After making the decision to tackle your Recruiting project on your own you are ready to cull your responses. Assuming your advertising has been written well, placed in the right media and targeted the right applicant pool, you should (theoretically) have a solid group of applicants from the available talent the market has to offer. Most managers expect that there will be a certain number of ‘hopefuls’ who don’t meet the criteria. Whilst sorting through these is factored into your time allocation, what many of the employers we work with are most surprised about is the sheer volume of applications they receive, especially for more generalist roles such as Receptionists, PAs and Admin Support Personnel. Our clients regularly tell us that the volume of applications is the most daunting and time consuming part of recruiting themselves, and the vast majority admit to getting it wrong because they didn’t have time to do it properly, or didn’t know how to do it at all. To help, I have put together the following 7 tips to help ensure your resume screening and culling is both time efficient, and appropriately thorough, to ensure you interview only a select few, top-quality applicants to continue through the screening and assessing process.
1. Have your Position Description written before you start and KNOW IT!
If you don’t know what you are looking for when you start screening your resumes, you will undoubtedly waste time trying to figure out whether each applicant is suitable or not. To ensure you don’t waste your precious time – plan and prepare. You should have your Position Description written before you start advertising, and your ad should target applicants who meet your requirements as identified in your positions description. The key for you in the screening process is to know these essential and desirable criteria inside out before you look at one single resume
2. Know your essential vs desirable criteria
If you know in your mind which key criteria (top 3-5) are essential that successful applicants must have, it’s easy to look for these things immediately. Before you look at anything else in the resume, check these, if none of them are met move that applicant directly to the ‘no’ pile.
3. Cull at a time that suits you, when you won’t be disturbed
Being constantly disturbed, interrupted or distracted while you are trying to screen resumes is the sure fire way of spending more time than you need to on the process. Screen resumes at a time that suits you; for me this is as soon as I walk into the office, before anyone else is in, before I check any other emails and before the phones get busy. It is sometimes easier to break it into small chunks, 10 minutes at each end of the day may be enough depending on the volume of applications you have.
4. Don’t read every line on a resume
Resumes are full of useful but sometimes irrelevant information. Before interviewing a candidate, and perhaps before even phone screening you will want to have a thorough read of all the details, but it’s not necessary at this early stage. Only skim through each resume in this screening stage only – take note of those ‘essential criteria’ along with any other key factors such as location, own vehicle, stable work history and qualifications. This will save you time in the initial stages, if the applicant ends up in your ‘yes’ pile of resumes, you can look at them in more detail then.
5. Don’t read the cover letter first
Some people love to read cover letters in a hope to get an insight into the personality of the applicant, as well as to pick up simple issues like spelling and grammatical errors. However, at this screening stage ignore the cover letter; it can bring you no value in helping narrow down during the initial screen.
6. Start with a Yes, No and Maybe pile
As you do your initial screen, sort each applicant into a yes, no or maybe pile/file. This can be done in your email by creating a folder for all your applications for the position, and then sub-folders for each of these. As you do your initial quick screen, move all those that meet your essential criteria into the yes folder, those who meet some but not all into the maybe folder, and those who miss the essential criteria into the no folder. This gives you a focus group to go back to when you are ready to phone screen, call for interviews or more thoroughly review the applications. If your yes folder holds 50 + applicants, re cull them and only leave those in who meet all of your essential, plus some of your desirable, or you may chose to cull via those with the more stable work history, live within closer proximity to the office (only if this is relevant) or have qualifications on top of their experience.
7. Act Fast!
It’s no secret, good applicants don’t last long in the market. There is nothing that will waste more of your time than getting around to screening applicants, only to discover that the good applicants are gone and you have to start the whole process again.
