Beyond Resume Roulette: Personalized Candidate Screening at Scale

Selecting the right job candidate for a position can feel like playing a game of resume roulette. Hire the wrong candidate, and you miss out on an opportunity to boost your company’s productivity, culture, and bottom line. Pick the right one, and you gain a team player who embraces your company’s values for years to come. 

Successful hiring managers think beyond the resume. The goal of quickly securing qualified candidates remains the same, but the post-pandemic world in which hiring managers play has fundamentally changed. 

Hiring managers must now fight The Great Resignation to snag the most qualified candidates. Competition has never been greater in some sectors. But hiring managers also have more open positions than ever, meaning more volume to fill. Their challenge becomes tailoring the application process, but at scale.

Misrepresentation (Read: Lying) Is a Real Risk

Changing the process is necessary because candidates misrepresent themselves on resumes regularly, from entry-level jobs to most executive positions. For instance, in 2019, a woman hired as a senior administration official for the State Department was discovered by an NBC News investigation to have had inflated an award, invented a role on a United Nations panel, and claimed a degree from the University of Hawaii that isn’t offered. 

A ResumeLab studyOpens a new window of 1,051 Americans found that:

• 93% of people know someone who has lied on a resume.
• When people lie on a resume, 27% lie about the experience, 18% lie about skills, and 17% lie about job duties.
• Only 31% of the people who lied on their resumes were caught.

There are considerable risks to an organization if they do not hire right. Hiring managers may rely on resumes to determine who is qualified to advance, usually to a phone interview. It is not difficult for problematic candidates to make it through using traditional screening methods. 

The Risks of Relying on a Resume

The next risk is missing something important on the resume. A recent Indeed studyOpens a new window showed that hiring managers spend an average of 6-7 seconds reviewing a resume. That makes it easy to miss red flags, especially for hiring managers with little experience interviewing candidates.

The next risk is missing something important on the resume. A recent Indeed studyOpens a new window showed that hiring managers spend an average of 6-7 seconds reviewing a resume. That makes it easy to miss red flags, especially for hiring managers who do not have much experience interviewing candidates.

Another risk is spending too much time on someone who is not right for the job. The most qualified candidates get snapped up quickly, creating an extremely competitive market for companies looking for top talent. If your company moves through the hiring process slowly, you may spend more time than necessary with unqualified candidates and miss out on the perfect candidate.

Finally, you risk hiring someone who cannot grow with your company. Resumes are self-reported historical documents rather than future performance forecasts, according to the Ere articleOpens a new window , “What’s Wrong with Using Resumes for Hiring? Pretty Much Everything.” The narrative provided by the candidate will tell you what the candidate says they did — distorted by bias and selective memory at best and intentional lying at worst — but not how they would behave on the job.

“Those making the hiring decision need to project into the future,” writes John Sullivan, an HR leadership speaker and author. “They need to know how you will act in this job and at this company when you are faced with this firm’s current and future problems.” 

3 Best Practices for More Effective Candidate Screening

The goal of candidate screening is to narrow the field to the most qualified people so you can spend more time determining if they fit your company culture. That is challenging to do using just traditional screening methods. 

Digital tools can tailor questions and automate the hiring process with surveys, workflows, and candidate management. It can elevate the voice of the candidate and give you a more accurate picture of the person’s ability to grow with you. Overall, this makes the hiring process smoother, faster, and more effective. 

Here are three ways to improve your online candidate screening:

1. Tailor your application process

Many online job applications essentially require that applicants complete a checklist. The common questions asked for years are — What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years? As a result, the company may learn information that helps assess culture fit but may not glean any useful intelligence on the applicant’s qualifications for the open position. 

Instead, adapt your questions to the open role and ask candidates to share their stories. This will elicit more sincere, detailed responses from candidates rather than rehearsed answers. For example, when we hire for the executive team at Alchemer, we want someone who relishes big challenges. In our online application and during interviews, I tend to ask questions aimed at determining if they possess the tenacity and an appetite to take on complex problems. For example, one interview question might be, “Tell me about the biggest challenge you have had professionally?” and “Tell me about the most rewarding professional experience you’ve had?” Hopefully, those answers match up.

Another benefit of tailoring the application process is that it trains hiring managers to be goal-focused interviewers. As a hiring manager writes the questions, it also forces them to consider what they are looking for thoughtfully and to be crystal-clear about the qualifications they most require from someone in that position. The resulting answers can also be analyzed. The answers of candidates who later prove valuable team players can be studied and used to evaluate responses for future hiring cycles.

2. Remove resumes from a pedestal 

Candidates may “look good on paper” but not actually be qualified for the open position. Instead of being able to quickly narrow your candidate pool to qualified candidates and then explore who is the best fit for your company culture, you may be letting the wrong people slip through and likely letting a great fit slip away.

Ask more tailored questions to receive more insightful answers. The resume serves a role but is just the start of candidate screening. There is more telling information about the applicant than what can be discovered in paragraphs of job history or bulleted lists of accomplishments.  

In your company’s online applications, ask position-specific questions targeted to the role rather than simply asking about qualifications. If you require someone with experience launching new products, ask candidates to describe the biggest lessons learned from a past product launch.

Candidate answers can give you a valuable window into how they express themselves and whether they possess the qualifications you need. If you need someone articulate who can craft intriguing reports, brief or bland answers could be a sign someone is not right for the role. 

See More: Recruiting Unleashed: 3 Ways To Remove Complexities When Hiring TalentOpens a new window

3. Create a more candidate-centric hiring process 

Truly listening to candidates can help you be more strategic about how you hire. Engaging with them online, as mentioned earlier, is far more scalable than meeting every candidate who satisfies a checklist of qualifications. 

Companies find different ways of being candidate-focused during hiring. After getting frustrated by a 40% dropout rate in their application process, Children’s Mercy Hospital now asks candidates to record a video answering questions asked by children. Recruiters then pair them with the right position. Candidate feedback has been positive. 

“They can tell their story,” according to Angie Richardson, the hospital’s clinical talent acquisition supervisor. “You can’t do that so much on paper.” 

Consider how your hiring process can change to accommodate different types of candidates. Becoming more candidate-focused will drive approval not just by candidates but also by those you hire or others who may eventually become customers. 

Tailored Hiring Makes It Easier To Hire Qualified Candidates

Hiring is challenging, especially when delays could cost you the most sought-after candidates. Overly relying on resumes and traditional hiring interviews can make you miss key information or dedicate too much time to people who aren’t right for the job or the company, especially if they are not prepared to grow with you. 

Being more assertive and asking questions on online applications tailored for the open role can enable you to hire people who understand and share your values and possess all the qualifications you seek for your open position.

What practices do you follow to select the right candidate for your organization? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . 

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