A complete guide of resume screening for HRs and recruiters

In order to fill up the job opening, you need to have a qualified number of candidates, thus shortlisting candidates from their resumes based on their qualifications, experience, education, skills, and certifications is called resume screening. In a recruitment process resume screening is a task that is most important and at the same time most time-consuming. A recruiter can receive an average of about 250 resumes, out of these only 20-30% are suitable for the interview. For a recruiter, sorting and picking the resumes is one of the most tedious tasks.

What are the Important Factors in Resume Screening?

Below are some of the important factors that should be considered while screening resumes. Though not all the factors at once will define the resume, however, most of these are important:-

• Education: Does educational background match the job requirement

• Skills: Are relevant skills mentioned in the resume?

• Professional experience: Does the candidate’s experience matches or close to the job posting?

• Cities or countries worked in: Is the candidate local?

• Resume presentation: How well the resume is written?

Challenges in Resume Screening

• Resume screening is a time-consuming and repetitive process, sometimes recruiters can spend 10-15 hours just going through resumes. This also translates into the cost of labor for the company.

• During a high-volume recruitment period, recruiters may stop searching once they find a suitable candidate for the role and not go through the entire stack.

• Recruiters spend days going through resumes while the great candidates move on. Thus time to fill and quality hiring gets affected the most.

Resuming Screening Methods

It is important to understand that there are two ways the resumes can be screened: manual and automated. 

Both are effective and different in their own ways. It depends upon the individual and the company which one to use. According to professionals manual is for higher positions and automated is for lower positions.

1. Manual Resume Screening

Manual resume screening is when a recruiter reviews each resume on their without the help of an automated tool.

Pros of Manual Resume Screening

The most common way of screening resumes is to manually review each one of them to see if the candidate has the experience and skill set to move on to the interview process. Manually screening can catch small but important details of an applicant’s profile. Here are some areas to focus on:

• Minimum required education

• Minimum required years of experience

• Minimum required skills

• Previous titles

Cons of Manual Resume Screening

It requires the recruiter to go through each and every application and sort out most of the candidates that are unqualified. It also leads to human failure such as bias, forgetfulness, etc.

2. Automated Resume Screening 

Automated Resume screening tools are generally part of the Applicant Tracking system or a talent screening and assessment platform. Most use keywords and boolean searches to scan applicants’ skills, experience, and qualifications to sort them. 

Pros of Automated Resume Screening

Using Automated screening tools not only screens the right fit but also shortens the time to fill the job post. Some of the features of the resume screening tool are:-

• The recruiter gets the choice to keep the data fields of their choice or according to the job post. This feature of the resume screening tool is a boon.

• Unwanted data can be removed such as age, gender, marital status, etc.

• Makes it easy for recruiters to communicate at all stages.

• Helps you remove unqualified candidates

• Stores applicant’s data for future reference

• Provides analytical reports.

• Supports all file formats(doc, Docx, pdf)

Cons of Automated Resume Screening         

• An automated system cannot measure the level of writing or design of the resume.

• Applicants might also game the system by putting in keywords as they were in the job description.

• They can also be expensive.

• They can sometimes miss the good candidates due to the keywords used for filtration during the screening process.

Read about: List of video interviewing software that provides a free trial

Conclusion

According to federal law, one cannot disqualify a candidate based on religion, caste, gender, etc. One way to ensure equal opportunities and unconscious bias in resume screening is to blind screen the resumes. Determine what information is non-essential and then remove it from resumes. 

To keep the hiring process organized I suggest using a talent screening and assessment platform. It allows you to track candidates from beginning to end.