The process of screening applicants is useful for an incredible number of reasons and should be carried out before recruiting for any position in a company. No matter how senior the position, using a thorough screening process will give any employer an advantage and prepare them for the interviews ahead.
Here we take a look at the top ten reasons for screening applicants when recruiting:
1) Time Is Important:
As any successful employer will understand, time is a valuable commodity and any way to reduce the length of a task without compromising the quality with which it is carried out should be examined carefully.
Screening applicants is a great way to save both time and money by ensuring that employers don’t have to sit through time-consuming interviews with applicants that are plainly neither qualified nor suited to the open position.
2) Cut 90% of Applicants:
The screening process is both time and resource efficient because of the incredible number of applicants that you can discard as unsuitable. Whether it’s because they don’t have the knowledge base necessary for a position, haven’t taken the time to write an interesting application or have made mistakes on their CV, screening ensures employers sift through those that don’t meet their high standards with minimum fuss.
It’s important to remember job seekers will look for positions in numerous ways – from services to independent applications. You therefore need to find a way to screen through all these applicants who will be coming at you from all angles.
3) Generate Questions:
Applications can be a great source of inspiration for interesting interview questions, particularly if you receive a fascinating application. The number of employees who tailor their answers to meet the demands of the job and consequently submit exciting applications may be low, but when employers do stumble across them, they are often a gold mine of information.
Interviews with this type of employee can be hugely rewarding, even if they don’t get the job at the end of the process.
4) Lower Employee Turnover:
One of the major recruitment problems experienced by businesses is finding employees that will end up staying on board for any serious length of time. A high turnover in a company means that they have to spend valuable time, resources and money running recruitment programs, training new employees and guiding them through the induction phase when they won’t be at their most efficient.
Screening gives employers the opportunity to search out those recruits that seem to display qualities that will keep them at a job for a serious amount of time.
5) Protect The Workplace:
In some cases, new employees can be an extremely destabilising force in the workplace. This may be due to a poor work ethic, a troublesome personality or an inability to work as part of a team.
Avoiding this is not only an essential part of finding the right employee, but also of keeping an existing workforce well motivated and efficient.
Consequently, protecting the workforce is an important benefit of pre-employment screening services.
6) Focus Your Interview:
The screening process will give employers the opportunity to focus any further interviews on the things that matter, rather than spending valuable time asking questions that don’t really go anywhere.
Any information revealed in the screening process should be put to good use and form the basis of further questioning. Generally, this will occur naturally if a potential employee proves particularly interesting.
7) Minimise Disruption:
The recruitment process can actually be quite disruptive to normal business operations; though not always in the most obvious ways.
Most businesses will utilise a number of senior employees during the interview stage, taking them away from their regular work and leaving them with a backlog.
Similarly, new recruits can generate a lot of interest from the existing workforce.
All of this means that you want to minimise the length of the application process in order to minimise disruption.
8) Test The Recruitment Waters:
Screening applicants will give employers an opportunity to send feelers out and see exactly what is happening in the recruitment world. It will give them an idea of whether they are hiring at a moment where there is a distinct lack of quality applicants or a period in which quality is exceptionally high.
9) Maximise Efficiency:
A lot of success in the business world can be put down to making a lot out of the little companies have to work with. This ability to maximise efficiency is a fantastic attribute, particularly in the world of recruitment, and screening should help you streamline the hiring process.
10) Get The Right Workforce
Hiring the right workforce is an important part of running a business and will go a long way to ensuring future success. The screening process will help contribute to a recruitment process that helps employers find a suitable and sustainable workforce.
Author: Francesca Holmes is a business consultant at CVInsight.co.uk who specialises in the kind of elite pre employment screening. In her spare time, she is a keen angler and enjoys relaxing by the lake with her husband and the couple’s two young daughters.
