Screening Applicants

The objective of using various screening techniques and levels of screening is to filter out candidates that either don’t meet the stated minimum requirements or aren’t a good fit with the organization’s culture or for other reasons (i.e., job realities or salary expectations). Screening is a process of elimination. The goal is to ensure that those candidates who are invited to participate in interviews are highly qualified.

There are five primary techniques for helping to screen potential candidates that also represent phases in the screening process:

1. Evaluation by association: Use the places where the job is advertised to filter candidates. For example, if a job is posted on a website dedicated to engineering professionals, it is assumed that applicants from that site will likely have a background in engineering. This technique helps to narrow down the pool of applicants to those with relevant interests and expertise right from the start.
2. Application: Conduct an initial assessment based on the review of a candidate’s cover letter, resume, and application. This may also include a review of a candidate’s social networking profiles (e.g. LinkedIn). To avoid investing time assessing a candidate that isn’t viable, incorporate pre-screening questions that require the candidate to attest that he or she meets the stated minimum criteria. In this phase, the objective is to eliminate candidates that don’t meet the basic requirements for the position based on fundamental factors including minimum experience and education, salary expectations, and/or willingness to relocate or meet work schedule requirements, if applicable.
3. Assessment: Conduct a preliminary assessment of skills. This can be done in conjunction with or after the application review process. Depending on position requirements, a more in-depth assessment of a candidate’s level of skill and aptitude may be appropriate.
4. Screening Interview: An initial telephone interview is used to assess the candidate’s objective and motivation, relevant education and experience, and to get a sense of the candidate as a person. In the course of approximately twenty to thirty minutes, an interviewer can confirm application and resume details and assess a range of soft skills—for example, active listening and communication—as well as engagement and overall level of poise and professionalism. The objective is to eliminate candidates who don’t warrant the time and cost of a longer interview or in-depth skills assessment.
5. External Verification: Verify stated educational qualifications and check references.

Assessing Candidates

Regardless of an interviewer’s (or interview panel’s) experience, judgment, or relevant expertise, an interview is largely subjective. That is, the interviewers have to trust in the candidate’s statements and resume. If position dynamics require a new employee to start immediately with minimal training, it makes sense to assess a candidate’s level of skill and knowledge relative to the stated job requirements.

Consider the role of tests in the hiring process.

Rejected for an Above Average Score

Many positions require applicants to take tests as part of the selection process. These can include IQ tests, job-specific skills tests, or personality tests. The organization may set cutoff scores (i.e., a score below which a candidate will not move forward) for each test to determine whether the applicant moves on to the next stage. For example, there was a case of Robert Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate who applied for a position with the police force in New London, Connecticut. As part of the selection process, Jordan took the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT), a test designed to measure cognitive ability, or his ability to problem-solve.

Jordan did not make it to the interview stage because his WPT score of 33, equivalent to an IQ score of 125 (100 is the average IQ score), was too high. The New London Police Department policy is to not interview anyone who has a WPT score over 27 because they believe anyone who scores higher would be bored with police work. The average score for police officers nationwide is the equivalent of an IQ score of 104 (Jordan v. New London, 2000; ABC News, 2000).

Jordan sued the police department alleging that his rejection was discrimination and his civil rights were violated because he was denied equal protection under the law. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the city of New London did not discriminate against him because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the exam (New York Times, 1999).

There are three broad categories of job-specific testing that we’ll discuss: work samples and simulations, cognitive ability tests, and personality tests.

Work Samples & Simulations

Work samples and simulation tests are used during the candidate evaluation process as a way for employers to evaluate job-specific skills and aptitudes. A work sample consists of having a candidate perform a work-related task. A work sample allows the employer to assess the candidate’s performance and also gives the candidate a realistic job preview.

In a simulation, the candidate would engage in a highly structured role-play designed to represent broad aspects of the job, for example, assessing an applicant’s problem-solving, communication, and interpersonal skills. Performance should be evaluated “by trained assessors who observe the applicant’s behavior and/or by measuring task outcomes (e.g., the degree of interpersonal skills demonstrated or the number of errors made in transcribing an internal memo).”^[1]  When administered and evaluated correctly, this assessment technique is one of the strongest predictors of job performance.

Cognitive Ability Tests

A cognitive ability, or mental agility, test is a tool to measure aspects of general intelligence, such as mental agility and speed of thought, analytical thinking, the ability to learn quickly, and verbal reasoning skills. Psychological research indicates that cognitive ability is one of the most accurate predictors of job performance and the tests are significantly more accurate predictors of job performance than interviews or experience. To be precise, the correlation between cognitive ability and job success is 0.51 (1.0 would be a perfect or 100% predictor). This compares to a correlation of 0.36 for reference checks, 0.18 for years of experience, and 0.18 for unstructured interviews^[2].

An example of a cognitive ability test is the General Aptitude Test (GAT) which was developed by the U.S. Department of Labor. A limitation of this approach, as with any test, is that an applicant’s practicing and using test strategies can decrease the validity of the test. Also, researchers have noted disparities in test outcomes across racial groups, with lower predictive accuracy for Black and Hispanic test takers.^[3] To avoid the risk of discrimination, use this test in combination with other evaluation methods.

Personality Tests

Personality assessments such as the Big Five or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) can provide insight into candidates’ personalities and whether they would be successful in a particular role or prospective company culture. As described by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Federal Government’s chief human resources agency, “Personality tests are designed to systematically elicit information about a person’s motivations, preferences, interests, emotional make-up, and style of interacting with people and situations. This information is used to generate a profile used to predict job performance or satisfaction with certain aspects of the work.” According to the OPM, “personality tests have been shown to be valid predictors of job performance in numerous settings and for a wide range of criterion types (e.g., overall performance, customer service, teamwork), but tend to be less valid than other types of predictors such as cognitive ability tests, assessment centers and work samples and simulations.”^[4]

One thing to keep in mind during the hiring process is that the effectiveness of personality tests is dependent on a candidate’s commitment to answering the questions honestly. Some individuals may try to manipulate the test by providing what they perceive as the “correct” answers rather than truthful responses. For best results, verify that a test is designed to identify misrepresentations.

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