating insight into your candidate’s life and can help reveal a lot about what drives them and what is important to them in their career and life in general.

When was the last time you looked at your candidate screening processes? Do you find having an efficient and effective process saves you valuable time and money?

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time,

Chery