5 Common Pitfalls of Candidate Screening

Flaws in the candidate screening process are becoming a huge liability for many companies today. Consider for a moment that organizations lose, on average, almost 20% of their workforce to turnover every year. That statistic is placing a tremendous burden on HR professionals to come up with an accurate and intensive candidate screening process that promises to deliver the right hires the first time around.

In our modern job market, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the total cost to hire a new employee equates to approximately 1.25 to 1.4 times their base salary. Plus, there are the costs and time investments involved in bringing the new employee up to speed. Depending on the type of role the organization is trying to fill, we’re talking anywhere from 3 months to a year before a new employee can even start to be productive for a company.

Fortunately, innovations in HR technology ramped up significantly during the pandemic, and that’s allowing organizations to rely more heavily on these new software technologies for their candidate screening processes. Of all the tools in the HR tech stack that are used in candidate screening today, few have had the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies have had. These technologies are already proving to be remarkably effective for parsing resumes, and AI recommendations, when done properly, can provide very reliable candidate scoring results.

The dynamics of our modern job market have changed significantly since Covid, and it’s important to stop and take a look at what the candidate screening process looks like in order to avoid certain pitfalls.

“Candidate Screening” in the Modern Job Market

Candidate screening is the process of evaluating a pool of talent to determine which applicants qualify to be ushered into the latter stages of the screening process; usually, it’s a process that determines who gets an interview. Ultimately, an HR professional considers the requisite skills for the vacant position they’re responsible for recruiting for, and then they’re compared to the skills and experience of the candidates in a pool of applicants.

The end game of candidate screening is to create a list of the most qualified candidates that show the most promise of being successful if the organization makes an offer.

READ MORE: The Importance of Candidate Screening for Recruitment in 2023

Technology’s Role in Candidate Screening

Almost 60 percent of recruiters today feel that it’s their inability to find qualified talent that poses the biggest challenge to their hiring efforts. Many of those challenges are attributable to the candidate screening pitfalls we discuss below. However, the HR software industry is responding to these challenges by churning out new technical innovations in the form of useful technical tools that help these recruiters apply more reliable candidate screening methods. These technologies include AI recommendation programs, resume parsing tools and candidate scorecards.

LEARN MORE: How AI Helps Recruiters Ace Hiring Goals

The Criticality of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Of all the technical innovations that we’ve seen from the HR software industry promising to help with the application of reliable candidate screening measures, the applicant tracking system (ATS) has firmly established its presence as a key strategic technical asset for modern hiring.

An ATS system is an HR software platform that resides at the center of an organization’s recruitment strategies. Once considered nothing more than a glorified database to warehouse applicant data, modern ATS systems provide recruiters with a wide array of useful tools like AI recommendation engines and powerful resume parsing tools.

Once only available to larger companies with deep enough pockets to install an ATS system on-site, modern ATS systems are often subscription-based solutions that can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Just about every Fortune 500 company has an ATS at the center of their recruiting efforts, and they can be very effective in optimizing your candidate screening processes as well, so long as you’re first aware of these common pitfalls:

1. Not Prioritizing “Soft Skills.”

In our tech-driven job market, recruiters tend to put a lot of emphasis on parsing resumes for those hard skills that they think their employees need to have in order to do their job successfully. As a result, soft skills tend to be neglected. That’s unfortunate because, no matter what the role, people tend to be social creatures, and soft skills like communication and empathy play a crucial role in building a positive work culture. In fact, almost 9 out of 10 recruiters will tell you that bad hires usually come down to a lack of soft skills.

Fortunately, modern ATS systems offer fantastic tools that allow you to reliably screen for soft skills. Resources such as LinkedIn extensions to look for soft skills and candidate scorecards that can be used in structured interviews give recruiters the means to learn more about the array of soft skills that a candidate has.

2. Ineffective or Unstructured Interviewing Process

An organization’s interviewing process must be structured and consistent for all candidates. Approaching interviews as casual conversations without any structured candidate scoring mechanism in place will only increase the probability of making bad hires and, worst of all, leave you with no explanation or data as to why the process is failing.

This is where the use of an ATS “scorecard” will also be very beneficial. Scorecards are often applied to determine the results of interviews. They’re essentially a list of criteria that are set against the skills required for an open position. Each interviewer will fill out a scorecard for every candidate. After the interviews, scorecards are compared to determine the top-scoring (most desirable) candidates.

3. Lack of Data-Driven Candidate Screening Processes

Over 70% of employers will tell you that finding skilled employees is difficult right now. The fact that many of them are still clinging to traditional hiring strategies that assume job seekers are still looking at newspapers to find a job is a big reason. The reality is that the best prospects are using technology and smart devices for their job search. When you have the proper technology in place to collect data from your recruitment and hiring campaigns, you can use that data to apply more reliable candidate screening processes.

The best way to start instituting these data-driven processes is to adopt a modern recruitment software system like an ATS platform to collect and compile all the applicant data that’s coming into your organization. In fact, modern ATS systems give you the tools to let you visualize all your essential recruitment metrics from a central dashboard.

*First published on Manatal.com.

*To read the full article, click here.

Manatal is an end-to-end recruitment and onboarding SaaS platform trusted by thousands of brands in over 135 countries worldwide. It is an AI-powered Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that allows companies to hire faster, better and save costs.