There were 2.2 million people looking for employment in the Philippines in 2023. With so many job seekers, each job post you create receives tons of applications. The good news is you’re likely to find qualified applicants in the pool; the bad news is you have to undergo the long and tedious process of job applicant screening to identify which profiles are qualified to be interviewed. Not only will this take up precious time and resources, you also prolong hiring time and risk making an error when it comes to making the right hire. This is why creating a clear and streamlined applicant screening process is key!
What Is The Applicant Screening Process
An applicant screening process is the act of going through job candidate applications, reading their submitted documents (resumes/CVs, cover letters, and portfolios), understanding their qualifications and skills, and matching them to your job openings to determine their fit for the role.
In the modern job market, screening applicants means poring over tons of documents, a time consuming task that recruiters undergo in order to find qualified applicants to endorse for an interview. The goal is to find great candidates, those whose skills, experiences, as well as expectations, align well with the job opening. With this, you can speed up the hiring process and increase the chances of a successful hire.
Why Is The Applicant Screening Process Important
As much as we want to give opportunity to each and every applicant, we don’t have the time or resources to do so. A good applicant screening process streamlines the selection of prequalified candidates so that only the ones with potential to get hired reach the interview stage of the application process.
Faster Time To Hire
In the Philippines, hiring processes take up to 23 days on average. three to six weeks. In that time, you have an unfilled position, putting stress on your current operations and organization. You also run the risk of applicants dropping out.
The point of having an applicant screening process is to save both you and the applicants time and energy in terms of determining fit. It’s also efficient in getting applicants from one stage to the next, accelerating the interview process, and making time to hire much faster.
Lower Attrition
Over 40% of Filipinos are overqualified for their jobs. And with the consequences of a job mismatch – lower wages, which decreases job dissatisfaction, and increases employee turnover – employers are bound to waste more time and resources hiring a new person.
The goal of an applicant screening process is to weed out applicants who are mismatched for the position they’re applying for, which increases the chances of a successful hire, and lowers turnover.
Good Reputation
Applicant experience holds a lot of weight in terms of your company reputation. The last thing you want is disappointing applicants, leading to bad reviews of your company on job portals. Such negative feedback can be damaging to your reputation, which will hinder your hiring process over time as fewer and fewer candidates, especially the high quality ones, will choose to apply to your job postings.
How To Conduct A Streamlined Applicant Screening Process
The modern applicant screening process is drastically different from its pre-digital version. In the advent of social media and online job portals, screening applicants should be simple, efficiency, and ultimately boils down to three main steps:
Profile Review
The first step of an applicant screening process, usually referred to as profile review or first check applicant screening, is to go through the profiles of your applicants. This means looking at their resumes or CVs, reading their cover letters, reviewing their portfolios, and even looking up their social media accounts.
During this step, you should already have a clear list of must-have and good-to-have skills and experiences. These will serve as a criteria to help you find profiles that meet your minimum qualifications, as well as those that exceed them, so you can identify the high potential candidates you want to endorse for the next step in the applicant screening process.
Of all the processes listed here, profile review is the most tedious, the one most recruiters struggle with, and the one where errors are most likely to occur. But with help from innovative job portals like Bossjob, there are AI tools for automated applicant screening to do the heavy lifting so you can focus on communicating with applicants and arranging the next step of the applicant screening process.
Initial Phone Interview
Once you’ve selected the applicant profiles that meet your minimum requirements on paper, it’s time to evaluate their qualifications and see if they fit with what you’re looking for or if your open position aligns with their expectations. This is usually conducted through an initial interview. And with help from innovative online job platforms, this initial interview can be done immediately through call or chat for faster turnaround time.
The goal of this step is to get a better grasp of who the candidate is, what they know and are capable of, and what they’re looking for. These are important factors to consider during the initial phone interview to see if it’s worth pursuing the application process for both you and the candidate.
Skills Test
If you’ve screened the candidate, they have the minimum qualifications on paper, and they seem to be the right fit for what you’re looking for, the next step is to find out whether their skills meet the cut.
To do this, you can issue a skills test to evaluate the candidate’s skills. With most of the hiring process conducted virtually, it’s much easier to test skills using virtual exams. Especially with reliable online job platforms like Bossjob offering standardized skills tests, you can easily leverage these to help evaluate the actual abilities of your candidates, saving yourself the time and effort.
Bossjob is a chat-first online job platform that leverages AI and various applicant screening tools to assist employers in the applicant screening process. With its resume screening, chat first function, and other value added resources, you can communicate and pre qualify candidates much faster, improving the quality of your screening and accelerating time to hire.
