Screening Candidates AND Capturing the Soft Skills
How do you keep the process human but maintain the ability to screen many multiples of candidates fairly and seamlessly ?
You want to ensure that you are picking up on all of those soft skills, emotional intelligence and wisdom of a candidate. …the very traits that complete the salesperson or indeed any role that has a requirement to deal with another human, face to face .
Imagine missing out on a perfectly good sales hire because he/she is not savvy with constructing a resume in a certain filtering optimised way ?…I say “constructing” as that’s what needs to be done. The unindoctrinated will have neglected to optimise their document as it enters the machine screening process, only to be rejected at the other end having failed to hit the preordained criteria for making it to the next phase in the onboarding. The main culprit here being the filtering parameters set by HR and the nuances of the relatively simple algorithms of an ATS.
To personalise it; “Mr ATS” will be reviewing the document. It will need to have been formatted correctly, written with the “right” font and have a number of phrases present (the same phrases that were described in the job spec). Industry terms , technical jargon, the mention of a CRM, a 3rd level course; lots of formulaic text that HR deemed as road blockers if they are missing or just not picked up for whatever reason. Mr ATS prefers bullet point and indentation to tables . He rejects colloquialisms. You need to make sure it looks like your LinkedIn Profile as he will be comparing the content of one against the other there too. This is a lexical search which means it looks for literal matches of words or variants of them, without understanding the overall meaning .
In true Philistine fashion Mr ATS does not take into account the soft skills; the empathiser, the networker, listener, storyteller, challenger, collaborator or questioner . It deals in hard facts and scripted evidence. It’s doesn’t sense Emotional Intelligence or the wisdom to walk away from a deal when you know the client has no intention of buying from you.
If that wasn’t enough to shake off a few more great candidates …
To seal the screening deal, Mr ATS deploys his “bouncer”; to catch anyone trying to sneak in the back door with their soft skills."Mr AI" The semantic search, seeks to improve overall screening accuracy by understanding the intent or words or phrases. The idea is that the AI technology is powerful enough to understand language in context and is deployed to pick up those particular traits . But how this is going to happen as candidates attempt to keep their resume and all of their details to 1 page? ….Well that anyone’s business.
So that’s it then , if your screening processes are like this you get what you set the parameters for. You have almost certainly ruled out some gems .While you may be cutting out the unlucky candidate who meets the tired eyes HR on the Tuesday morning after a long weekend, the candidate whose resume has to play phrase bingo with AI and mirroring the words on the job spec suffers the same fate.
Of course, It doesn’t have to be like this!
Step forward asynchronous interviewing technology
- Deal with large volumes of candidates
- You can view and review the reactions of the candidate in an interview environment
- Every candidate gets asked the same questions (that you choose) in the same way and every candidate gets the same amount of time to answer
- You can make decisions in your own time
- Benchmarking is on a level playing field
- Its can be cost effective , flexible and simple to deploy it
The solution involves screening people by allowing through an asynchronous video interviewing platform which allows invited candidates to answer questions on camera in the comfort of their own homes . The result is sent to you. You can share the result with stakeholders .
You can allow candidates to record and re-record their first effort. You can time limit their attempt. You could even send the questions in advance …It's your choice !
With the current COVID19 climate it meets all the social distancing requirements.
Step forward Competitive Wedge !
Trial here https://competitivewedge.com/request-demo
If you would like to discuss this offering please contact me
?Build Trust Networks?Goal Achievement Coach ?Speaker ?Property Developer ?IT Project Management ? Web Update Tools
4 年Wow, no wonder I didn't get the last jobs I applied for. Thankfully, as that was a turning point in my life to something bigger and better ??
CMO | Strategy | Marketing | Customer Experience | Digital Transformation | Sales | IoT | Connected Services | Fractional Services
4 年Hey Brian, great article mate. You know me, you know I am utterly averse to today's recruitment process. Some of the best sales people and marketers are awesome at their jobs but terrible at selling or marketing themselves. And they all, mostly anyway, get looked over. It's utterly frustrating. Having said that, and in response to your article, constructing a CV is a wonderful description of the act because it's factually correct. But let's also consider that sales people, and others constructing a CV, are not deprived of MASSIVE amounts of tools and tips on the Internet on what to do, what not to do, or deprived of access to sites like Jobscan to compare a CV/cover letter to the job description and get a gap analysis on keywords. So where I absolutely agree with you that being "penalised" for not passing a highly impersonal and mostly wrongly programmed ATS is not fair! But we still need to assign credit, and blame, where it is due. Professionals ought to know better. Young graduates can maybe be excused, but not 20 year veterans, in my opinion. Continued below
Albury Business Connect | close-line.com | Management | $150M | Coaching | BD | Tech Investor
4 年Nice option here Brian Mc Glennon - It's getting back to a more "personal" connection that I very much like here. Mr ATS (made my day!)
Talent Partner, Search, Source and Onboard
4 年Floris Blok Avon Collis MBA (Marketing) John B. Lonergan
Talent Partner, Search, Source and Onboard
4 年Please feel free to provide feedback and start discussion !