How to Shortlist the Best Candidate for your Organization?
You’ve advertised a position and received tons of applications. It means people are interested in your position. When you’ve received lots of applications against a job post, identifying the right fit is a challenging task. So, what next? Now it’s time to shortlist the best suited applicants and decide who you want to invite for higher stages of interviews. Finding a promising candidate who is the perfect fit for your organization can be time-consuming. You probably have to scan through a large volume of resumes to know whether someone is near to fulfilling all the mandatory and desired eligibility. However, A well-planned shortlisting strategy and pre-decided set of parameters could make your talent picking process more effective and smoother.
If you aren’t sure about how to shortlist a qualified talent that could suit your company’s work culture, check out the below tips. It would enhance your interviewing capacities and encourage better decision-making when recruiting.
Pre-decide what you need
Before you post a job on the online portal and start interviewing candidates, take a break and work on your needs and requirements. Also, prepare a list of mandatory and nice-to-have skills based on the job’s nature. A predetermined list of the essential and desired qualifications would help you eliminate the misfit and select the most suitable applicants for in-person interviews. Whereas, without understanding your requirement, you might end up hiring odd fit people. This might increase the operational cost of your businesses and reduce outcomes. Hence, instead of choosing a random candidate in a hurry, know your needs in detail and set realistic expectations in the job description. It would help you attract the relevant applicants for the position and improve your quality of hire.
Go for a blind screening
When you start considering candidates besides established criteria and skills, this is a clear indication that you’re giving space to unconscious bias in your hiring and might end up selecting the wrong people. To avoid this situation, we strongly recommend you to go for a blind candidate screening and remove all information from the resume that reveals demographics and any other unwanted details that haven’t directly linked to applicants’ professional and qualification skills. This reduces your conscious or unconscious biases when screening and channels a fairer and comprehensive hiring schedule for the business.
Write an engaging job description
To ensure a successful recruitment process and enrich your workflow, it is crucial to communicate your needs and requirements to potential applicants in a well-structured format. A clear and nicely written job description would help you engage qualified talent in the interview process. Use your job description as a tool to get candidates excited about the position. Moreover, instead of writing a long bucket list of skills and qualifications in your job description, you should provide a compelling description of your organization’s requirements and highlight achievements to impress the right talent and jump into your recruitment process.
Integrate automated HR technology
Technological advancement in your talent acquisition team enables you to connect, discover, engage, and select potential candidates worldwide and reduce your dependency on local talent. It reduces time consumption and investment of the businesses in hiring practices and brings recruitment automation. Not only this, integration of a video interviewing software allows you to scan candidates in detail even before calling them in for the in-person interviews and scale up the quality of in-person interviews. Digital hiring solutions enrich your HR tool kit with cutting-edge recruiting features such as remote-based video interviewing, cloud-based storage space, ATS integration technology, and unlimited interview recording facilities. It transforms your hiring experience to the next level and makes it easier, smarter, and more affordable than traditional hiring practices. Best of all, remote-based HR technology makes it convenient for time-tightening and passive candidates to join the interview remotely, improving your chances to select top talent for your businesses.
Reduce your response time
One of the most effective ways to attract a promising candidate is to reduce your response time and keep updating the applicants about their candidature in the interview process. An engaging communication helps you align with candidates and don’t let them disappear from your radar. An HR survey reveals that recruiters with a quick response mechanism and a shorter interview schedule are more likely to attract promising talents. Integration of a video recruiting platform like Jobma enables you to leave feedback and review & score the candidates from afar. Besides, it significantly reduces your response time.
Prepare a candidate’s scorecard
Having solid cut-off points of each candidate helps you build a score-board of top-performing candidates and make it convenient for you to hire the best talent for the position without putting in much effort. It is unlikely that all of your applicants will meet all the criteria described in the job description. However, using a scorecard, you can still identify and select the strongest candidates based on their scores obtained in the interview.
Use Social Networks
With the growing trend of digital social networks, millennials spend more and more time on social media platforms to optimize and explore connectivity to the world. Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram could be a great place to discover and engage passive candidates who aren’t looking for the job actively but are okay to switch if they get attractive offers. You can assign one of your team members to have an eye on social media and shortlist potential candidates who can suit your company’s work culture. Moreover, social media can also be an excellent tool for employer branding and attracting progressive candidates.
Are you a recruiter and looking for ways to hire top talent for your company? If so, you can check out Jobma’s blogs and FAQs section. For sure it would help you conduct effective recruitment and discover great talent. You can also integrate Jobma free video interviewing software into your talent acquisition team to scale up your hiring experience and pick promising candidates from the market without much effort.
