Screening Process in HR

The screening process in HR is an essential step in the overall recruitment process. Without it, hiring managers would find themselves swamped with unqualified candidates. All the while, competition will swoop in and make an offer to the best talent first. Calling that less than ideal would be an understatement.

That’s also why the entire recruitment process hinges on building a strong screening process to find the best talent and get them to the main interview fast. However, that’s easier said than done. Screening is an involved, time-consuming process that needs to be done right.

To that end, let’s take a look at what your typical screening process in HR looks like.

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1. Screening Resumes and Cover Letters - Every screening process begins with sorting candidates according to their resumes and cover letters. According to Zippia, the average corporate job posting receives an average of 250 applications. That equals hours of sorting for a small team, especially if it’s done manually. Thankfully, there are many applicant tracking software solutions available to help identify the best candidates and save recruiters precious time.
   
   
2. Skill Assessment - Once you’ve found a set of promising candidates, consider asking them to perform some basic skill assessments – especially for a technical role. These tests will help further sort candidates based on skills.
   
   Although skill assessments can occur during any point in the screening process, they are arguably best placed immediately before or concurrent with the screening interview.
   
   
3. Screening interview - The screening interview represents the most important stage of the screening process. This brief 15-30 minute interview ideally gathers relevant information on the applicant beyond their basic information. Ideally, each candidate will have the same amount of time with the same set of questions on salary expectations, experience, and other details relevant to the position. If you use on-demand interviews, you can conduct every single screening at once.
   
   
4. Research - At this stage, you will have boiled it down to a handful of candidates. Now is the time for due diligence, and research the candidates’ backgrounds via background checks, references, and online research.

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The candidates that pass this stage will go on to the next stage, an interview with the hiring manager.

Recruitment Process

Now that we’ve explored what the screening process is in recruitment, it’s time to look at the process as a whole.

Although screening is certainly important, it by no means represents the complete recruitment process. Recruitment steps can change from company to company, but they ultimately follow the same pattern.

So, let’s take a look at the recruitment process.

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1. Writing and posting a job description - A job description will include everything a candidate can expect from a position. This can include required skills, role expectations, and expected salary range. When writing the description, consider the language carefully. A job description will often be a candidate’s first impression, and it’s vital to steps to mitigate bias at this stage.
   
   
2. Screening - The steps we mentioned previously will fall under this step. For brevity’s sake, we will surmise screening here is the process of separating the qualified and the unqualified. That will require identifying and eliminating candidates that fail to meet the minimum requirements for the position.
   
   This stage is arguably the most time-consuming, with most recruiters, according to Yello, reporting that most of their recruiting time is spent on scheduling and performing screening interviews. Thankfully, there are solutions such as on-demand interviews to expedite the process without sacrificing quality.
   
3. Interview - After the screening process, the candidates that make it to this stage will undergo a more in-depth interview with the hiring manager. This interview will cover more than just qualifications. Rather, it will include questions and discussion on whether a candidate is the right fit. This will include exploring their attitude toward work and how they would perform in the company’s culture.
   
   
4. Making an offer - They have the right skills. They have the right experience. Everything about the candidate indicates that they would be an excellent employee. It’s time to make an offer. Here recruiters will reach out to the chosen candidate to formally offer employment, detailing benefits, salary, and more.
   
   
5. Onboarding - An often forgotten stage in recruitment is onboarding. Once a candidate has accepted an offer, it’s time to integrate them into the workplace. This includes providing them with information on the available resources and the general procedures they can expect. Neglecting this stage will result in a new employee that will take a considerable amount of time to get up to full speed.

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Methods for Screening Candidates

If you’re not a recruiter, you’ve realized at this point how involved and time-consuming recruitment can be. If you are a recruiter, you’re exasperated by how simple it sounds written out in a list. It’s hard work. That’s why recruiters are constantly looking for ways to speed up the hiring process while still improving the quality of hire.

To this end, the most natural place to start is in the screening process. This stage is highly dependent on interviews, the biggest time sink of the entire process. Thankfully, there are quality methods for screening candidates available to the modern recruiter. We’re talking about on-demand interviews.

We mentioned them briefly before, but asynchronous interviews eliminate scheduling and live interviews without sacrificing human connection in the process. They primarily come in two forms: phone or video interviews. However, only one can be the best.

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Let’s start by looking at time-to-hire. The average in the United States ranges from 36 to 42 days. According to Zippia, this costs approximately $98 per day, making the average cost $4,129 per position. On-demand interviews can drastically reduce time and ultimately save money.

However, on-demand video interviews consistently fail to provide this same time reduction as their audio counterpart. Although scheduling is still eliminated, the video format requires a recruiter’s complete attention. Contrast this with on-demand phone interviews that allow recruiters to multitask, listening to interviews in a convenient podcast-style format.

What’s more, phone interviews offer the fastest review time, making them ideal for handling high-volume hiring.

How to Screen More Candidates at Once

High-volume recruitment involves handling hundreds of applications a day to fill multiple roles, unlike your average job posting with its 250 candidates throughout the recruitment effort. As such, recruiters need to be prepared with the right strategies and the right tools to handle how to screen more candidates at once.

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Start with a strong job posting. According to JobVite, recruiters need at least 180 people to view their postings. As such, high-volume recruiters need several times that number. So, the job description will need to attract as many qualified candidates as possible. Most candidates are looking for honest and realistic job postings that will build trust and encourage them to apply.

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Then there’s the matter of sourcing. Candidates have to come somewhere. High-volume recruiters look beyond job boards such as Indeed. They’re utilizing all the avenues available to them including social media – especially if that’s where their ideal candidate spends most of their time.

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Once you’ve built a healthy pipeline of candidates, you’ll need the right tools to handle them. Virtual phone screening allows recruiters to potentially interview hundreds of candidates 24/7. That’s perfect for high-volume recruitment. This is because this interview format allows recruiters to eliminate scheduling and screen individual interviews at a rapid pace.

Get a demo with Qualifi today to see how on-demand interviews can change the way you look at screening.

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