Screening job applicants is an important and understated part of choosing the right candidate. If a company rushes through its screening process — or skips it altogether — the negative consequences could outweigh the benefits. Time is money, so anything you can do to speed up this process and save your HR department valuable hours will have major cost-cutting benefits. The following are just a few things you can do to save at least an hour per candidate.
With an automated screening tool, you don't have to go through all those resumes yourself. With the rapid advancement of machine learning technology, there are already different generations of these tools available, with the older versions being CV-parsing. What the automated screening tool does is what you would have done yourself, but faster. It reads through resumes and looks for specific criteria that you've taught it to look for.
How do they know that? Well, you have to support it with information about what you’re looking for in a candidate, such as;
When you’ve typed down the criteria you’re looking for, the automation begins. The AI goes through all the resumes in less than an hour. But not only that, if the tool is advanced enough, it will also generate a ranked list, listing the top ten candidates that it has deemed to be most suitable for the job. But why has it deemed those candidates more worthy than the others? The AI can also provide you with this information, e.g., it can vouch for its decision.
Screening resumes in this way is only the first step on the automated hiring journey. When you’ve found your first candidates, you can make use of automated screening interviews.
Based on the successes of the older generations of screening tools, more advanced tools came into play. Developers and recruiters asked the question: would the world be able to trust an AI to conduct recruitment interviews?
It turned out to be, not only a possibility but absolutely doable. Large corporations jumped on the bandwagon early on and led the way for AI-based recruitment. However, it didn’t come without a cost. For example, Amazon drove the development of an AI recruitment tool that turned out to be sexist due to the implicit bias it was programmed from. So no, an AI should probably not be allowed to be in charge of the whole hiring process just yet. But thankfully, there are many bulletproof tools that you can use starting today.
Related: The importance of developing fair software.
Depending on what job you’re hiring for, you can either use automation tools to screen resumes, or you can jump straight into automated text-based interviews. This means that every applicant receives a link to an online interview in chat format, and the AI interviews the candidates. The premise is the same: the AI conducts the interviews and gives you a ranked list of the most valid candidates. Using an interview tool can speed up the process even faster because you learn more about the candidate in one go.
For example, Tengai is a conversational AI. Meaning it’s a tool based on natural language processing that can read, process, and understand human communication. We’ve already mentioned the time-saving aspect as a major benefit but another perk is that automated tools if programmed right, are less biased than humans. When you use a tool like this you can completely disregard common discriminatory factors such as name, age, sex, and nationality. Because the tool focuses solely on the resume’s contents, you can block it from taking certain information into account in its decision.
Read more about conversational AI.
Once you start receiving applications, now is the time to begin pre-screening candidates. You don't want to waste time interviewing 15 applicants when only five of them are qualified for the job. Utilize a rigorous screening process to weed out candidates who don't meet the requirements, who don't have the necessary experience, or who don't seem like they would be a good fit for the corporate culture.
You might opt to use a variety of pre-screening strategies such as application reviews, phone screenings, and automated reference checks. The automated reference check process allows hiring managers to quickly collect a great deal of information on job applicants early on in the hiring process. This can make it easier to narrow your pool of candidates down to a select few who are the most qualified for the job.
If you have a small hiring staff or work for a large company with many open positions, streamlining your hiring is a top priority. One of the most effective ways to quickly save valuable time is to utilize technology to make faster hiring decisions. Automating your reference-checking process, for example, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to save at least one hour per candidate. Instead of spending hours on the phone chasing down interviews with people listed as references, you can simply email each reference a link to an online survey. Respondents can then provide their honest feedback at their own time and convenience.
Finding highly talented and high-performing people is critical to any company's success. By speeding up your hiring process, you can ensure that you are getting highly qualified employees and putting them to work as quickly as you can. Automated screening effectively frees up a big-time block in one neat, little package.
Read more about interview screening.
Tengai combines AI and unbiased recruitment. Today, there are several software that helps you assess blind resumes and chatbots that can be used to screen applicants. But until now, there have been no objective tools that could take away bias from the interview. This makes the job interview a risky step in the recruitment funnel and at risk of being inefficient, unfair, and expensive. To change that, we combined conversational AI with an unbiased recruitment method and developed Tengai: the friendly screening interview designed to save you time and money.