How To Pick The Right Candidate Screening Software

With recent entries in applicant screening tools from Google and Facebook, candidate screening software is currently top of mind.

Here are some factors to consider when buying candidate screening software.

What Do You Need From Candidate Screening Software?

This is where the discussion needs to start. Before you progress to the demo stage, you need to ask yourself if the screening software you’re considering fits these criteria:

• Aligns with your business model
• Integrates with your pre-existing software and processes
• Is capable of handling the highest volume of hiring you plan to do

Those are the “big three” you typically need in place when evaluating candidate screening software options. Your list of “nice to haves”, on the other hand, might include:

• Some degree of automation
• A way to communicate with candidates in the early stages
• Opportunities or processes to reduce unconscious bias

Why You Should Consider These “Nice to Haves:”

Some degree of automation

AI and automation are all the rage in recruiting these days, in large part because so much of a recruiter’s job can be taken up by repetitive tasks during the screening process.

If software can automate screening, as well as interview scheduling, recruiters can be more strategic, attend more conferences, develop deeper relationships with talent, and spend more time sourcing.

Plus automated screening helps solve the “resume ignore” problem (i.e., up to 65 percent of resumes received are ignored).

Communicate with candidates

More communication is the #1 request of job seekers. You can use a chatbot for this, or email, or whatever method works best for your workflow.

In the era of Glassdoor and similar sites, candidate will talk about how bad your communication is.

That’s bad candidate experience, which is bad employer brand, which hurts your ability to get the best talent in a competitive market. And most of us are playing in very competitive markets right now.

Reduce unconscious bias

There are a lot of biases in the recruiting process.

Automation helps with bias reduction because it doesn’t screen based on the quality of school attended or first name perception, as human recruiters can’t help but do sometimes.

Over time, the candidate screening software can get smarter (using machine learning) about what qualities make a good hire, and it screens for the best combination of those, reducing bias and increasing quality of hire in the process.

Bias was an initial concern of the HR community around AI, but bias is more likely to be reduced when using a degree of automation. More diverse workplaces, which can result from less biased hiring, tend to make more money.

5 Steps for Picking the Right Candidate Screening Software

1. The first step is making sure that the candidate screening software integrates with your recruiters’ current workflow. If it doesn’t integrate well, it will go from “software” to “shelfware” in a hurry.
2. The second step is to think about the cadence of your hiring: is it low-volume or high-volume? How often a year are your recruiters slammed?
3. Next, how do you want to be seen in the marketplace? How proactive do you want your communication to be?
4. Fourth, how much can you automate and what will your human recruiters be doing when that task-level work of screening is gone?
5. Finally, what features aside from communication would you like the software to have?

After all those questions have answers penciled in, you’re ready to start shopping for candidate screening software.