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Pre-Screening Phase

Science found that the validity of using normal pre-screening is very low. If you screen people by their CV and sent-in-documents, your chance of being right is 18%. Let me repeat this: eighteen per cent!. This means that in 82 % of the cases, the choice was wrong and you either throw out the right candidates or invite the wrong ones.

Pre-Screening in small to medium companies mostly happens either by a secretary, personal assistant, the intern or sometimes by a HR manager. Studies found that HR managers mostly look

  • for formal aspects like tidiness of the CV,
  • completeness of the documents,
  • orthographical errors
  • and formal matches to the job application list you gave them
  • they screen work references,
  • reasons for changing the job
  • or grades in school and university.

But these decision measurements seem to be 82% wrong. If your code throws errors in 82% of the time, you want to re-do it. And if your A.I. algorithm has an error rate of 82% it is considered not really good. But for strange reasons many companies never question the decision making process for the pre-screening phase. Or how many times do you do a pre-screening review with your HR managers to discuss their performance and underlying decision making process?

We have university psychology departments who have been researching on this topic for now almost 100 years, but the science does not seem to be applied in the majority of the companies.

I am not writing about this, because it is a theoretical issue. Employees are the gold of each company. And everyone is talking about the “war of talents” and “how hard it is to find good employees”, but by ignoring the basics of good pre-screening, your employee in the HR department or the intern or the secretary might constantly eliminate the best fitting candidates and the future-employees without even knowing it.

But do not worry. At the end of the week, we will look at potential solutions for these problems. However, before we look at potential solutions, we will visint the next phase of the hiring process in the next section: the personal interview.

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