Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion

Here are some small steps that can make a big impact on the lives and livelihoods of the hourly workforce.

In high-volume hiring, sifting through resumes can feel a lot like flicking through profiles on Tinder (or so I’ve, uh, heard). Sure, it’d be great to give everyone’s profile a comprehensive review, and maybe do a bit of due diligence before agreeing to actually meet a stranger you found online, but let’s be honest: it’s almost reflexive for most of us to “swipe left” almost immediately (or right, depending). 

Part of this is probably Pavolovian, but let’s be honest: no one has the time to read through every potential online dating match, which means that we’re acting mostly on instinct. This leads many to accept dates that are, in short, a disaster. Bad dates based on bad matches are seen as one of the necessary evils of online dating, but really, it’s more our fault than any algorithm. 

We react based on immediate impressions, not careful consideration - which means, inevitably, many people who would be otherwise perfect matches - soulmates, even - are rejected for really no reason other than expediency and immediacy, which are pretty crap reasons to exclude any potential partner in a long term relationship.

It’s the same exact problem that’s so pervasive and persistent when it comes to how employers approach high volume hiring. When most of us think “high volume hiring,” we think of people as widgets, really - interchangeable cogs in the human capital supply chain, with low skills, high turnover and little need for the kind of personalization or high touch approach that’s become so critical for hiring professional, salaried “talent” in today’s tight market.

This means that instead of personalization, high volume hiring solutions tend to place a premium on recruitment process automation. In theory, this should create efficiencies, and make hiring much more effective, given the fact that most of the manual, resource intensive work has been outsourced to some machine learning instance. In practice, this AI tends to eliminate as many people as possible, based solely on poorly defined job requirements and whether their resume is stack ranked with a high enough score to move along to the next stage of the process. 

Thing is, few do. And that, frankly, is a waste - of time, resources, and, inevitably, potentially great hires who are cut from the process before they can even really be considered. These candidates are the collateral damage in our never ending quest for efficiency, even at the risk of real recruiting results. 

Of course, you don’t need AI or ML to spend 3-4 seconds looking for a reason to pass on an applicant - individual recruiters have a long history of acting as gatekeepers based on arbitrary and subjective criteria. 

For many, it’s a “gut feeling,” something that really can’t be explained besides some vague utterances about intuition and experience. Which is not only a whole lot of BS, but more importantly, those less than objective outcomes are the very same data that’s used to train the algorithms that we’re increasingly relying on to make informed decisions on who should be hired. 

The process of “pre screening” candidates is, of course, code for “disqualifying as many applicants as possible” - typically involves pinpointing a few missing qualifications or characteristics on a resume, ones that rarely do anything to predict potential or performance, so that candidates can be quickly culled. This is where the “black hole” lives, and why candidate experience is still a problem, even after all these years.

We always want every candidate to be “perfect” for the role, although in reality, there’s really no such thing as a perfect candidate, merely one who is over-experienced, underpaid and willing to accept our job offers. We think cutting candidates eliminates the extraneous ones, with every rejection getting us that much closer to our perception of perfection.

Just like swiping left at the first sign of imperfection or incompatibility on dating apps can cost us potentially great matches, professionally swiping left based on nothing more than impulse and “feeling” probably doesn’t lead to the best hires. 

Of course, there’s no way to measure an opportunity cost, which means that we’ll never know what we don’t have, or who we missed out on by not even considering them past our perfunctory prescreens.

We are not particularly effective at high volume hiring, based on industry wide retention rates, endemic talent shortages and a huge amount of churn over what often amounts to a few cents. 

So what do we have to lose by switching things up and instead of finding reasons to reject candidates, start looking for reasons to say “yes” instead?

Why Screening Hurts Hiring

Many people make the false assumption that screening candidates out and narrowing their talent funnel even before the first touch by a recruiter is a huge time saver, a way to create efficiencies, eliminate manual, repetitive work while streamlining our hiring process. 

This has led to a proliferation of tools and technologies that are explicitly designed to automate the high volume hiring process for employers, and if that’s the direction that you’ve decided to go, well, the good news is that you have options. 

The bad news is that few, if any, of these tools have any empirical evidence or long term proof of concept that they’re doing anything to improve or impact the hiring process. To be fair, neither do most human recruiters, either.

The thing that we’re learning about these technologies and their efficacies, while the jury is still out on whether they’re helping organizations at TA, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that automation in high volume hiring can actually do more harm than good. Efficiency always comes at a cost, and for many employers, it’s a price that they probably can’t afford.

By eliminating so many candidates simply because they’re missing information or not perfectly aligned with tightly scoped job requirements that tend to be a bit specious to begin with, they are ignoring the fact that just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge high volume workers by their resumes, either. 

Many have limited experience in any professional position, or have been on a different career path, or lack formal qualifications, education or industry credentials. They’re willing to learn, and eager to work, of course - and don’t come in with a lot of bad habits or preconceptions - but potential isn’t something that a resume, or even a basic prescreen, could ever predict or project. 

Like Tinder, matches are the basis of a lot of historical data and our own prejudices around perfectly asinine requirements, removing any nuance or discretion the end user might have in favor of a checklist of criteria that instantly eliminate anyone who isn’t a perfect fit - even if it might turn out, in fact, that they are a perfect fit for you and your company. Forget hiring for potential and training for skills. We’d rather hire someone who’s already done the job than someone who could potentially do it even better. 

It seems like a pretty big miss.

So, what happens when you stop screening out candidates entirely?

What if every applicant was a potential new hire, and we looked for reasons to say “yes” instead of consistently looking for reasons to knock them out before they’re even technically candidates?

It’d probably make high volume hiring a whole hell of a lot easier.

Do The Math: Making The Case With Recruitment Metrics.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Screening everyone in sounds like a huge waste of time and effort, particularly since, if you’re like most high volume recruiters, you’re generally faced with dozens of open requisitions and thousands of applicants, with finite time and resources.

However, with the right tools, strategy and mindset, screening candidates in is actually markedly less work than erring towards screening them out. It also helps organizations achieve much better outcomes - and improved core recruitment metrics and talent analytics, too.

Those companies who took advantage of the global COVID 19 pandemic to upskill their workforces and refine their recruitment programs and strategies rather than resort to redundancies, furloughs and freezes, had the time and bandwidth to create a pretty compelling proof of concept. 

Many clients I work with, for example, initiate the conversation based on their needs for a better screening solution; most on the market are long, labor intensive and use the dreaded resume review as the primary way to assess candidates, without consideration of the myriad other dimensions that do a far better job of predicting potential and performance.

Most companies literally screened most, if not all, of the resumes that came into their ATS; rethinking that approach to screening, though, has led many companies to realize that picking up the phone, having conversations with people, building relationships and trying to find complementary skills rather than screening against a list minimum requirements is far more effective. 

Turns out, when it comes to high volume hiring - or really all recruitment - personalization beats automation every time, and high touch beats high tech. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive; used in tandem, they’re the closest thing we have to a silver bullet in TA today.

The best way to do this is by opening up the assessment process to all applicants, so that everyone who wants to apply will not only be filtered based on what they self-report on their resume, but also tested and scored on the skills that the job requires. 

These assessments should be unique to your company, and based on behavioral science and quantitative outcomes that measure candidates’ knowledge, skills and situational judgment, among other characteristics that are imperative for high volume hires.

This allows companies to actually articulate real problems, and provide context to candidates around real workplace challenges, allowing them to respond to certain situations or questions in their preferred communication style - and allows them to realistically preview the job before moving on to the next stage in the hiring process. 

Bringing the opportunity to life is one of the primary benefits to this approach; ideally, this allows candidates who might otherwise be failed hires or low performers to screen themselves out before having to start a job that they realize they’re poorly suited for and dislike. This is a win-win for everyone, and actually leads to much better matching than any algorithm out there.

The hope is that hiring managers will see someone’s capabilities, especially those top performers whose resumes might otherwise disqualify them from consideration, and lets hiring managers base their decisions not on a static piece of paper or personal bias, but instead, on what really matters in hiring and recruiting: whether or not the person has the skill set required for those jobs. 

This leads to hiring managers being able to make more informed decisions about candidates instead of relying on bias and instinct, which, as it turns out, not only leads to more productive and engaged workers, but increases offer acceptance ratios, shortens time to fill and significantly reduces cost of hire (and backfilling those hires, too). 

Fit happens.

Can you really afford to “swipe left?
 

Author Bio

Omer Molad is Co-Founder & CEO of Vervoe. Visit Vervoe Connect Omer Molad https://www.linkedin.com/in/omermolad/