Selecting the best candidates for your company could be an overwhelming task. While you can trust your guts in some cases, this technique doesn’t cut it all the time. You’d like to speed up the candidate screening process, yet you’re also concerned that expediting it might lead to hiring the wrong people.
Fortunately, there are many methods and ways to optimize candidate selection without cutting corners and bypassing crucial steps. And thanks to technology and tools, you can hasten the assessment of resumes and other qualifications of prospective applicants. A company’s success quite translates to how good your team members are, so it’s understandable to create more efforts for screening job seekers.
Include valuable talents to your company by applying the tips in optimizing your screening process as shown below:
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Invest In Technology And Third-Party Vendors
Like most businesses, technology plays a big part in making companies save more time and get things done more efficiently. Here are some technology tools that can help your human resource (HR) team make the hiring process faster, especially if there’s an urgent need to find the best person for a specific position.
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Background Screening Specialists
Conducting reference and background checks is necessary to avoid various types of harm or legal liability, whether to the employer or others. While this task requires time and money, it’s often a smart move to rely on a third-party contractor. They’re experts and well-versed in conducting drug screening tests, background checks, national criminal searches, and down to trivial details like driving records. By ensuring that your candidate has a clean image and record, you won’t put your company’s reputation and other organization members’ safety at stake.
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Applicant Tracking System
The HR department sometimes has so many things on its plate that recruiting new talents becomes no longer their main priority. Fortunately, employers can now use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to post jobs, manage candidates, and efficiently screen them. The market is flooded with ATS. However, it’s best to consider the best choice of ATS for your organization carefully. If you’re evaluating them, keep in mind that ease of use, time to implement, and cost should be considered.
When used correctly, an applicant tracking system will screen applicants by requiring answers to specific questions upfront before they are accepted and delivered. The pre-screening process gets done speedily and only those that have answered the questions correctly and passed can proceed to the next step in the hiring process.
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AI Resume Screening Tool
Developers have built tools for screening resumes, utilizing artificial intelligence, which helps companies save time in hiring. Natural language processing (NLP) is used to analyze resumes and produce structured data that is easier to analyze. However, the limitation of this tool is that it can only check what’s written on the applicant’s resume, so there won’t be accurate proof that the candidate is capable or skilled.
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Consider Must-Have Requirements
Human resource planning and management is vital for any business. To make the process of finding the most suitable candidates, you need to set the must-have requirements.
In terms of paperwork and documentation, they need to have a legal working visa if they’re not residents in the country. The same thing goes for education and certifications. Depending on their job roles, you should only consider applicants who have acquired licenses, degrees, and official certificates on skills and education related to their jobs.
With these basic requirements, you can disregard those that might not qualify without wasting too much time. Yet, when setting this rule, you need to accept and anticipate that some great candidates might be overlooked as they might not own the essential criteria of requirements. Therefore, it’s best to decide beforehand whether these requirements are strongly implied, or some candidates can show alternative proofs for their capabilities instead.
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Conduct Quick Phone Interviews
Conducting the first-round interview on the phone is a quick, lower-cost alternative to in-person interviews. In just a few minutes, an employer can gain a great deal of insight into how the candidate is regarding their speaking skills, attitude, and courtesy.
The short call can go through questions regarding education and experience. It’s an excellent method to judge how motivated and inspired a candidate is to join the company. With just under 30 minutes, you can ask all the viable questions and screen out which prospects have passed the over-the-phone interview assessment and can come over to your office for the next hiring step.
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Rely On The Power Of Social Media
Whether companies realize it or not, social media platforms are now one of the best avenues to find candidates. Since some of their personal information, educational background, personality types, and other details are posted online, you can catch a glimpse of a person’s capabilities and the like. Increasingly, companies ask for applicants’ social profiles and there’s a good reason behind it.
The hiring team can look at the applicant’s social media profiles to determine how they behave outside of work and how their opinions might affect the company’s values. Use the social media platforms to your company’s advantage by getting to know more about a person through their online activities and profiles.
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Update Job Descriptions
While job descriptions commonly contain crucial information about what your company is looking for, you can create a unique twist by this time, emphasizing candidates that your company doesn’t need. It’s ok to call out some unwanted characteristics of applicants in your job description. For instance, you can post your ad stating that the position is only for those who aren’t jumping from one job to the next.
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Make Decisions With The Entire Team
If your recruiter takes excellent notes and shares detailed insights regarding every candidate with you, then you’ll be in great hands. They can share all the valuable information with the entire team to evaluate and assess who would be the best fit for the position.
Shared and collaborative information about each candidate allows for better hiring decisions. For a candidate screening process to be as effective as possible, all people involved in the decision-making must be on the same page. A systematic hiring process will ultimately benefit the company in the long run.
Conclusion
Some recruiters and hiring managers may find the screening process overwhelming and stressful, but there are ways to enhance your screening and hiring skills. With the fresh tips enclosed in this article, you can maximize the available resources to expedite hiring processes.
To find the best and qualified talent, you need to exert efforts and invest in the right services and tools to make the process more efficient and effective. In the end, your company can reap the rewards when your talents contribute very well to your business.
