4 Tips For Better Job Applicant Screening

Once you have a job posting, it always feels great to get a flood of job applicant. However, once it happens, it can be challenging to manage to screen numerous candidates for potential interviews. This is especially true if you’re still using the traditional approach and haven’t thought of implementing technology.

Luckily, due to the advancement of today’s technology, there are countless solutions that can help screen applicants more easily. That being said, keep the following tips in mind:

Make Use Of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology

A good way to remove bias from your screening process is to automate your recruitment process. With this in mind, take advantage of AI technology, like an applicant tracking system, to optimize your recruitment when screening applicants without bias.

The best thing about AI technology is that it can be used to screen candidates, conduct interviews for situational and behavioral questions, and test candidates’ skill sets.

Here some of the AI tools you can use:

1. Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

It’s digital software that provides hiring and recruitment tools to empower your entire recruitment process. It’s also helpful when screening job applicant by filtering out particular information, like gender, in a fair manner. This ensures that every decision is made based on the applicant’s ability.

Aside from reducing bias, it can also provide anonymous feedback, where it’ll store and separate negative or positive applicants without the presence of names.

2. Psychometric Tests

These tests are made to measure the suitability of the applicants for the role. Typically, a psychometric test includes a simulated work environment, mini-games, personality test, or the standard behavioral test.

Most recruiters use these tests to evaluate the applicant’s cognitive abilities and soft skills. Such tests only consider candidate abilities and skills, which remove any potential unfairness and bias in the screening process, allowing you to hire the right employee.

The results of these tests can also be used to choose the best-performing candidates to move through the recruitment. This solution enables you to provide candidates with an opportunity to show their abilities while saving you more time.

3. Automated Interviews:

These offer a bias-free solution since they screen applicants blindly. This kind of digital solution often involves the use of AI to screen candidates automatically in the form of phone or video interviews. It also provides applicants with unique opportunities to show their abilities without any bias.

4. Always Set Your Own Screening Criteria

The key to effective applicant screening is to define certain criteria. To benchmark and assess applications for a job role, setting a standard experience and skill requirement is essential. 

This will help you narrow down the applications further and determine the range of educational background and experience that your candidates should have.

5. Have Reasons For Unsuccessful Applicants

When screening applicants, know the reasons why job applicants can’t advance in your recruiting process. 

You can use simple reasons like they have unrelated work experience. But you may also settle for specific reasons, including a bracket length of work experience that applicants should fall into.

6. Use Knockout Questions

A knockout question is an excellent way to screen applicants. This allows you to know who’ll stand out in a job interview. If you’re using tools like ATS, it can be set up automatically to help you save more time.

Some of the common knockout question categories include:

7. Experience:

If work experience is crucial, use questions to screen job applicant and disqualifying the ones who don’t meet your minimum requirements. You can start by asking about their years of experience in a certain role. 

You may also ask about their experience managing teams of a certain size. For example, if you’re searching for a foreman who manages more than 20 people, you should disqualify those who have managed fewer.

8. Culture:

Another way to hire the right candidate for your business is to ask knockout questions regarding culture. This means that you must ensure that your questions tie into the core values of your company. 

For instance, if you value transparency, you can create a scenario and offer options on how they’d respond. Picking the most transparent response can be your only option that would move them to the next stage of the recruitment process.

9. Behavior:

Questions about behavior are normally open-ended. While you may ask questions regarding their behavior in a previous job, it isn’t an indicator of their future response. Asking questions that are unrelated to the job can give you unique insights into how they respond naturally.

To get better results from using knockout questions, make sure to create a list of acceptable responses for all questions. This will save you more time and maintain consistency during your review.

Conclusion

Attracting the right job applicants can save your company money and time. So make sure to properly implement the tips above. Once you’ve done it right, it’ll help you screen applicants effectively and keep you on the path to hiring the right people for your company.