Candidate Screening Strategies

Candidate screening is the process of evaluating applications to identify which candidates should move forward to the interview stage. Effective screening saves time, improves hire quality, and ensures you focus your energy on the most promising candidates.

The Challenge of Screening

Screening is one of the most time-consuming recruiting tasks, particularly for popular roles that receive hundreds of applications. The challenge is to be thorough enough to identify great candidates while being efficient enough to keep your hiring process moving quickly.

Poor screening leads to two types of errors: false positives (advancing unqualified candidates who waste time in interviews) and false negatives (rejecting qualified candidates who could have been great hires). The goal is to minimize both types of errors.

Resume Screening Best Practices

Resume screening is typically the first screening step. Review each resume against the job requirements, focusing on relevant experience, required skills, and any red flags such as unexplained employment gaps or frequent job changes.

Be careful not to screen out candidates too quickly based on superficial factors. Research shows that factors like university prestige, previous company brands, and even typos are poor predictors of job performance, yet recruiters often use them as screening criteria.

Create a simple scoring system or checklist based on your job requirements. This ensures consistency across all applications and reduces the influence of unconscious bias.

Phone and Video Screening

Phone or video screening calls are brief conversations (usually 15-30 minutes) used to verify basic qualifications, assess communication skills, and gauge candidate interest. These calls filter out candidates before investing time in full interviews.

Prepare a consistent set of questions for all candidates. This might include verifying specific skills or experience, asking about salary expectations, explaining the role and company, and assessing the candidate's interest and availability.

Keep screening calls focused and respectful of the candidate's time. The goal is to gather enough information to make a yes/no decision, not to conduct a full interview.

Skills Assessments and Work Samples

For many roles, skills assessments or work samples provide better signal than resumes alone. These might include coding challenges for engineers, writing samples for content roles, design exercises for designers, or case studies for consultants.

Ensure assessments are relevant to the actual work the person will do and are respectful of the candidate's time. Asking for hours of unpaid work as a screening tool is unfair and drives away qualified candidates.

Automated Screening

Automation can help manage high-volume screening. Resume parsing, knockout questions, automated scoring, and AI-powered screening tools can all save time. However, automated screening must be monitored carefully to avoid bias and ensure compliance with hiring regulations.

For more on automation in screening, see our Hiring Automation Playbook.

Reducing Bias in Screening

Screening is where unconscious bias most commonly influences hiring decisions. Research shows that identical resumes with different names (suggesting different genders or ethnicities) receive very different response rates.

To reduce bias, use structured screening criteria, involve multiple people in screening decisions, consider blind resume screening (removing names and other identifying information), and regularly audit your screening decisions to identify patterns of bias.

Related Playbooks

Key Takeaways

• Effective screening balances thoroughness with efficiency
• Structured criteria and scoring systems improve consistency and reduce bias
• Phone or video screening calls efficiently filter candidates before full interviews
• Skills assessments should be relevant and respectful of candidates' time
• Regularly audit screening decisions to identify and correct bias