Sifting through applications to find the best candidates is often a difficult task and it’s easy to overlook talent. Implementing the correct process can help you hire the right person whether you’re looking for professional experience, transferable skills, or soft skills. Not only this, using a robust screening process reduces any risk of bias, and saves time and resources.
Shortlisting is a method used to select candidates that have the skills and experience required for the job role and to determine who to invite for an interview. There is a range of methods for shortlisting and screening candidates that can all help to narrow down your pool of job applicants in the very early stages of the hiring process.
Agree assessment criteria
Developing and agreeing on both the essential and desired criteria is a crucial step in determining the skills, qualities and experience required for each job role. Simply put, essential criteria are ‘must-haves’, while desirable criteria are ‘nice-to-haves’. By having criteria in place, recruiters can easily compare candidates, which in turn helps to strengthen the selection process.
It’s also important to strike a balance so that your criteria are robust enough to successfully identify high-quality candidates, but not so strict that you risk eliminating other talented individuals. The following are some of the assessment criteria that could be applied:
- Assessing skills, traits and experience: Identify what skills, experience and attributes are required for the role.
- Education level: Determine the minimum educational qualifications needed to perform the job.
- Competencies: Define the key behaviours, abilities and knowledge that would drive candidates to be successful in the role.
- Right to work in your location: Ensure any potential employee has a legal right to work in your country.
- Criminal convictions: Perform checks to reveal whether a candidate has any kind of criminal history.
- References: Necessary to gain insight into a candidates’ performance, personality or work ethic, as well as potentially uncover any misleading information.
- Agree number of applicants to be shortlisted: This will depend on the role being advertised, how many applicants will need to be hired, and how much time you have available to interview candidates.
A clear job description
A well-written job description not only helps to ensure you attract the right candidates to the role but can also be used to determine the shortlist criteria. Building on the assessment criteria you can formulate what is needed from the candidate but also what the business is offering.
Here are some factors to consider when creating a job description:
- What skills and traits are desirable, essential or required for the role?
- How many years of experience are needed?
- What are the key and day-to-day responsibilities of the role?
- What company benefits are offered?
- What are the company culture and values? What is it like to work there?
Criteria for shortlisting
It’s important to agree on clear assessment criteria that you can refer to across all stages of shortlisting. This keeps the process fair and robust for all candidates and will help you make the right hire.
When assessing candidates you can also use scoring methods to help narrow down your pool of applicants, where you score candidates against your defined list of criteria and use a shortlisting matrix to identify which applicants make the cut.
Scores can then be recorded on a rating sheet or scorecard and continuously utilised and compared to ensure you’re making impartial decisions.
Application screening questions
Screening questions form part of the wider application process and enable recruiters to filter down to the most suitable candidates, as the responses given will indicate whether a candidate meets the minimum requirements for the role.
Having pre-screening questions in place will remove any irrelevant applications, which means you can save time otherwise spent viewing unsuitable CVs.
Some examples of questions include:
- Do you have a legal right to work in Ireland?
- Are you educated to degree level?
- Do you have more than ‘x’ years’ experience in ‘x’ industry?
- Do you have the relevant skills required to excel in this role?
- Do you have experience with ‘x’ software?
- Do you have management experience?
- Are you willing to travel?
- Can you be flexible with your working hours?
Screening test or assessment
It’s often standard for recruiters to include a short task or assessment during the application process, to help pre-screen applicants, gain insight into their capabilities, and ensure only the most relevant candidates are shortlisted for interview.
You can incorporate screening tests into the application itself, or after candidates have applied. These kinds of assessments can be really effective if you find yourself with too many applicants who meet your criteria and you’re finding it hard to cut your shortlist down, or if you are looking for particular skills or competencies that are essential for the role.
Basic literacy, numeracy or IT tests are commonly used by recruiters. These can be done either online or in paper format, and you can screen out any wrong answers. It’s a good to have a standardised benchmark when scoring candidates, for example, you could agree that all applicants with more than 75% correct answers can progress through the pre-selection process.
Some recruiters also use psychometric testing. Scores obtained from psychometric tests will help you to assess a candidate’s intelligence, as well as behavioural and personality traits. When used in conjunction with other assessments, psychometric testing can play an effective part in making good hiring decisions, as they are often considered a more ‘scientific’ or objective way to identify suitable candidates. Lastly, you could include written competency questions within the online application.
Here are some examples:
- How have you used your persuasion skills in a previous role to successfully influence others?
- Give an example of when you had to manage conflict in a team, and how you helped to resolve the situation?
- When have you used your communication skills to make a difference to a specific situation?
- How have you used your leadership skills to improve team performance?
Application screening
Before reducing the shortlist down, and ahead of inviting any prospects to interview, you’ll need to screen CVs to determine whether they’re suitable for the role.
A cover letter can tell you more about a person than just their CV, as it gives candidates a chance to elaborate on their skills and experience, as well as personalise their application. If you regard cover letters as an important part of the selection process, make sure you screen out candidates who omit these from their application.
When glancing through CVs, look for specific keywords used by the applicant, as they can give a quick indication as to whether they are qualified for the role in question. The keywords used will obviously depend on the job itself, and the industry you’re working in, but these can be specific qualifications or technologies.
Streamlining the Candidate Selection Process
Building out a robust screening process will help you get to the right candidate faster. It’s important to get the essential and ‘nice to have’ criteria completely agreed at the start. This will give you the perfect steer and guide to get you through your applications.
Alongside this, make sure at every step of the way, you have a consistent process for assessing, rating, and filtering candidates. This will mean that you can make objective decisions and reduce any risk of bias so you can make the right hire.
