Screening to find the right job candidate

Jack Fellers

12/19/2009

The response to a current job opening at your firm has been unlike anything you anticipated. In a single week, a steady stream of resumes, calls and online applications swelled to a flood, and now, to a virtual tsunami of candidates.
Welcome to the new job market, where a single vacancy may attract hundreds of candidates. Much of the deluge is due to current economic conditions, but you might also feel entangled by the wider net that online job boards have enabled you to cast.
The good news is there are effective approaches to the screening process that don’t require round-the-clock resume reading or massive quantities of caffeine.
The following tips may help keep you from getting swamped and help you to hire the right candidate.
&#8226 Write a detailed job description. It may seem self-evident, but to effectively winnow the ranks of candidates, you need to have a clear idea of what you want them to do. A targeted job description that outlines not only responsibilities and work-related experience but also performance requirements can be used as the basis of a well-defined job listing.
If prepared in this way, the job ad can then become the standard against which you measure applicants. It will help you eliminate candidates who rely on “resume-speak” (e.g., “I maximized work flow”) and focus on those who cite real, relevant achievements (e.g., “I reduced response time to help-desk calls by 30 percent”).
&#8226 Make some requirements ironclad. In the past, you may have advertised for candidates with 10 years’ experience when you were willing to consider those with only seven. Or you may have stated that certain technical skills were “preferred” rather than mandatory. When faced with hundreds of resumes, however, it helps to make some requirements absolute. Depending on the job, this may mean you decide to consider only candidates with a college degree, advanced certification, industry-related experience, specific technological skills or an existing book of business they can bring with them to your company. &#8226 Focus your search. If you place your employment listing in industry and professional-association publications and Web sites, you will have more success targeting individuals with the necessary skills and experience you are looking for. You may not receive the volume of responses you would on a major, online job board, but what you are after should be quality, not quantity.
&#8226 Don’t do the screening alone. If you have established clear-cut, unvarying standards for the position, you can safely delegate the initial round or two of resume screening. Provide your human resources department or hiring manager with the job specifications, along with specific instructions about which types of candidates to eliminate (those with no experience in your industry, for example). When the “prequalification” stage is over, you will likely still have many resumes to look through, but they will belong only to individuals who meet or surpass your requirements.
&#8226 Two heads are better than one. When you have narrowed the field to the top dozen or so candidates, ask a co-worker whose opinion you trust to review the resumes and share his or her assessments. Your colleague may raise questions or issues you hadn’t considered, which may in turn help you further reduce the list of prospects.
&#8226 Conduct a preliminary phone interview. As you zero in on your top choices, a phone screening can save you the time and trouble of interviewing someone in person who ends up being a disappointment. This happens more than managers may realize. More than 72 percent of senior executives in a survey commissioned by Robert Half said it is common for candidates with promising resumes not to live up to their expectations during the interview. When interviewing candidates by phone, ask each person the same questions about work history, expertise, skills and current responsibilities. An alternative is a brief questionnaire about the same topics sent via e-mail to the most outstanding prospects.
&#8226 Standardize the face-to-face interview process. Before scheduling in-person interviews with candidates who passed the initial phone screening, create and prioritize a standard list of appropriate questions. In addition to asking about job-related abilities, experience, aptitude and interpersonal skills, you may want to include some open-ended questions designed to uncover a candidate’s professional behavior, decision-making capacity or career aspirations. In any case, ask each candidate roughly the same number of questions, and take notes on all responses.
As a hiring manager, a consistent, methodical approach is your best strategy in the face of an onslaught of candidates. You will have a greater chance of quickly narrowing the field and identifying from that select group the best person for the position. &#8226

Jack Fellers is a regional manager with specialized staffing firm Robert Half International and oversees several area offices, including the company’s location in Providence.

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