The best way to surface top talent is to review every applicant in a timely manner. While phone screens are essential for determining which candidates are fit for a hiring manager interview—that first step of determining which candidates meet your base qualifications requires more time than most recruiting teams have.
Let’s say you’re hiring for 20 roles. Given that the average corporate role attracts 250 applicants, that’s 5,000 applications. Whether you take a luxurious five minutes to review a resume like ERE reports or just six seconds, you still have to open their application in your ATS, scan their resume and sometimes cover letter, and check whether they meet basic qualifications like work eligibility and relevant experience. And that’s not all! Finally, you have to send an email to candidates, letting them know they don’t fit the bill or inviting them to schedule a phone screen or first-round interview.
If you’re extremely efficient, you might be able to go through this checklist in 5 minutes per applicant. Best case scenario: You’re looking at roughly 416 hours of applicant review alone. That’s 17 days straight of reading resumes, checking requirements, and sending out emails.
Most recruiting teams don’t—and won’t—spend that kind of time reviewing applicants.
The result: Thousands of applicants never hear back, creating a terrible candidate experience that can lead to negative impacts on your employer brand as well as your bottom line. and a flurry of bad Glassdoor reviews. Plus, top talent gets left on the table—or snatched up by a competitor before you have time to review their applications.
That’s why WayUp created its digital screening solution, an automated applicant review tool. Our WayUp technology reviews each applicant for essential qualifications through knockout questions, and replies to candidates with either a polite rejection or a “congratulations” email with clear next steps, like an invitation to schedule a phone screen.
A digital screen is an automated applicant review tool used to determine whether an applicant meets the basic credentials required of a candidate who merits more serious consideration, like a first-round interview or phone screen.
The digital screen works by asking candidates knockout questions during the application process to collect essential info not usually found in the contents of a resume, and therefore invisible to most resume scanning software. Through our data and analytics, we’ve helped our employers come up with more meaningful criteria for these knockout questions and eliminate ones that are not useful or biased.
Here’s an example of common knockout questions—created by WayUp, and used by employers to match their unique criteria:
Once candidates apply through WayUp, their applications are automatically reviewed by the digital screening tool, and they’ll receive a reply within 24 hours with a polite rejection or clear next steps.
Digital screens have three main advantages:
A faster, positive candidate experience isn’t just important for your brand—it helps surface top talent quicker and keeps them engaged throughout your hiring process. After all, ERE reports that top candidates only remain on the market for an average of 10 days.
The alternative—manually reviewing every application—will cost your team valuable time and invite the possibility of bias or unequal review. This also leaves far less bandwidth for important tasks: like spending time with qualified, interested applicants and coordinating with hiring managers and non-HR business partners.
Digital screens also facilitate the distribution of employer branding content. Want to send an article or custom video to engage talent? Include it in your automated follow-up email. You can even help prep candidates for their phone screen or interview by providing them with valuable information about the role and your company.
Digital screening is the automated applicant review tool required for teams looking to hire top talent, fast. It can help reduce your time-to-hire, surface top talent, and improve your candidate experience, all of which can increase your recruiting return-on-investment (ROI).
There are, of course, some things that the WayUp digital screening process can’t do.
It’s not a replacement for a phone screen. Actual conversations are still needed to verify their experience, give context to their skills, and confirm key details of their application.
It can’t serve as a test of hard skills. While WayUp’s digital screen integrates smoothly with hard skills assessments like Pymetrics and HackerRank, it can’t replace these tools, which can be important for tech roles.
It doesn’t involve a human element—desired by 87 percent of Gen Z candidates—into your process. By and large, Gen Z and young Millennial candidates prefer to hear from a human rather than an automated response or, worse, no response at all. That’s why it’s important to establish next steps in your follow up that include an introduction to a person, whether that’s a face-to-face interview or a phone screen.
The key to an effective recruiting strategy is finding just the right balance of high-tech and high-touch. To save you hundreds of hours, preserve the candidate experience, and keep top talent moving through your pipeline efficiently, you might want to consider an additional service, like the WayUp phone screen.
In conclusion, WayUp digital screens are an automated applicant review tool that can improve your candidate experience, surface top candidates before they’re gone, and save your team hundreds of hours.
If you have any questions about WayUp’s flexible screening offerings, please reach out to engage@wayup.com to learn more or fill out the form below.
