Resume Screening Blog: 2022 How-to Guide for Recruiters
“Be curious. Use data. Leverage imagination. Be an expert. Be an enthusiast. Be authentic. Know your competition.”
-Jim Stroud
Recruiters pour hours into finding that one perfect resource for their company. The majority of this time is consumed by the ever so tedious CV screening process.
Do you know how many resumes a single job opening receives? Over 250! And then comes the process of wading through the unqualified applications, which are way more than the qualified ones, to reach the few applications worth considering.
On top of it all, surveys have shown that while most companies will increase their hiring volume (over 56%) but the size of 66% of recruiting teams will either stay the same size or shrink.
With so many roadblocks to overcome, we thought why not make their lives easier by laying down a detailed guide for CV screening and how to use CV screening software.
In this guide, we will show you the parts of the CV screening process that could be automated resume screening and use technological advances like resume screening machine learning so you have to put lesser effort for high yielding results.
So, roll up your sleeves and dive into this guide without further ado.
Here are the top tips that we will be covering in this resume screening guide:
- Resume Screening Meaning
- A Detailed How-to Guide on Resume Screening
- Challenges to Overcome
- Leveraging Technology for Resume Screening
- Key Takeaways
Resume Screening Meaning
Resume screening is the first level of vetting the applicants to determine their candidacy for any open role.
There are several aspects taken into consideration for defining the ideal candidate which often includes education criteria, previous experience, and other profile relevant information.
While screening a resume, a recruiter matches these factors/job requirements with the resumes to make a final decision on whether or not to move the candidate to the next round of recruitment.
Read on to understand how you can minimize the time taken to screen resumes and ensure the quality of hire at the same time.
A Detailed How-to Guide on Resume Screening
The first basis for screening resumes is deciding the minimum and preferred qualifications of a role. It is best if the recruiter liaises with the concerning department head to draw up a job description that perfectly encapsulates both these types of qualifications.
The qualifications encompass anything from previous professional experience, education details, to required skills (whether hard or soft).
Once you have decided the minimum and preferred qualifications, you can move on to the following steps and create a resume screening checklist to follow:
Resume screening according to minimum qualifications
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This is the minimum benchmark that each applicant should be held up to. Anyone falling below it gets rejected automatically.
Minimum qualifications can mean different things for different jobs. It usually represents a basic level of competence that would be required from the candidate if hired.
For a technical job, it could mean a degree in the relevant field. However, if the job is clerical it could mean a certain permit to work, etc.
Once you have screened the resumes that meet this basic demand, you can escalate them to the next step.
Resume screening according to preferred qualifications
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These are nice-to-have qualifications that would make a candidate a shoo-in for the role. However, not necessarily mandatory but if present they should be given higher priority than candidates only having the minimum qualifications.
Prior work experience in a similar field or setting is one such example of preferred qualifications. You can move both the candidates to the final step of CV screening but remember to give preference to the ones with the more favorable qualifications.
Shortlisting resumes based on both minimum and preferred qualifications
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Assess your recruitment needs before finally making a call over who to shortlist and who to reject.
If you are performing mass recruitment or conducting recruitment in high volumes then you can shortlist all the resumes from step 1 and make the final decision during the interview process.
However, if you are hiring for a specific role, it is better to only go for the cream from the bunch. Select only a few top resumes that meet both the minimum and preferred qualifications and interview them for the job.
Determining the number of resumes to be shortlisted
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Now that you know how to go about shortlisting candidates. The question arises, what is the right number of candidates to be called in for an interview?
Recruitment data show that only 12% of received applications are converted to interviews. Out of these only 17% of candidates are made an offer. Further, out of these 17%, 89% usually accept the offer.
In short, to get one hire, you have to shortlist 12 candidates from every 100 resumes screened.
Challenges to Overcome
The biggest challenge the recruiters face today is sifting through the sheer volume of resumes submitted for a job opening. It would not be wrong to say that this causes one of the biggest bottlenecks in the recruitment process.
Followed by that, it falls on the recruiter if after going through such a strenuous CV screening process, the quality of hire is not up to the mark.
Optimizing your resume screening process can help you overcome these challenges.
Take a look below:
Dealing with volume
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It takes longer and longer to fill a position these days because there are just too many resumes and not enough time to assess them all.
An eye-opening metric is that out of over 250 resumes received for a job opening, more than 88% of them are underqualified. Do you know what this means for the recruiter? That they have to spend over 23 hours screening resumes for a single hire.
A simple solution to this is the Applicant Tracking System (ATS resume screening) which is a resume screening software. If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager then this will probably become your best friend at work.
You can use it to organize all the resumes you receive for each role and further adopt an automated resume screening process. It works on a keyword search model, i.e, you can feed keywords into the system for a role and it will scan the resume for the same and only parse the resumes where the keywords are present.
However, this leaves open chances for exploitation. Oftentimes candidates can stuff their resumes with keywords just to pass the resume screening software test even if they are not qualified. On the other hand, totally capable candidates can be left out because they did not write the desired keywords in their resumes.
We will show you how you can overcome this loophole later in the guide. So, keep reading!
Quality of hire
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The basis of determining whether a hire is up to the mark is different for different companies. Following are some of the most common ways that companies measure the quality of hire:
- The performance of a new hire
- Low turnover
- Satisfaction of hiring managers
There is no easy way to ensure that the quality of hire is 100% all the time and up to everyone’s expectations. If you are only using a traditional resume screening software/ATS resume screening than it won’t be enough to maintain the quality of hire.
ATS is just designed to screen resumes. They are not advanced enough to learn the patterns in resumes of successful and unsuccessful employees.
Using more advanced resume screening tools like resume screening machine learning or artificial intelligence resume screening will help achieve the desired quality.
Let’s see what up and coming innovations in the recruitment industry will rule the recruitment world. You can also start using technical advancements to meet your KPIs as a recruiter.
Leveraging Technology for Resume Screening
Innovations have been made and more and more companies are looking towards artificial intelligence resume screening and resume screening machine learning to fulfill their requirement needs.
Once completely adopted, manually screening resumes will forever be a thing of the past.
Resume screening using AI
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AI when integrated with the resume screening software/ATS resume screening can help to largely make it an automated resume screening process. This will be helpful for recruiters as the more monotonous jobs will be taken care of by the technology while they will be free to apply their talent elsewhere in the recruitment process.
How does it work? The AI will go through the resumes of successful employees hired previously to understand what ideal applicants should look like. It will further learn the job qualifications based on the job description and apply all this knowledge to screen resumes.
It will not only analyze the resume of successful employees but also crawl your entire resume database to understand what an unsuccessful employees’ resume looks like. The unsuccessful employee will be judged on their performance and tenure.
There’s more! artificial intelligence resume screening will also utilize the candidate’s public data from their social media profiles to interactions about prior employers to make a profile.
Moreover, the AI software will be able to make it a more automated resume screening process which will help recruiters overcome the challenges we previously talked about.
Let’s see how?
Solving the volume issue
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Resume screening using AI can fix this problem once and for all. AI needs a large volume of data to accurately recommend which candidates to shortlist for interviews.
So, it is perfect for screening resumes especially if performing mass recruitment.
If you are wondering if they will replace a recruiter, the answer is no. There are many more aspects to recruitment that need a human touch that a recruiter will be free to take up once they are not spending endless hours screening resumes. From sourcing to interviewing, recruiters will have a more hands-on approach while hiring new employees.
Ensuring quality of hire
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AI takes away the loophole created by resume screening software/ATS. Where an ATS would parse a keyword stiffed resume, AI will easily capture it and dismiss the candidate.
Moreover, candidates unaware of the keyword game also do not slip through as it will catch good candidates that do not have the desired keywords in their resumes.
Moreover, it will crawl your database and learn from your current hiring decisions to understand what your company envisions as a desirable candidate. Thus more or less successfully predicting quality of hire.
The testament to its success is that the companies performing resume screening using AI have reported seeing an increase in performance by 20% and their turnover rate has decreased by 35%.
I would call that a huge win!
Key Takeaways
- CV screening is the process of determining whether a candidate is desirable for a role by scrutinizing their resume for educational details, past experience, skills, etc.
- The first step is to determine the minimum qualifications required for the job.
- The second step is to determine the nice-to-haves and be on a lookout for the resumes that have them
- The third step is to shortlist candidates based on your recruitment needs and move the shortlisted candidates to the interview stage of the recruitment process.
- Create a resume screening checklist to make your job easier.
- Be aware of the challenges, especially tackling the volume and the quality of hire and seek ways to overcome them.
- Leverage technical innovations like resume screening machine learning and resume screening using AI to overcome CV screening challenges.
With this, you have reached the end of this blog. We hope that your next hire is awesome!!
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