Efficiency and thoroughness in candidate screening must be balanced to make hiring smooth. If the screening is taking too long, good candidates lose interest and drop out; that means you end up with fewer talents. But rushing without detailed evaluation opens a window for the risk of advancing candidates not suitable for the role and, therefore, wasting time and resources. While it’s a somewhat laborious process, modern tools and techniques, such as pre employment screening UK, help to speed the process along without sacrificing accuracy. This approach will enable employers to effectively verify qualifications, skills and backgrounds and ensure that only the most suitable candidates move to the next stage. A well-planned screening strategy minimises hiring risks and gives one confidence in the recruitment process. You will be able to balance speed with thoroughness to enhance the overall candidate experience and secure top talent for your organisation.
CV or Resume Screening:
Resume screening, in general, is the process of screening applicants’ CVs to match their skills and qualifications to the requirements of a particular job. Conventionally, recruiters would have to manually go through resumes, which, besides being very time-consuming, is also very inefficient. With the advent of modern tools such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), scanning resumes for relevant keywords saves much time and effort. However, resumes tend not to give a full answer about the candidates’ capabilities. A study revealed that up to 78% of applicants overstate or exaggerate information in their resumes, making it very tough to assess their technical suitability. Furthermore, candidates report that creating resumes is utterly tiresome and mostly does not reflect their real skills either. By depending only upon resumes, hiring risks also increase, where you more than likely are missing high talent or are hiring based on misleading information.
Cover Letters:
One of the ways candidates can elaborate a bit on their application is a cover letter. Hiring managers adore them because they open up a window into a candidate’s personality and job aspirations. The thing is, though, that they truly measure little more than one’s writing ability. Over the years, many companies have moved away from requiring cover letters as it discourages candidates from applying, especially those qualified but in a hurry. To candidates, it is seen as an extra step and one that’s especially superfluous when combined with the pressure to write a customised resume. Without requiring a cover letter, a company opens itself up to a wider, more diverse candidate pool.
Phone Screening:
This allows the human resource team to easily corroborate the candidate’s information and validate any skill set and/or work experience questions that one might have. Managers will appreciate this as an option since it’s time-efficient, narrowing down the field of applicants to more meaningful, in-depth analyses. However, it has its limitations: it lacks the non-verbal cues of a candidate’s body language, which may be indicative of his or her personality and confidence. For candidates, scheduled calls that are concise are tolerable, but they are not able to fully represent their skills. In order to minimise risks in hiring, phone screenings should be supported with more robust methods of evaluation.
Skill Assessments:
Skill assessments will test a candidate’s abilities via job-specific tasks or tests which give a crystal-clear overview of their capabilities. In fact, such assessments are swift and require less than 15 minutes to administer with modern tools like Toggl Hire. That way, the hiring managers will know whether a person can perform their future work, saving hours not to sift through resumes. Candidates also prefer this method as it is quite straightforward to prove one’s competency. However, the minor downside is that there is still the possibility of cheating, which can be minimised with proctored or monitored assessments. Skills tests decrease hiring risks by focusing on what candidates can do rather than what they claim on paper.
Combining Methods for Better Screening:
Relying on a single screening method increases hiring risks, as no method offers a complete view of a candidate’s suitability. By combining multiple approaches, such as skills assessments, video interviews and phone screenings, you can create a more effective and reliable hiring process. An ATS will parse resumes, for example. Then, a quick call to further screen is followed by competency skill assessments to measure particular job-related skills. This will be followed by video interviews that will help rate the soft skills and culture of fit. This layered approach reduces the likelihood of a mistake in hiring qualified candidates that best fit your organisational needs.
Conclusion
This means mitigating the risks of hiring with a balance of technology and modern tools, considering thought-over evaluation methods. Moving away from the archaic practices of hiring by resume or cover letter and moving on to skills-based assessments guarantees you a skilful person who will surely excel in his place of work. Mixing these methods of screening helps you to achieve a situation whereby the people that you have hired are qualified and fit your team.
Also, read: Why Employee Absence is a Critical HR Metric to Monitor?
