3 Ways to Screen Candidates Faster Using HR Tech

Conventional approaches to candidate screening have not kept pace with the new requirements of candidates — they expect an exceptional job search, discovery process, and interview experience. They also have a finite number of hoops they’re willing to jump through prior to receiving an offer.

For employers, the screening stage of the hiring process is absolutely critical. Your teams should feel confident that the right candidates are being qualified and progressing forward to the interview stage in a frictionless, streamlined manner. Instead of turning to lengthy phone screening processes and outdated resume/CV submissions, organizations should be leveraging technology to engage, nurture, and convert the right candidates.

Let’s take a look at what an efficient and effective candidate screening process can look like when leveraging AI and automation.

What does a better candidate screening process look like?

If you’re assessing your current approach and it sounds a bit like the one described above, you may want to update your screening process. But where do you begin? For starters, it needs to be easy to:

• Sort between qualified and disqualified candidates

• Determine what the job seeker’s conversation style is
  Get a feel for the candidate’s personality and level of professionalism

• Understand how authentic the applicant is, and how credible their claims are

• Gauge whether they meet the qualifications for the role (e.g., can travel a certain percentage of time or fulfill relevant language requirements)

With these criteria considered, it is no wonder that typical resume reviews and phone screenings are falling flat. Today, HR organizations need a more diverse assortment of candidate screening options at their disposal, including:

1. Text-based screening which allows employers to prepare questions that are internally ranked based on a relevant point system for that particular role and automatically distributed to the right stakeholders for review.

2. Audio questionnaires that are effortlessly distributed to applicants and returned at their convenience.

3. Videos that are effortlessly recorded and returned to recruitment teams via mobile or desktop, depending on the preference of the candidate.

No matter which of these methods your team of recruiters and hiring managers decides to use in a given interview cycle (individually or collectively), it's important to ensure it meets your requirements from a business perspective while creating a positive experience.

Fortunately, this wide variety of form factors for gathering and assessing inputs from candidates offers the flexibility needed to balance both sides of the equation.

Boosting efficiency with automation and AI for candidate screening

Whether using text-, audio-, or video-based screening approaches, AI candidate screening can be leveraged by decision-makers to determine which candidates provided the best responses in alignment with the role requirements. However, a critical element of AI candidate screening that helps make this process effective is Natural Language Processing (NLP).

AI for candidate screening should always be engineered with NLP on the backend to ensure the right context can be understood and quickly analyzed regardless of what types of questions are asked.

AI can also provide recommendations for the types of questions that should be used for the assessments being distributed — such as what set of questions should be included in each screening process or potential questions that are relevant for specific roles based upon defined requirements.

In addition to infusing intelligence into their screening techniques, organizations can also leverage automated candidate screening processes. For example, automating the process of extending invitations to candidates to complete their text-, audio-, or video-based assessments.

Pre-defined criteria can be put in place by hiring teams — such as hiring status or fit score — and depending on whether a given candidate meets the criteria, automated emails and SMS can be distributed to ensure they receive the right request for information at the right time.

Taking it one step further, automated reminders can be sent out to stakeholders who haven’t completed a required step. For example, a candidate may be pinged with an email reminding them to complete a text-based assessment they were sent a few days ago but did not return.

Through automated candidate screening, candidates can take charge of when and how they conduct interviews while hiring managers gain time back to tackle every day tasks. This win-win scenario offers a more streamlined, informational, and efficient candidate screening process.

How to get started with AI candidate screening

No matter which approach you find most relevant to your needs, there are a few things you need to consider before implementing and optimizing these strategies. When assessing your current processes, ask yourself:

1. Do I need to leverage high-volume hiring and screen thousands of candidates in a short period of time?

2. Does my team need to focus on hiring external-facing roles — such as marketing, HR, or sales — and evaluate candidates based on their level of professionalism?

3. Do my hiring needs start with University Recruiting? If so, how do I meet them where they are and deliver a great experience?

After you’ve assessed your AI candidate screening needs and current processes, it’s time to get granular. Here are a couple questions to keep in mind that will help you successfully leverage an automated candidate screening process:

• Ask yourself whether your text, audio, or video questions bolster your understanding of the candidate and their role qualifications

• Determine how many questions you will be asking, and be sensitive to this number as less can improve your response rate

• Know who will be evaluating the responses that are submitted by job seekers. Are they educated and trained to the extent they need to be to evaluate appropriately?

• Check to ensure the candidate knows what is expected of them, and what they can do in preparation (for example, sharing best practice guidance with them to shorten the learning curve)

• Establish what channels of communication you will be using, including bots, email, SMS, and any landing pages that candidates will see before they complete their response
  
  

What happens when it all comes together?

By now, you know what an enhanced AI candidate screening process looks like, and what steps you can start taking to incorporate positive changes to your hiring process. When done properly, your team experiences time savings, efficiency gains, and most importantly, they can connect the best possible candidates with decision makers, fast.

To learn more about how today’s recruiting teams are reducing time to hire and bolstering hiring team efficiencies, check out this on-demand webinar.

Want to take a closer look at AI candidate screening? Book a demo with our team to get a personalized tour of what AI and automation can do for your team.