Finding the right candidates for the role you’re hiring for is a time-consuming and costly process, so to be able to streamline your practices to save time and money is the optimum strategy. Incorporating screening techniques into your hiring strategy is important to source the most qualified candidates for interviews and be time-effective when hiring. Screening measures can start from even before a potential candidate has applied for the job, all the way to third stages in the recruitment processes.

Let’s take a look at some effective screening techniques to help save your company money and time when looking for the perfect fit for your role!

Know What You Want

Before embarking on screening candidates, you need to know what you’re really screening for. Have a tight description of the skills, the personality and the experience that would be perfect for the role. This will help you have clear markers that will make any screening processes either an easy no or yes. It can be difficult when experienced or personable candidates apply for a role that isn’t quite right for them, but they woo you anyway. Try and avoid this misplaced hiring for the role by really knowing at the core what you’re looking for, what the goals of the roles are and the “ideal” person to fill it.

Social Media Is Your Secret Weapon

Before even reaching out to candidates who have applied, you can screen them via their social media accounts, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Looking at the way they present themselves across different social media channels can show you whether they are pursuing the passions they’ve expressed in their resume, if they are involved in the community of the role they are applying to and if they are motivated in an appealing way to work at your company. It is a quick way to deduce whether they are true to their resume and the skills they have expressed, whilst the resume and cover letter is a small perfect snapshot into a candidate, their social media can be more revealing of their character.

Out Of The Box Tasks

 Providing a range of tasks for candidates to do can help to weed it down to the best candidates for interview stages. Devising a pre-screening task for your website can be a good way to let those who are thinking of applying see if they are initially the right fit for your company; this can be a great measure for cutting down on unqualified applications. Similarly, employing different task techniques at the initial application stage can be an easy way to lead to only qualified interviewee’s. This can be anything from changing the cover letter portion to being a short questionnaire to find out more about their personality, to giving them a task that is a simulation of a situation within the role they are applying for. Having a simple grading system on these tasks so that it can almost be automated on a scaling pole will make it easier to process all of these screening measures.

HR Automation Software

To effectively screen candidates before taking them into the interview stages, it is a good idea to implement HR automation software into your strategy. As employees can’t spend the time going through each application and screening measure, if you can automate as many processes as possible this will save time and money in the long run. Investing in tools that can score candidates on a task automatically to provide them with a number, as well as setting up a talent pool software which will keep candidates information and score for future use will be great for current and future hiring. Also, for initial screening measures investing in chatbot software that can be tailored to the questions you want to know about potential candidates, that can simulate a positive first experience for the candidate and can provide you with the information you need quickly and effectively can be a really smart measure to help screen candidates.

Investing in screening techniques is a key to saving time and money when it comes to hiring candidates.