AI in Hiring, Artificial Intelligence, Candidate Qualification Screening, Data Analytics & Reporting, Hiring Manager Engagement, Talent Acquisition Problems
We’ve posted about this subject before…but why not do it again!!
Most recruiters and hiring managers know there is a disconnect when it comes to communicating job role qualifications. But do those two groups actually know how wide the separation really is?
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we’re hiring for a Full-Stack Rails Developer. A typical job description would say things like:
– Proficiency in Ruby on Rails
– Ability to write clean ruby code
– Good understanding of front-end technologies like Javascript
– Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, OR RELATED FIELD (this last part is always hilarious)
These ambiguous and undefined terms will not qualify any applicants in or out, and the role of screening the applicants will rest solely on the hiring manager.
Below are just 3 simple examples (which would probably be just 3 out of 12 total) of how SmartRank would screen and qualify these applicants:
Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Hiring Assessments, Leadership, Resumes, Talent Acquisition Problems
There are multiple methods for getting to the root cause of a problem.
One method is called “5 Whys” and it’s just how it sounds. You take a problem and keep asking “why” until you get to the root cause.
Another method I developed many years ago is called the TPPO method. The TPPO stands for Tools, Processes, Problems, and Outcomes. It’s pretty easy and it goes like this…whatever tools you use will dictate a certain process. That process will inevitably create certain problems. Those problems will either keep you from achieving positive business outcomes or create negative business outcomes. Last but not least…those business outcomes will almost certainly drive your personal outcomes (e.g., stress, work-life balance, promotions, demotions, etc.).
For example, if we look at talent acquisition teams using résumés, job descriptions, and traditional ATSs to screen job applicants, those tools will dictate a process of manually reviewing each applicant. This inefficient process creates problems such as wasted time and biased screening. These problems create negative business outcomes like reduced productivity and limiting DE&I progress. Ultimately the personal outcomes are higher stress, lower morale, etc.
Another example is looking at why 65% of recruiters have a tenure of 2 years or less. Why are recruiters turning over at this rate? One explanation is that they have a rough job. Why? Because they have SO MANY manual, tedious, and time-consuming tasks. Why? Because their processes like manually screening each applicant, chasing hiring managers down for feedback, etc. are very inefficient. Why? Their tools like résumés, job descriptions, and traditional ATSs dictate that process.
If you had a tool that automated job applicant screening without using a résumé, while giving hiring managers EXACTLY what they’re looking for, then you significantly improve your process. That process improvement mitigates the problems of wasted time and biased screening, which improves productivity and DE&I progress. And ultimately, provides personal outcomes like lower stress and higher morale.
In short, fix your tools and you can ultimately provide some significant business and personal outcomes!
Candidate Qualification Screening, Change Management, Leadership, Resumes, Talent Acquisition Problems
How many of you have landlines? Maybe I should have first asked how many of you remember landlines?
At one point, it was all we had. You had to hope someone was home when you called them or you left a message on their answering machine (separate device). Sometimes you had to wait at home if you were expecting a call. You had to fight with your sibling or parent about using the one phone line in the house…unless you had a fancy household with multiple lines.
From the time the telephone was invented to when we finally forced it into retirement the foundational technology evolved very slowly and only with small incremental changes.
Then we started down this path of “mobile phones” but they were the briefcase car phones or “Zach Morris phone” (bonus points if you understand that reference). But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that mobile phones became mainstream. Since then, the technology has evolved quickly and with unbelievable innovation.
We’re at an inflection point in the talent acquisition world where we desperately need to make this move from reviewing résumés (old fashioned corded phones) for screening talent to automated applicant screening technology like SmartRank. It’s more efficient, more effective, less biased, more applicant-friendly, and makes the hiring managers happier.
The old fashioned telephone was a great tool and helped us for many decades. Resumes were our best tool for screening talent for many decades, but it’s time to embrace the newer and better way of screening talent. It’s time we bring job applicant screening into the 21st century!
Candidate Qualification Screening
When you look at your hiring process, are there any elements that are there “because that’s just how we’ve always done it”?
That’s not a great reason…
Thomas Midgley Jr. invented leaded gasoline (he also invented chlorofluorocarbons or “CFCs”) in 1921. We added lead to gasoline because it was an “antiknock agent” which improved the efficiency of vehicles and the performance of the engine. In short, it turned clunky engines into smoothly running engines. Hoorah, right?
Well it turns out lead is a toxic pollutant, particularly for children, and it was polluting the air in towns and cities across the world. Even with concerns about its use, we continued using leaded gasoline for decades. The first clinical studies proved it had toxic impacts on humans in 1969, but it wasn’t until 1986 when the first country, Japan, banned it completely. Then the U.S. banned it ten years later in 1996, and Algeria became the last country to ban leaded gasoline in 2021.
Résumés were in full swing in the 1970s as well, just as they are today. Studies have been out for decades about how biased names and résumés are in the screening process, and yet we still use them. You simply need to do a quick Google search to find that screening applicants by reviewing résumés one-by-one is usually the biggest consumer of time for a recruiter. I would argue that reviewing résumés is also the most ineffective way to screen applicants. And just check out social media if you want to see what applicants think about submitting résumés into an ATS in 2023. So the data is there…using résumés to screen applicants is a 50-year old (actually even older than that) process that arguably sucks worse today than it did 50 years ago.
I think we can all agree that getting rid of leaded gasoline was a good idea, and certainly should have been done much earlier in most countries. I also hope we can all agree that getting rid of résumés in the screening process is a FANTASTIC idea. The question is, when it comes to résumés, are you going to be Japan or Algeria?
Candidate Qualification Screening
100+ applicants to a job within a day?
Yep. We’re starting to see it. How do you screen everyone?
The answer is: you’re probably not able to review every single applicant. If you are, you might have to close your posting quickly because you get so many applicants and it is overwhelming.
But what if the best applicant applies last?
Hundreds of applicants don’t need to make it harder to find the right fit. There is another way…
Maybe a better title for this post would have been “waste your time focused on manual & tedious tasks looking at surface-level information that ultimately decreases hiring manager engagement and DE&I” or “the opposite of that”
Is there a more inefficient way to review/screen applicants than going through them one-by-one in an ATS?
Are there not more effective ways to review/screen applicants than matching keywords between résumés and job descriptions?
There are definitely some parts of the hiring process that are really tricky to “automate.” But the screening & selection process for deciding which applicants you want to interview, is NOT one of those. It’s simple, it makes perfect sense, and it will 100% be automated in coming years.
Talent acquisition is arguably more challenging now than it ever has been in the past. Not automating the screening process is like trying to tread water with a weight belt on. You can either use your arms/hands to try and stay above the surface of the water with the weight belt dragging you down, or allow yourself to sink below the surface of the water for a couple seconds so you can use your arms/hands to get the weight belt off and then swim back up to the surface of the water. If you fell in the water with a weight belt, which option would you choose?
Keep your head above water (without the weight belt) with SmartRank!!
Candidate Qualification Screening
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
