There’s nothing wrong with the above-mentioned screening methods, perhaps you even enjoy it! However, in this fast-paced day and age, it’s probably wise to consider otherwise. Growth, production efficiency, and cost-efficiency are the guiding lights of many companies of today so to remain in the game, we’ll give you three convincing arguments for why you should consider becoming one with automation.
Have you ever measured how much time you spend on manually screening candidates for a position? If you haven’t, try it! You might be appalled by how many hours you actually spend on it. Why is this an issue? Because, and I don’t want to say it; time is money, but time is also your life at work. So there are two important factors at play here, but we’ll get to the latter later on.
Suppose you spend a full working day just going through the job applications you’ve received in your inbox. You screen, skim, perhaps you use a score-card to keep track of who to go forward with, and you do your best to remember every person, apart from the apparent no-go of course. When the screening is completed you’ve spent a lot of time on something that you’re not sure will give the optimal results, not saying that you’re not great at your job, but because your brain can only store that much information at once which means you probably don’t even remember why you thought the candidate you ranked highly first was a good fit. Therefore the time and effort you’ve put in don’t marry with the results.
The risk is simply that you’re moving forward with candidates that aren’t skilled nor experienced enough for the job and the reason for it is because your workload was too heavy. Hence you’ve wasted even more time on pursuing something that turned out to be both futile and costly.
To get back to the part regarding your life at work, how do you like spending it? Since you’ve chosen a life in HR you’re most likely a people-person who enjoys the magic of meeting new people. But if you’re spending one-third of your time on screening resumes, is that equal to making the most of your potential and ability? The point is that it’s not only costly money-wise but talent- and people-wise as well. Maybe you excel in interviewing people or you’re brilliant at forecasting recruitment trends, then shouldn’t your own talent be leaning towards that? Just as you’re used to optimizing human capital for various positions, yours is as important.
The energy you bring to work and into your tasks is precious and should be allocated to where you create the most value.
This is a big one. As already touched upon, a human brain that gathers a lot of resume data will most likely falter at some point due to the excessive amount of information. Compared to a computer, you can’t actually guarantee that you’ve made the correct decision in who you choose to move forward with. From all that skimming, you might have to settle with average hit and miss results which is an absolute no-go no matter if you’re hiring internally, for a client, or for the company you work at. “Oh, okay, mind you, people have been manually screening since the dawn of recruitment,” you might think now. Yes, definitely, we won’t oppose that, but the fact is that no one can measure how great of a fit those recruits actually were and whether someone in that pile of resumes would have done a greater job than the candidate who got the job. Hire failures are costly both for you and the company you’re hiring for.
Without accurate data, you can’t measure the failures nor the successes because you don’t know why a completed hire turned out to be successful or vice versa. But if you gather data from the beginning of the hiring process, from the number of applicants to the final hire, you’ll start to get a better understanding of why you nailed a hire. You can also use employee retention as a metric of success.
Heureka! Welcome to the part where we’ll stop being so problem-oriented and start looking at solutions. The name of the game is automated screening. Maybe you’ve heard about it but have felt that your screening method is good as is, until you read this article that is. Automated candidate screening is a way to earn time, production energy, and create great hiring results. Automated screening is to leave the screening process to an intelligent screening software that conducts the screening of resumes and interviews for you. We’ve written many articles about it so if you want to dive deeper, please follow the link below. The most interesting part about it, however, isn’t the fact that you get things done faster and with better results, but it is that you can use the data to your advantage by connecting the dots from it. How?
We usually have preconceptions of who we think would be most suitable for a job based on a person’s background, experience, and skill-sets. Say that you’ve been hiring computer engineers for a really long time using manual screening and you’ve always gone for the ones who have the same degrees, interests, skills, etc. But as you continue your journey with automated screening and see how the computer evaluates people, you slowly start to notice that the candidates who actually land the jobs are sometimes far from the ones you'd choose by yourself. Therefore, with this new information, you can start streamlining the hiring process so that it speaks more to this new profile that you’ve found. For example, begin writing job ads that speak more to them. That way you’ll more quickly get a hold of the people that are of actual interest which increases efficiency further.
Another example of how you can use the data from the automated screening is to use it to write your own content. You can write trend reports, articles, and research papers based on the statistics. This contributes to making you more valuable in your profession as well by helping people understand how knowledgeable you are in your area of expertise.
If this has upped your curiosity regarding automated screening processes, feel free to connect with us at Hubert to see how we work with it.
