How to Screen Candidates

Screening candidates is one of the most important stages in the hiring process. Proper screening allows you to filter out unsuitable candidates and compile a realistic pool of potential hires. It’s essential to get this part right so the next steps of the process can go ahead in a productive way, maximising your chances of hiring the perfect new team member.

Screening can be tough, though. When dealing with an enormous pool of talented potential employees, like many businesses today, whittling it down to a manageable number without letting real talent slip through the cracks is a challenge.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the very first part of the screening process, which takes place before you even contact anyone, and show you how to boost your chances of success.

Why you need to screen candidates before contacting them

By the time you start reaching out to potential candidates for interviews, assessments, and introductions, you should have already screened a good chunk of your original prospects. Here’s why it’s important to start screening long before you contact anyone:

• It allows you to narrow down a potentially vast pool of candidates to a select and manageable number of people worth reaching out to.
• It helps you use your resources more wisely, eliminating a portion of your potential candidates before you carry out more hiring activities.
• It makes life easier for interviewers and other members of your hiring team by filtering out unsuitable candidates ahead of time.

How to screen candidates

1. Create a screening checklist

It’s important to be clear on what you’re looking for in a candidate before you start the screening process. To achieve this, it’s useful to create a checklist that lists the specific qualities, achievements, qualifications, and traits that you would like to see in your ideal team member.

This helps you roughly assess potential candidates and eliminate those who are clearly not right for the role. As you create your checklist, make sure you know which qualities or requirements are “need to have”s versus “nice to have"s, since a checklist that’s too rigid may eliminate potentially great candidates.

Your screening checklist will differ depending on the role you’re hiring for, but it will likely include the following elements (which you can pull from your job description):

• Work experience
• Technical skills
• Education
• Soft skills
• Personality traits

2. Check candidates’ social media

You can learn a lot from a candidate’s social media profiles. Social media screening is a low-cost, easy way to get a quick overview of a candidate, spot any glaring red flags, and see how they engage with their industry. Many employees are building personal brands on LinkedIn and Twitter these days, which lets you get a better sense of them than simply looking at their work history.

It’s best to focus on the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Be fair and impartial in your screening — if you fixate on negative things it could lead to an unfair assessment.

3. Review their work history

Your candidate’s resumes can provide a great insight into their lives, experience, personality, and qualifications. If you’re scoping out a potential candidate to reach out to, their LinkedIn profile can also fill in as a resume. Your screening shouldn’t focus solely on the resume, but it can be an excellent starting point and in many cases may be enough to select a candidate for the next stage of the hiring process.

Resume screening is another good place to use your screening checklist. Look for candidates who have the required skills and experience for the role, and pay particular attention to those who have customised their resume for your specific opening — this shows real dedication and enthusiasm.

4. Speak to any connections you share

Speaking to other people who know your candidates can teach you more than any resume. This method is especially powerful if you personally know and trust your shared connections — a strong endorsement from a reliable connection can be enough to guarantee a candidate an interview. To find connections, check sites like LinkedIn or use a tool like The Swarm. In many cases, your candidates will be referred to you by someone else, so it’s always worth asking a few questions.

5. Check your unconscious bias

Unconscious bias is something we all struggle with to some extent, and in the recruiting process, it can be a real problem — leading people to unfairly dismiss promising candidates without even realising that they’re doing it.

There are a few ways to mitigate unconscious bias in your screening process, such as:

• Education — make sure your team is aware of potential biases and trained on how to avoid them.
• Use multiple screeners, so if one person falls victim to their own biases, it won’t necessarily doom the candidate to rejection.
• Use more diverse recruiting teams and try to avoid one homogenous demographic being in control of the entire screening process.

The screening process is a crucial part of hiring. This is where you will say goodbye to a large chunk of your original candidates and, ideally, end up with a smaller and more qualified group of people to reach out to. If you follow the steps above, this should be much easier.

At The Swarm, we help startups streamline and optimise their recruiting process, ensuring they hire the very best talent to take their companies forward. Contact us to find out more.

Extra resources

• Learn what your implicit biases are using Harvard’s Project Implicit bias tests.
• Your screening checklist doesn’t need to be complex to be effective. Here’s an example of a basic screening checklist you can base your own off of.

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