The importance of screening a candidate

Q and A with Jafeth Rodriguez, the Founder and CIO of RECRUITadvantage

What is the process of online screening question and why YOU should be using them?

QA with Jafeth Rodriguez from RECRUITadvantage the maker of turboRECRUIT.

Jafeth is a veteran of the online recruitment industry, melding his extensive background in software design and development with online recruitment implementations since the nascent days of the industry in 1997. Prior to founding RECRUITadvantage, Jafeth worked in a range of IT consulting roles with blue-chip organisations globally including Accenture, EDS and Telstra.

What is the definition of screening question?

Screening questions is a process that takes place online. It is basically asking questions or specific questions around the position that we are sourcing careers for. It a process where someone has found a job, the candidate has clicked on the link to apply, and the screening questions pops up while the candidate fills out the application. The answers indicated from the candidates can be assessed and compared against other candidates.

What were some of the reasons why you would implement a screening question process in the application process?

The benefit of screening questions are, to gather pertinent information upfront on a particular candidate or alternatively to utilize the candidate responses as a means of automatically culling candidates from the recruitment process. This is would extremely beneficial in large volume recruitment.



What kind of questions should be asked?

I would recommend to consultants that they really need to think a little bit about the questions they ask. They should not be asking questions for the sake of asking questions, but they should ask questions to make it a meaningful part of the process. For example, ìDo you have the right to work in the UK? This is a very important requirement for some roles especially when you are talking about the defense or government, however the question itself is very open ended.

Avoid Yes and No Questions

What I usually recommend to our clients is to avoid a ëyes/noí question whenever possible. Let us go back to the example, you were asking, ìDo you have the right to work in the UK? - Yes/No,î and then what you are implying is that if you say ënoí, in a way, you will actually reject that particular candidate they may have been a good match for the role.

What is a better way to structure the question?

In this example I would ask a question like, ìPlease state your citizenship status.î This gives the candidate a few more options. The answers could be 1. I am an UK citizen, 2. I am a permanent resident, 3. I am looking for sponsorship, 4. I am on a working holiday 5. I am a student. An open ended question will give you the ability to collect a bit more information, make it not a threatening process for the candidate and at the end of the day save time on both sides.

What would be the maximum number of screening questions for an application process?

It will depend on what the role is and criteria for sourcing the right candidates. But in general I would say a handful of questions - say four or five questions for a particular role.

It is possible to weigh the importance of responses in the screening question process?

The format of the questions can be an open-ended question, single-selection question, or a multiple-selection question. And then you will be able to assign scores and weights to each of those questions and answers based on the importance and based on the results that you actually want to measure out of that process.

Want to know more about the benefits of screening candidates?David Chernick leads the screening business for Reed Managed Services, and will be giving a presentation at the Online Recruitment Conference & Exhibition on 3rd June. For more details, click here