How do you keep the process human whilst screening candidates fairly and seamlessly?
You want to ensure that you are picking up on all of those soft skills, emotional intelligence and wisdom of a candidate. They are the very traits that complete the salesperson or indeed any role that has a requirement to deal with another human, face-to-face.
Imagine missing out on a perfectly good sales hire because he/she is not savvy with constructing a CV in a certain filtering optimised way? The unaware will have neglected to optimise their CV for the machine screening process, only to be rejected at the other end having failed to hit the preordained criteria for making it to the next phase in onboarding. The main culprit here is the filtering parameters set by HR along with the nuances of the relatively simple algorithms of an ATS (applicant tracking solution).
Meet Mr ATS
To personalise it, “Mr ATS” will review the document. It needs to have been formatted correctly, written with the “right” font and have certain phrases present (the same phrases that were in the job spec). Industry terms, technical jargon, the mention of a CRM, a 3rd level course; lots of formulaic text that HR deemed as blockers if they are missing.
Mr ATS prefers bullet points and indentation to tables. He rejects colloquialisms. You need to make sure it looks like your LinkedIn profile as he will compare the content there too. This is a lexical search which means it looks for literal matches of words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning.
Mr ATS does not take into account soft skills; the empathiser, networker, listener, storyteller, challenger, collaborator or questioner. It deals in hard facts and scripted evidence. It’s doesn’t sense emotional intelligence or the wisdom to walk away from a deal when you know the client has no intention of buying from you.
Meet Mr AI
To seal the screening deal, Mr ATS deploys his “bouncer,” Mr AI, to catch anyone trying to sneak in the back door with their soft skills. The semantic search seeks to improve overall screening accuracy by understanding the intent or words or phrases. The idea is that the AI technology is powerful enough to understand language in context and is deployed to pick up those particular traits. But how this is going to happen as candidates attempt to keep all of their details to a 1 page CV?
If your screening processes are like this, then you get what you set the parameters for. You have almost certainly ruled out some gems. While you may be cutting out the unlucky candidate who meets the tired eyes of HR on the Tuesday morning after a long weekend, the candidate whose resume has to play phrase bingo with AI and mirroring the words on the job spec suffers the same fate.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this!
Meet asynchronous interviewing technology
Its benefits:
- Deals with large volumes of candidates
- You can view and review the reactions of the candidate in an interview environment
- Every candidate gets asked the same questions in the same way with the same amount of time to answer
- You can make decisions in your own time
- Benchmarking is on a level playing field
- It can be cost effective, flexible and simple to deploy.
The solution involves screening people through an asynchronous video interviewing platform which allows invited candidates to answer questions on camera in the comfort of their own homes. The result is sent to you. You can share the result with stakeholders.
You can allow candidates to record and re-record their first effort. You can time limit their attempt. You could even send the questions in advance. It’s your choice !
With the current climate, it meets all the social distancing requirements.
Step forward Competitive Wedge!
Trial it – Competitive Wedge Demo
Please contact me if you would like to discuss this offering.
