Candidate Screening

When it comes to the functions needed to operate a business, candidate screening may be the most important one. A lot of people may look to the finance department or product development when they think of a large impact on business operations, but everything comes back to HR. If your candidate screening process is faulty, the rest of your business will be as well.

Candidate screening allows you to determine important metrics like candidate experience and whether potential employees pose a big risk or a big reward to your company. With a rigorous screening process in place, your business will ideally be bringing in the best and brightest to help serve the goals of your company. However, this is sometimes easier said than done, and in a goal to move quickly (as the business world often demands), you can risk doing a bad job.

Now, this doesn’t mean that a fast hire is necessarily a bad one or that you need extended amounts of time to determine the perfect candidate. In fact, with the pace at which business moves today, too timely can be just as bad as too fast. Ultimately, you want to save time where you can, and that is where the value of a swift but efficient screening process comes in.

With the help of asynchronous interviews, like those provided through Qualifi, your business can screen hundreds of candidates in a fraction of the time without a drop-off in quality. Before we get into the details of this on-demand interview format, we first want to break down why the recruitment and selection process is so valuable in the first place and what you can expect from managing your own.

Recruitment and Selection Process

The recruitment and selection process is best described as the process in which recruiters take a candidate from application to the final decision, job offer, and then onboarding. It is not the same for every company.

However, the typical example of a selection process involves:

• Application – The application stage has long been considered a passive stage in the selection process. However, it offers the first opportunity to include pre-screening interview questions to begin disqualifying candidates.
• Resume screening – The next natural stage in the selection process, resume screening involves evaluating the candidate’s resume for relevant skills and experience. Although this process varies based on company and position, the principles are the same.

This stage could require shifting through hundreds of candidates, if not thousands. Thankfully, there are tools available to help recruiters cope with high volumes of resumes.

• Interviewing – A good interview with the hiring manager allows a recruiter to evaluate candidates’ potential. However, this stage is time-consuming, second only to manual resume screening. Thankfully, tools like Qualifi allow hiring managers to streamline the process using on-demand audio interviews calling to deliver HR screening questions to candidates in the form of recordings.

• Background & Reference Checks – Background checks are one of the most important risk management initiatives you can manage for your company. By analyzing your potential employee’s history for criminal, credit, and other records, you can learn the risk that they may pose to your business operations.
• Job Offer – The recruitment and selection process will typically cap off with the job offer finally being produced, assuming the candidate has successfully made it through the other phases beforehand.

While this is one of the most important functions of your business, it can also be costly in time and other resources. It is important that businesses can learn how to improve their recruitment time by empowering their screening methods.

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Methods for Screening Candidates

Of all the stages of the recruitment and selection process we listed, the screening portion may be one of the most significant. This is not only due to the valuable candidates it can secure but also because of the time that can be involved in maximizing the effectiveness of this process. Therefore, when screening candidates, it is important that you can do a swift and effective job. There are a few dominant methods of screening candidates, which includes:

• Video Interview – Much like it sounds, a video interview can be hosted over a platform like Zoom and involves assessing your candidate in a “face-to-face” video call.
• Phone Interview – This involves reaching out to the candidate over the phone and assessing their skills, experience, and education. This can be much faster than an email back and forth, but hosting calls for every candidate can become a time-sink.
• Asynchronous Interview – This screening method involves providing candidates with questions and having them respond typically in a video format. This can greatly speed up the screening process, as multiple candidates can respond at once, and all their responses can be analyzed consecutively.

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As we mentioned, these different methods have their advantages, but all can become a costly time-sink if not handled correctly. With Qualifi, you can harness the power of asynchronous interviews to screen hundreds of candidates in the time it would take to host a phone or video call with only one or two.

Benefits of Virtual Interviews

On-demand interviews, also known as asynchronous interviews, provide a large advantage over more traditional forms of screening. This is due to the time saved and the expansion of your capabilities in the hiring process. Let’s take, for example, a situation involving high-volume hiring.

If you are in a high-volume hiring phase, then you don’t have a lot of time to spare in order to screen candidates and fill positions. Every minute wasted is another minute of business productivity lost, so you want to save time where you can. If you wanted to call or video chat with every potential candidate, this could cost you hundreds of hours, and you might still not even find the right candidate.

The benefits of on-demand interviews include a shortened time-to-hire by greatly decreasing the time needed for the screening process. With on-demand interviews, hundreds of candidates can answer your screening questions at once, and you can conveniently browse through them and determine the right candidates much more quickly.

Technology has been used to advance just about every other area of business operations, and with an interviewing platform like Qualifi, you can now harness technology to improve your hiring process as well. Not only is it beneficial for you, but candidates also don’t want to wait to know if they are hired. The faster you can share a decision, the better your candidates will respond to you.

Employee Selection

The candidate selection process is not an area of business operations that should be overlooked. When it comes to employee selection, it may in fact be the most important duty of your business. Without the right quality employees, or even quantity of employees, your business can experience heavy disruptions.

But traditional wisdom would suggest that a quality screening and selection process would be a timely one. However, this is no longer necessarily the case. With the advent of asynchronous interviews, you can now rapidly speed up the screening process and greatly improve your time-to-hire. A decreased time-to-hire is not only positive for your HR department but also plays a huge role in the feelings of your employees. A swift hiring process is a win for all sides of the interaction.

If you are interested in the concept of asynchronous, on-demand interviews, then you’ll want a trustworthy partner to help empower your screening process. Qualifi is one service that allows your company to access the power of asynchronous interviews and rapidly improve your hiring process. Visit our site and even schedule a demo to preview our services today.