Over the past decade, employers have put increased emphasis on hiring job candidates who hold advanced degrees. However, many hiring experts believe that eliminating job applicants who don’t hold advanced degrees is tantamount to overlooking the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Writing about degree requirements, recruiting expert Gail Miller notes that “”very often this false criteria has no bearing on someone’s ability to engage, contribute or excel in a role.”” Instead of eliminating good job candidates because they don’t meet stringent requirements, consider adjusting your pre-screening procedures to ensure that you’re not trashing top talent.
Improving The Prescreening Process
Recruiters have long used prescreening questions to eliminate job candidates who simply don’t have the qualifications to fill a given role. However, using questions that are too stringent can have a negative effect on hiring success. Using yes-or-no questions that eliminate candidates without gathering any qualitative data is a common mistake HR professionals make when dispositioning candidates for their jobs.
Using text-based questions that require candidates to formulate a reply and demonstrate their skills can provide easily translatable information about their ability to perform job duties. The ATS OnDemand applicant tracking system will provide you with the means to program your own prescreening questions into the database when you are building your jobs to post so that you can vet candidates based on their true qualifications. The flexibility of the prescreening questions and skill assessment options can help recruiters drastically reduce the time-to-fill metric and boost their retention rates thanks to hiring candidates that are a good fit for their organization.
By asking all job candidates to answer a set of questions that probes their ability to think through a problem, you’ll be able to eliminate those individuals who just don’t have the critical thinking skills needed to succeed at your company. Remember that these types of skills are often gained from experience, but they’re not always gained from an advanced degree program. Using qualitative prescreening questions will also help you assess a candidate’s fit with other job openings at your company, cutting down on the amount of time you spend searching for new candidates every time you must fill an open position.
Automating Recruitment Tasks
In addition to providing HR professionals with powerful means of prescreening candidates, ATS OnDemand can also assist any HR department to streamline, manage and centralize recruiting tasks. Comprehensive tracking and reports will allow you to understand how ATS OnDemand can impact your HR department’s efficiency, maximize your recruiting budget and hire the best talent for every position.
