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The Case for Screening Job Applicants

The Case for Screening Job Applicants

If you Google “account executive job applicant screening questions” you will get about 249 million results.  The problem with those results is that most of them are not “screening questions” related at all, they are mostly “interview questions” related.  Try this for any job role and you will see a similar result.  But screening and interview questions are the same thing, right?  No, they are not.

Why is it that you can find page after page of interview questions, but not screening questions?  Probably because 99% of time is spent on getting the right interview questions, and spending little to no time creating screening questions.  This means there is a high probability that hiring managers are asking some incredibly thoughtful behavioral and situational interview questions…but unfortunately they are asking those questions to candidates that may not even be qualified on a basic level.

The typical process for screening job applicants is a two-step process: 1. Review the resume and look for keywords that match the job description. 2. Phone screen with the job applicant.

I know some people out there are going to say, “well we do more than that, we have a coding challenge for our software developers, or an aptitude or behavioral assessment that we use for screening.”  Those tools are great and the data they provide is useful.  But do you administer those tools to 100% of the applicants for every single job role, or just the few you chose after reviewing a resume and conducting a phone screen?

Reviewing resumes and phone screens are not enough.Going through resumes one at a time is inefficient and ineffective.  Resumes lack the necessary context needed to truly evaluate an applicant, and phone screens are usually not specific enough to truly qualify an applicant.

Screening in this way is not a fair process for the job applicants, and additionally, companies are missing top talent.  In higher applicant volume situations, many of the applicants don’t get reviewed at all because they are being organized chronologically by the applicant tracking systems (ATS).  Suppose you are the best qualified applicant but you happened to apply 243rd out of 250 applicants. There is a good chance your information will not even be looked at and the company loses the most qualified person.  If you are reviewed, but you don’t have the right keywords on your resume, then you also run the risk of being overlooked.

For companies to do a better job of screening applicants, they should start:

  • Going through every job description and figuring out exactly what is meant by “experience with” or “knowledge of” or “familiarity in” type of statements
  • Generating specific screening questions for each job role and knowing which answers to look for so you can generate an equitable scoring evaluation
  • Ensuring that every single job applicant answers the exact same set of questions to give every applicant a fair and equitable chance of getting an interview
Resumes Hinder DE&I Progress

Resumes Hinder DE&I Progress

While many companies are making great strides towards implementing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) initiatives across their respective organizations, DE&I progress on the job applicant screening and selection process has still been largely ignored.  But why?  In one word…resumes!

Resumes influence recruiters and hiring managers both consciously and unconsciously.  There are over 20 different documented biases that people engage when reviewing resumes.  These include affinity bias, halo effect bias, contrast effect bias, recency bias, and many more.  A simple Google search will show you multiple studies that prove these biases have real statistical impacts for job applicants.

These biases come into effect with resume attributes such as name, college attended, college not attended, year of graduations, previous employers, etc. 

And yet the resume continues to be the most commonly used tool for screening applicants.  How are companies addressing this?

  • Training and awareness: while these are great practices to implement, they are not going to completely solve the challenges associated with unconscious bias…because the bias is “unconscious”!  In other words, people don’t know they are doing it 
  • Artificial Intelligence: this is a can of worms I don’t want to open here, but I would encourage people to do some objective research on this topic.  Many companies that sell resume scraping AI technology will attempt to prove that their algorithms are not biased. Some of these algorithms are extremely biased and some are less biased.  Again, a simple Google search will show you plenty of studies on this topic.  There are a lot of factors at play here such as the data they are using to teach their AI, the input data, how the algorithm works, and the person that wrote it.  One thought for consideration is that algorithms are written by humans and humans are inherently biased
  • Resume “masking” technology: this is where companies invest in a solution that “masks” or removes the attributes (e.g., name, graduation dates, etc.) that typically create bias.  This is certainly the best option, but unfortunately it is the least adopted

If companies really want to address DE&I, then they should start at the very beginning of the process, with how they are screening and selecting applicants for interviews.  However if companies continue to use resumes for screening, and don’t mask any of the information that typically creates unconscious bias, then this problem will be very challenging to solve in the near future. 

540 Years of Using Resumes?

540 Years of Using Resumes?

Yes, you heard that correctly, we’ve been using resumes for almost 540 years, or maybe even longer!  Leonardo da Vinci is credited with drafting the first resume back in 1482 to get a job with the Duke of Milan and we are still using resumes today.  At this rate we are literally more likely to have the human race step foot on another planet 245 million miles away before we stop looking for keywords in resumes.   

Tell me if this process sounds familiar as a recruiter:

Step 1 – intake meeting, find out needs, wants, knock-outs

Step 2 – create, edit, or use an existing job description to identify keywords

Step 3 – go into the applicant tracking system (ATS), pull up the job vacancy, then open up each applicant in chronological order one at a time and open their resume

Step 4 – look for keywords in the resume that match the keywords in the job description

I realize I’m generalizing the process, but for most companies, I speak with, this is basically how it goes.  Not only can this process be inefficient, but it can also be equally ineffective.  

Recruiters have so many tasks they need to complete each day and going through resumes one-by-one is just plain time-consuming.  They could make better use of that time by doing more passive recruiting or spending more quality time with qualified applicants.  

What do these self-authored documents tell us about a person?  Not much.  Sure, resumes tell us where an applicant worked, what they did, and sometimes what their results were.  But they are lacking the real context and objectivity usually needed to match a person to a role.   

Let’s say your job description is looking for “proficiency in MS Excel.”  You find a resume and sure enough it states, “highly proficient in MS applications, including Excel.”  Eureka, we have a match!!!  Or do we?  The problem is, humans and even artificial intelligence can’t tell us what that applicant meant by “highly proficient.”  Highly proficient could mean they know how to create Power Pivots or it could mean they know how to open Excel and put numbers in the cells.  Unfortunately you won’t know until you ask the applicant.

Unfortunately for applicants, we don’t ask every single one of them detailed screening questions about every requirement because that would take way too long.  Sadly we often miss the opportunity to ask detailed screening questions around requirements to candidates coming in for interviews.  The risks of not getting this level of detail from applicants can be very expensive.

I think if he were alive today, even da Vinci himself would tell us, “it’s time to let the resume go.” 

Why are we still using job descriptions to attract talent?

Why are we still using job descriptions to attract talent?

Job descriptions add a lot of noise and very little signal to the screening process. Why do we still use these things? What value are we really expecting they will generate when we attach them to an open job vacancy? They don’t help the applicant clarify the role and they certainly don’t help hiring organizations weed out unqualified applicants.

I look at job descriptions every day and I’m shocked with how little they have changed over 20 years, especially considering they are largely ineffective.

It doesn’t matter if the hiring organization is large or small, job descriptions are all structured almost exactly the same and all filled with the same vague language.

This creates a rather large problem for talent acquisition teams, especially if they receive a high volume number of applicants. The result…too many unqualified applicants. Why? Because companies are leaving all the interpretation up to the applicant.

Case in point: Just this week I was reviewing a job posting for a software engineer position at a large software company. The “Skills” section was riddled with vague terms such as:

  • Demonstrated proficiency in programming to include a solid foundation in computer science, with competencies in one or more of: data structures, algorithms, object-oriented software design, and working with cloud-based distributed systems.
  • Experience working in modern programming languages such as Dart, JavaScript, Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, or C#
  • Some experience debugging systems or applications
  • Familiarity with one or more of the following areas: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, relational databases, REST, and other modern web protocols, and/or Mobile computing

What exactly do “demonstrated proficiency” and “solid foundation” mean? How do you define “experience”? What is the difference between “experience,” “some experience,” and “familiarity”? What if the person has “experience” with 1 of the 7 programming languages (Java), but that experience was 25 years ago and lasted 3 months? Is that really what you’re looking for?

Most job applicants will interpret “experience” or “demonstrated proficiency” to their benefit, which means that more applicants that don’t match what you’re looking for will apply. And this means more time reading and filtering resumes.

It’s probably time we find another way to articulate the qualifications that we are looking for with open job vacancies!!!