Finding the best candidates to fill up roles in your company is one of the most important tasks that you have as an employer. Whether you’re running a large organisation or a small start-up, you’re bound to receive hundreds of applications for roles you’ve posted on recruitment sites. Deciding on who to shortlist for the interview process can be a tricky and overwhelming responsibility.
How looking for the right one can go wrong
Despite your experience in hiring, sometimes the candidates that you’ve shortlisted for the interview stage turn out to be not what you expected. On paper, they may appear to have the right credentials on their resume; or rather, you assumed that they do, but then they fall short of even the basic qualifiers for the role.
For example, you may be looking out for someone with a digital marketing background, and so you invited a particular candidate that you thought would fit the bill, only to discover that he or she is a UX designer with little skills for the role you’re aiming to fill.
If you’ve been in this situation, or any others that only led to having unsuitable candidates turn up at your interview sessions, don’t be too hard on yourself. Having to sieve through hundreds of resumes, you’re bound to overlook certain things. You’re only human.
Now is the time to look into a more efficient screening process for candidates.
Screening candidates more efficiently
In shortlisting candidates to call up for an interview, one of the most common challenges for employers is to interpret the information bits that candidates present in their resumes or CVs. The task gets even more laborious when presented with a large number of applicants.
One good way to overcome this problem is to include screening questions for candidates to respond to when applying for the job you’ve posted. These questions are crafted to help you pick out certain attributes that you’re looking for in a candidate very quickly right from the early stage of the hiring process.
For example, if you’re looking for a local candidate to fill an experienced marketing communications manager role, you may include relevant questions like:
- Do you have at least 5 years of experience as a marketing communication manager?
- Do you have a marketing or communications degree from a recognised university?
- Are you ok with working weekends to host marketing events?
At a glance, you may wonder how these simple questions can make a positive impact on your hiring process. Screening questions are designed to be simplistic in nature to allow the employer to easily interpret the candidates’ responses.
At this stage, in-depth questions are not necessary and you can ask those at a later stage during the interview process. The screening questions also enable the candidate to assess his own suitability when applying for the job while responding to the screening questions.
Based on the applicants’ responses to the screening questions, you are now able to filter and narrow down potential candidates, even from a large applicant pool.
The right portal for the job
Thankfully, with the digitalisation of the hiring process in Singapore, employers like yourself can now include screening questions in their job posts conveniently. It is just a matter of finding the right jobs portal that supports this feature.
One of the few jobs portals is MyCareersFuture (MCF) which has this useful feature available to employers that subscribe to the portal. Employers have the option to add up to three screening questions to their job posts, which will then be mandatory for jobseekers to answer when applying for that job.
The feature is specially designed to be user-friendly for employers and speeds up the hiring process. One of the key benefits of the feature is that the screening questions asked by the employers are kept strictly to a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer format only, which will reduce the possibility of misinterpretation of candidates’ responses.
This will enable employers to screen applicants easily and quickly identify the ones that they would like to proceed to the next stage of the interview process.
Wondering how to best utilise the feature? Watch this video:
To further aid employers in getting the best candidates to fill up roles within their companies, the MCF portal also has a Talent Search feature that allows employers to type in keywords such as job titles or skills, to find relevant matches from the large pool of jobseekers on the portal.
Assessing talents? Go digital!
With digitalisation, there are many tools that employers can use to improve candidate screening and develop a more accurate and valid recruitment process. These screening tools, which consist of pre-employment tests, help employers learn and understand the candidates better to select the ones best fit to helm various roles in the business.
As for which types of pre-employment screening tests to use, you can opt for one or more depending on your company requirements. Some candidate assessment tools that can be administered quickly and easily through well-designed software are:
- PwC and Accenture: Pymetrics software, which uses a series of 12 games to assess your personality and behaviour
- Nestlé: Pulsifi software, which features a combination of numerical and verbal reasoning tests as well as assessments on your personality and work interests
The bottom line is, the competition for the best talent is fierce and you need to ensure that you have an efficient recruitment process to attract and retain the right employees for your company. Implementing a more comprehensive hiring process can definitely help you make better hiring decisions and avoid the high costs of bad hires.
Get started!
Speed up your hiring process by quickly identifying quality candidates. Add screening questions to your MyCareersFuture job postings to easily find applicants that meet your most important requirements.
To use Screening Questions:
- When creating a job posting on MyCareersFuture, add up to three yes/no screening questions
- When reviewing applicants, filter them based on their responses
That’s it! Start your hiring process now.
