3 Futuristic Ways Companies Can Automate Candidate Screening

No, we don’t have chrome jetpacks or lunar vacations just yet, but we’re still living in the future—and that means there’s a whole bunch of bleeding-edge tech tools to help recruiters like you automate the most tedious part of your job: screening candidates.

Here are three ways companies are using new, futuristic tech solutions to automate the screening process.

1. Super smart algorithms that listen to candidates’ voices to decode personality and engagement

Your speech speaks volumes about you—and it’s not always what you say, but how you say it. You can probably imagine what a dull, disengaged candidate sounds like; you also probably know how a confident, passionate applicant sounds. Recruiters can easily evaluate candidates based on their voice, but that still means getting to the time-consuming phone screening stage.

Instead, more recruiters are relying on algorithms and artificial intelligence to filter out candidates based on their voice. Candidates call a number, answer a few pre-recorded questions, and the computers do the rest.

One speech analysis tool by Precire Technologies decodes half a million aspects of speech to predict personality, behavior, and communication skills. A similar tool from Jobalign analyzes candidates’ voices and rates how engaging, calming, and trustworthy it is.

This voice technology is primarily used to refine talent pools in industries where vocal engagement is particularly important—like in sales and call centers. At the end of the day, recruiters still make the final hiring decisions, but voice analysis helps filter it down to the most promising candidates, saving recruiters tons of time.

2. Chatbots that talk to interested candidates and filter out disqualified ones

Robots might steal your job one day, but for now they can still be quite helpful. Chatbots have made huge leaps and bounds in recent years—they’ve come a long way from SmarterChild, who you might have talked to on AOL Instant Messenger in 2000. Today, tons of companies use AI-enabled chatbots like Mya and Job Pal to do everything from sourcing, to screening, to scheduling interviews.

Unlike you, chatbots don’t need to sleep, they respond instantly to any applicant question, they can easily filter out candidates who don’t meet your minimal requirements, and they can be everywhere at once (online browser, text messaging, Facebook Messenger, mobile apps, etc.).

Just like voice analytics, chatbots aren’t meant to replace recruiters—they just get the busywork out of the way and keep candidates updated throughout the hiring process, handing applicants off to flesh-and-blood recruiters when appropriate:

Now, if chatbots saved a lot of time but made for a worse candidate experience, you’d have a real dilemma on your hands. Fortunately, candidates seem to love them! Mya claims to average a 9.8 out of 10 on candidate satisfaction surveys.

3. Automated reference checking, so you don’t need to make time for tedious calls

This blog recently featured a thorough takedown of checking references and why you shouldn’t bother. There are a few good reasons to be against reference checking—but one of the biggest might be the time sink. Calling every reference, getting them to actually answer their phone, chit-chatting, and then taking notes on the discussion eats up a lot of your time.

New solutions like SkillSurvey’s Pre-Hire 360 and Checkster take a different approach. Instead of trying to wrangle people on the phone, you just send candidates an email. They provide references, and the system automatically emails those references with a quick quiz or survey.

The beauty of it all is that the answers are all collected in a centralized place—you don’t need to make time for calls or transcribe notes, just review and compare references’ answers as you see fit.

Final thought

These automated screening methods are just a few examples of how the future of recruiting will be shaped. By getting tech to narrow down the candidate pool from the biggest funnel to a more manageable pack of promising talent, you can spend less time trudging though tedious tasks and more time doing what recruiters do best.

* image by CartoonStock

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