Finding and hiring new employees is one of the most important HR functions. New employees mean new changes for your business as they bring modern skills, novel ideas, and positive attitudes into the workplace, breathing life into your company.
That’s why companies are eager to hire only the best candidates to make the most of this opportunity for innovation. But as hundreds of people respond to a single job posting, it can be difficult for recruiters to sift through the masses and find the best candidate, wasting valuable time the new hire could’ve spent working.
So what’s the best way to quickly evaluate potential recruits and find the perfect candidate? If your company is new to the recruiting process, here are the tried-and-true top HR methods to evaluate a potential candidate.
5 Top HR Methods to Evaluate a Potential Recruit
#1: Use Resume Screening Software
If your job listing received dozens—or even hundreds—respondents, you might quail at the thought of reviewing all of those applications and resumes.
Luckily, companies can invest in automated tracking software (ATS) and resume screening software to streamline and augment the resume review process. Resume screening tools use come with various features that make the job easier for you. Most of them come with parsers with which you can search for certain keywords in candidates’ applications.
Some also have enrichment tools that allow you to pull further candidate information from the internet. Plus, you can use the AI and machine capabilities of resume screening tools to automate the filtering process after you evaluate the first few candidates.
That means the software can run these tasks by itself, so you don’t have to lift a finger to find the best resumes.
#2: Evaluate Their Experience
Once resume screening software has been able to reduce the list for you, you can then take a closer look at the more promising candidates. So, the next thing to do will be to consider the candidates’ experience and education.
While it can be tempting to prioritize candidates based on the prestige of their university or previous workplaces, recruiters should instead critically evaluate whether the details of the applicant’s education and experience fit with the role they’re being considered for.
For example, if you were hiring for a programming position, a candidate with a psychology degree from Harvard would likely be less qualified than a candidate with a computer science degree from a local community college. The same goes for experience – it doesn’t matter where they worked, but rather what they did in each position and how that’s relevant to the position they’re applying for.
Candidates whose education and experience don’t match the company’s needs should be removed from the applicant pool. Or, if a candidate seems promising in other ways, their education and experience gap might be a good area to ask for more detail on during the interview phase.
#3: Conduct a Test for Hard Skills
We often encourage recruiters to leverage technology to facilitate their recruitment process. So, if your position requires unique technical skills, you can test applicants on skill aptitude, cognitive ability, job knowledge, and more using employee assessment software.
This assessment software usually comes part-and-parcel with the ATS system from the resume screening stage. That means you can manage all of your applicants in one convenient platform. All you need to do is to give each candidate the same aptitude test. From there, you will have an objective measure of each applicant’s qualification for the position that you can use to compare candidates.
What construes a passing score will change from company to company, but it’s safe to say that candidates who performed poorly can be removed from the applicant pool.
#4: Interview for Soft Skills
A job is more than just completing the technical tasks at hand. A good employee should also be personable with good interpersonal skills and fit the company culture of the workplace.
To that end, you may want to consider talking to candidates through phone calls, virtual conferences, or face-to-face meetings to quickly have a sense of the candidate’s personality, work ethic, and conversational skills.
It’s also a good test to see how the applicant conducts themselves and if they can manage their time wisely to attend the interview.
Depending on the role, soft skills may be even more crucial than hard skills. For example, in customer-facing positions, an employee’s ability to answer questions quickly and precisely become paramount to the company’s reputation. If you’re not sure what sort of soft skills or personality traits you should be screening for, visit this site to learn how to evaluate your company’s culture and workplace needs.
#5: Verify References
Finally, if the candidate has made it all the way through the interview process, you should reach out to the references listed on the candidate’s application and speak to their former employers to verify that everything a candidate said is true.
Up until now, all information about a candidate has come from the candidate themselves, meaning that it may be subject to personal bias and self-promotion. Asking the candidate’s previous employer or coworker about their performance will give you another perspective on the candidate. It will help you verify the skills and traits they claim to have to be an accurate reflection of their true work performance.
Because of its laborious nature, reference checking is usually reserved for the last step of the application process when you only have a handful of candidates left.
Final Note
Finding the best candidate for an open position can be an arduous process. But by following these five steps to evaluate potential recruits, any company can quickly qualify which applicant is the best person for the job.
With the recruitment process done in a flash, you can immediately move on to onboarding, and in no time at all, the new recruit will be hard at work and boosting your company to new heights.