How to Screen Through Candidates for Better Hiring with Jobstreet

As a hirer, have you ever been bogged down by dozens and dozens of resumes, and somehow still struggle to find the perfect candidate for a role? If so, you may want to consider if it’s because of your screening process.

With hires, time is always of the essence. Candidates who are actively searching for new roles are often considering multiple job offers and interviews at once. And so it’s incredibly important that a company’s process of narrowing down and filtering out unsuitable candidates is designed to run optimally.

Even the best hirers and recruiters aren’t capable of finding the best candidates for roles consistently if their screening process is haphazard. A well-designed screening process is crucial for ensuring not only that hires are made as quickly and efficiently as possible, but that quality of candidates are not compromised in the process.

Here are a few ways to use JobStreet to improve your screening process:

A great way to filter through applicants is to get a sense of how they think, what their preferences are and what they’re searching for in their career. These are all usually difficult to determine from a simple resume which doesn’t allow for much interaction.

Instead, JobStreet allows hirers to connect quickly with applicants without yet reaching out to them through a Screening Questions feature.

Hirers are recommended a set of screening questions when a job ad is posted. These questions will automatically be recommended to you once you have provided input for a position title, job role, job specialisation and work location. Hirers can select up to 5 screening questions to capture the relevant responses from candidates.

For example, something specific like “Have you worked in a job that requires a sound understanding of the software development cycle?” or something a bit more general such as “How many years of experience do you have in change management?”

These questions chosen by the hirer help candidates understand the requirements of the job and better prepares them for an upcoming interview. They allow them to get a clearer picture of the role and where their skills stand next to another candidate applying.

All this adds to the preliminary filtering of candidates, allowing hirers to have a smaller, but more relevant pool of talents applying for the job. While a smaller pool of talents applying may initially be seen as negative by some hirers, what’s important to understand is that narrowing down a search at the beginning of a search process is far more efficient than getting a larger group of unsuitable candidates who need to be filtered out.

Of course, as a hirer, it’s important to choose questions which are most relevant and will help streamline the search process.

The screening questions process brings two major benefits to hirers:

i) Immediate relevant results

Based on answers given by candidates, a scoring system helps sort applicants in order of relevance to the job. These scores are based on their individual answers of applicants and are used to rank them for hirers who will view the highest-scoring and most relevant candidates first. This greatly reduces the amount of time hirers spend screening through candidates, increases efficiency of the hiring process and allows the candidate to showcase their interests and personality to the hirer.

ii) Actionable candidate insights

Candidates’ responses to screening questions will provide hirers with insights to help them make better hiring decisions.

They can gather information and insights about the candidates even before the interview which allows them to streamline and customise the candidate’s hiring into the company. For instance, if the candidate indicates he is a team player in his answers, hirers can make a note of that and encourage more collaborative work arrangements for him or her.

Hiring the right candidate takes teamwork. Getting on the same page as colleagues when searching for prospective candidates can be a big challenge for hirers.

By using JobStreet’s Collaborative Screening feature, a system administrator is able to provide access to colleagues (other hiring managers, for example) to view selected job ads posted. Selected collaborators can then work together with key hiring decision makers in the organisation using the same platform, all at the same time.

This generates better involvement in the hiring team and feedback can be delivered immediately and faster. With more efficient feedback on whether candidates are suitable, hirers are able to act quicker in the hiring process and stand a better chance of securing candidates.

This feature also allows for HR to share shortlisted candidates with hiring managers to review before arranging interviews. This is so important in order to save time for the hiring manager but also to allow HR to share information on interviewees more easily.

To enhance recruitment at your organisation, check out Jobstreet’s Recruitment Centre