If you want to get the very best for your organisation, then selecting the best candidate to fill a role is key. Selecting good candidates can be difficult because applicants may bend the truth and be dishonest when they apply for a role.  

Cifas the UK’s leading fraud prevention service, carried out research in 2023 among 2,000 adults and found that 10% of respondents knew someone that had lied on their CV. 

Without the correct level of pre-screening and pre-employment checks, there is a risk of making bad hiring decisions which can cost your organisation time, money and potential legal issues, depending on what happens when you make a bad hire.   

Manual CV Screening 

Once your advertisement on a Job Board has closed, you will need to screen the CV’s that you have received.  

Screening applications to understand how a candidates skills, knowledge, & experience match to the requirements of the Job is the first step in assessing a candidates suitability for a role.  

You can manually sift through CV’s, but reviewing lots of CVs can be time consuming and prone to errors. However, establishing a screening criteria before you start the task will make the process easier and minimise errors. The CV screening process should be based on the essential and desirable criteria that you have set out in the job description/person specification.  

The CV’s that are selected to progress to a pre-screening call should meet the most important essential criteria for the role. Choose three or four essential criteria and check the CV’s against these. For example, if a professional accountancy qualification is required, you would check the CV to see if the applicant has an AAT or ICMA qualification. This will enable you to shortlist applicants based on what is required for the role and will enable you to screen out candidates if they don’t meet the particular criteria you have set. 

Screening CV’s using Application Tracking Systems 

You may have an applicant tracking system (ATS) such as Hireful, which is the ATS we use at Meraki HR, through which all applicants are directed to submit their application. Applicant tracking systems can be used to make your recruitment process more efficient by mass mailing application acknowledgements or rejections for example, and the system also keeps “track” of where candidates are in your recruitment process.   

If you use your applicant tracking systems to screen out applicants, it is important to ensure you ask the right questions of applicants and that you have confidence in the screening questions and in the way the system draws in the responses and evaluates them. 

You should be aware when using an applicant tracking system that: 

• If an applicant fails to answer one of your questions the ‘score’ the system gives them will reflect this. A quick scan of the CV may reveal that they do meet the criteria but somehow missed the question. 
• Most systems can’t cope with qualitative answers, such as ones which ask for a description of experience or skill. 
• Some initial screening questions may be information gathering – e.g. highest level of education or equality monitoring information. You need to be careful these are not included in the system’s evaluation of the applicant as they are not relevant to an individual’s requirement to do the role and could be discriminatory. 

Meraki HR are experienced in working with applicant tracking systems and can support you with ensuring that you are asking the system the right questions and that the questions you are asking are relevant and not discriminatory. 

 Pre-Screening Interviews 

Once you have completed the CV screening process, we would recommend conducting a pre-screening interview via Teams ideally, with the applicants that you have selected. They enable the employer to get to know the candidate and whether they have the essential skills needed for the role, but also allow the candidates to ask useful questions about the role, the business and what is expected of them, should they be successful. 

How to conduct an effective Pre-Screening interview 

• Be sure to have read the candidate’s CV 
• Do a search of the candidate’s LinkedIn profile to get an understanding of their qualifications and skills base as sometimes this is more up to date than their CV 
• Pre-prepare with a list of competency based questions based on the essential requirements of the role, and any values or particular behaviours that are important in the role.  
• If you require the candidate to have experience in a particular area, you can ask them to outline this experience by asking for examples “Please tell me about a time when you have had to take minutes at a meeting”. 
• Prepare probing questions if you believe there may be inaccuracies or embellishments in a CV. 
• Recommend to candidates that they too draft some questions they want to ask in order to assess their understanding of the role or the business. 
• The pre-screening questions should then be scored, and those candidates with the highest scores, will be the select few you want to invite to a face to face interview.  

If you need help with attracting candidates to apply for your roles, designing your recruitment process, or just need help with your recruitment in general, then get in touch with us – we’re pretty good at this, even if we say so ourselves! But don’t just take our word for it, here’s what some of our clients have said! Book a call here. 

Helen Carter – Director at The Scott Foundation 

Initially I was uncertain about whether it was right to ‘outsource’ this recruitment. Previously I’ve done all the recruitment directly and managed all aspects, so this was quite a leap for me. I’m happy with how it has gone, and it was really good to work with you on this. 

I really liked the candidate pack you created to send to people who were being pre-screened by you, and this reflected the Trusts in a way that would really resonate with prospective candidates. This is a great idea and it was really well put together.  

The pre-screening done by you, was good to have you do and the notes you made were helpful and informative, so thank you for doing these.  

In particular I’m grateful as I just don’t think I’d have had the capacity to get this important recruitment work completed during the period it fell which was a really busy time, so thank you to you and the Meraki HR team.  

Ruth Power – Director of BD – FMB  

We needed some support with our recruitment process which hadn’t been reviewed for a long time. Meraki supported our HR Manager in updating and improving what we already had in place and suggested new ways of thinking about things from job ad, scoring, selection and induction/probation process. The whole experience was great and has given us tools to use going forward. We highly recommend Meraki!