An effective strategy for candidate evaluation is crucial to ensuring you make the right decisions on who to add to your engineering team. While hundreds of people might apply for a job, many companies only invite a small percentage to an interview.
The screening process is how business leaders shortlist candidates based on their skills, experience, and attributes. However, not every screening strategy is alike.
To ensure they’re not missing out on valuable talent or adding unnecessary complexity to the hiring process, companies need to analyse and implement the right screening methods for their specific needs. Here, we’ll explore some of the best ways to screen candidates this year.
CV Screening Works With Limitations
CV screening is among the most commonly used candidate evaluation methods. CVs and cover letters provide companies with a quick insight into a candidate’s experience, critical skills, and capabilities.
Unfortunately, CV screening has limitations.
If you receive hundreds of applications for a specific role, manually reading through everyone you receive takes time. Since HR teams have a lot of additional work to do each day, it’s easy to “rush through” reviews (even with the help of AI) and miss important details.
What’s more, a paper or digital document cannot provide a complete view of each candidate. It’s difficult to understand how well a candidate will fit into a company’s culture based on this method alone.
That’s why it’s so important for companies to take the right approach to screening by:
Using Technology
Leveraging technology, like automated screening tools, can help businesses or their recruitment partner rapidly sort through applications, searching for mentions of keywords or terms relevant to the job role. This can help companies quickly create short lists of candidates with the correct skills or capabilities.
Combining CV Screening with Other Methods
Companies should consider combining insights from CVs with other screening methods rather than relying exclusively on this method to find the right fit for a role. Conducting skill tests, using profiling tools, or working with a recruitment company to conduct initial phone interviews can be a great way to unlock additional insights into each candidate.
Profiling Tools for Candidate Evaluation
Profiling tools are an excellent way to dive deeper into the specific capabilities and personality traits of a potential engineering candidate. Companies can use various types of profiling solutions. For instance, personality profiling tests are an excellent way to learn about candidates’ attributes and determine how well they might fit into your company’s culture.
Options like the DiSC profile can help companies determine which candidates will fit well into leadership roles. Skills tests are also extremely useful, allowing companies to validate candidates’ competencies before they invite them for an interview.
Certain tests can examine critical soft skills, such as communication and collaboration skills, resiliency, or time management capabilities. Aside from helping companies shortlist candidates faster, skills tests can even help to reduce bias in hiring decisions, ensuring companies choose staff members based on their abilities.
Video Interviews
Video interviews have become increasingly common in recent years. They offer a fantastic replacement for in-person interviews, allowing for more flexibility, eliminating the need for candidates to travel long distances and employer scheduling challenges to arrange in-person interviews.
Video interviews can also be excellent for engineering candidate evaluation. They offer a fast-paced and convenient way to interact with multiple candidates, ask standardised questions, and get a feel for each applicant’s personality and communication skills.
Thanks to the rise of video conferencing and recording software, scheduling and conducting synchronous and asynchronous interviews is easier than ever today. Asynchronous video interviews can be particularly valuable for candidate evaluation, as they allow applicants to record answers to pre-set questions at a time that suits them.
Business leaders can then review these videos, compare them, and make notes throughout the process to help enhance their hiring strategies.
When conducting video interviews, it makes sense to focus on a few key things, such as making the interview process as simple as possible for candidates and asking questions that offer insights into soft and hard skills.
Leveraging AI and Automation in Hiring
Advanced technology, such as AI and automation solutions, can streamline hiring strategies and enhance the screening process. Already, many organisations use some form of automated technology to help optimise screening.
For instance, applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) can help shortlist engineering candidates instantly by searching for mentions of specific phrases and terms in cover letters and CVs. AI in hiring is increasingly common as companies leverage intelligent tools to analyse, and match candidates to job descriptions.
Both automation and AI in hiring processes can save companies time and effort in the screening process. However, it’s important to be cautious when relying on these tools.
Some automated solutions can disregard applications from valuable candidates simply because they haven’t used a specific keyword in their CV.
Additionally, AI systems can demonstrate bias due to limited data sets.
Additional Screening Methods to Consider
Alongside the four popular candidate evaluation methods mentioned above, some engineering companies will benefit from using additional strategies for screening. For instance, in highly regulated industries, background checks are an excellent way to confirm a CV’s accuracy and learn more about a candidate’s history.
References are another excellent tool, allowing companies to gather insights from previous employers who can confirm a person’s skills and behavioural traits.
Best Practices for Better Candidate Evaluation
Regardless of which screening methods you choose to evaluate candidates, there are some best practices you should keep in mind, which we have shared here.
Use Multiple Screening Methods
Rather than relying exclusively on one screening strategy, like reviewing CVs, combine various methods for a comprehensive picture of each candidate. Consider using phone or video screening to help inform your hiring decisions.
Be Consistent
Build a comprehensive, standardised screening strategy, and use it every time you hire a new team member. A consistent approach will make it easier to assess candidates rapidly and ensure you’re making decisions fairly, with minimal bias.
Collaborate
Get multiple stakeholders involved in making hiring decisions. Ensure everyone has access to the same screening insights and data. This will help to reduce bias in hiring decisions. You can also work with engineering recruitment companies, who can conduct some of the screening process for you and save you considerable time.
Remember Candidate Experience
Put the experience of the candidate first throughout the hiring journey. Ensure you provide clear assessment instructions, make it easy for candidates to attend video screening sessions, and follow up with candidates after each stage in the hiring process.
Optimise and Improve
Gather feedback from your candidates (including the people you don’t hire) for insights into how you can improve the screening process. The right feedback will help you make your hiring strategy more efficient and improve your employer brand.
Final Points To Consider
Candidate evaluation is critical. When screening potential employees, you’ll need to consider various factors, from a person’s skills to how well they’ll fit into or improve your current company culture. Leveraging the right technology and process can help you streamline your screening process, but remember that you still need to keep human beings at the heart of your process.
Working with a engineering recruitment company can save significant time, effort, and money if you struggle with a time-consuming and complex screening process.
The right partner will be able to handle various aspects of the screening process for you, optimising candidate experiences and boosting your chances of making the right decisions for your team.
All the best
Steve
At Coalesce we have been partnering with engineering businesses for over 28 years; if you would like any pointers on candidate screening, then give me a call on 07512 821708 or email us here.