If you don’t know much about the profession you’re hiring for, read up! Talk to people in the same position, ask them what their challenges are and which traits and skills help them overcome them. Take the chance also to ask them if there were any experiences in their lives that unexpectedly helped them to succeed in the role. The better you understand everything regarding the job, the greater you’ll be at finding the ultimate candidate.

A helpful tool is to ask the same set of questions for each job and answer them as thoroughly as you can. By doing so you’ll get a good grip of what your minimum, preferred, and optimal requirements are. Define the minimum requirements and weed out from there.

What are the minimum requirements of a person in this job?

• Skills
• Experience
• Education
  

What are the preferred traits for this job?

• Personality type
• Social skills
• Cultural fit
  

What are some extracurricular activities that could benefit a candidate for this job?

Examples:

• An active member of school boards, political party, or organisation
• Sports on an elite level
• Sales background
• Volunteering

Once you’ve jotted down your various requirements, rank them to see which ones are invaluable, great-to-have, and good-to-have. Choose a ranking system that works for you. As you sort and decide, you might find that you have too high demands of one single person e.g. it would be near impossible for one person to fill all those requirements. That’s when it’s time to kill your darlings and find a combination of requirements that are closer to reality.

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Once you’ve got a good understanding of particular merits, type them out neatly and apply a number to them with the most preferred requirement ranking as 5 and the least valuable requirement ranked as 1. Create a scorecard for each candidate and start applying a number to each fulfilled requirement. As you count the numbers, you’ll quickly be able to scan who has ranked the highest based on your criteria.

This is, after all, and if we dare say so, the less modern way of screening resumes. How could you amplify this process and at the same time be more efficient? We’ll get to that in a bit.

Time to start reading and look for the competencies that you’ve identified. Keep your notes close so you can continuously fill out the scorecards for each candidate that you think matches most of the criteria. Those with an obvious lack of skills can be removed from the list.

Yes, you guessed it, have a digital tool do the screening for you! Screening conducted by a resume screening software works in similar ways as a manual scorecard. You type in the requirements you’re looking for into the tool and the tool will begin screening the resumes. When the screening is finished you’ll be handed a shortlist of the most viable candidates, ranked from 1-20 or whatever amount of candidates you’ve asked for to see.

The benefits are many, you save both time and money and you can brag about, and feel proud of, that you’re conducting a less biased hiring process than your peers. How? Well, another neat function of these tools is that you can conduct an anonymous hiring process, e.g. you can remove all attributes that are typically discriminated against such as age, sex, nationality, name, and so forth.

Consider that you implement an online skill-test and resume screening software into the screening process. How do you know if these actions actually give better results? The answer to that is that you compare two processes to each other and define what “better results” are to you, for example;

1. You saved time and were able to focus on other more important tasks such as interviews

2. You actually saved money because your whole team could work on other business-related tasks such as marketing and the implementation of a new ATS

When it comes to comparing, if you’re about to hire for two customer service jobs, use this chance to compare two processes, one without using digital tools and one during which you use them. What was the outcome?