A well-shared job advert can bring in two hundred applications. Nobody reads two hundred CVs properly. So most systems let you ask a few questions up front and reject the people who give the wrong answer.
Used well, this gives you back a day. Used badly, it quietly throws away the person you were looking for, and you never find out.
Here is how to tell the difference.
Only screen on facts
The safe question has one correct answer that the candidate knows for certain and you can check later.
Good ones look like this:
- Do you have the right to work in this country?
- Do you hold a current driving licence?
- Are you able to work on site in Leeds three days a week?
- Do you have a valid forklift certificate?
Each is a plain fact. The candidate is not guessing at what you want.
Now compare:
- Are you a good communicator?
- How many years of leadership experience do you have?
- Are you comfortable in a fast-paced environment?
Everyone says yes to the first. The second sounds factual but is not, because two people with identical careers will answer it differently depending on how modest they are. The third means nothing.
The rule: if a strong candidate could reasonably answer in a way that gets them rejected, it is not a screening question. Ask it at interview instead.
Only reject on clear answers
Screening should only cut people on yes-or-no and pick-from-a-list answers.
Free text cannot be judged reliably, so it should never trigger an automatic rejection. Neither should a number the candidate typed in, because "5" and "five years" and "5+" all mean the same thing and only one of them matches.
There is one more rule that sounds small and is not: a blank answer must never reject anyone. Forms fail. People tab past a question. Phones do strange things. If someone has not answered, you do not know what their answer is, and rejecting them treats "did not say" as "said no". Send those to a human.
Keep it to about five
Every question you add loses you candidates who would have been fine.
Not because they fail. Because they leave. A form with three questions gets finished. A form with twelve gets abandoned partway, especially on a phone, and the people with the most options are the quickest to give up on it.
Five is a sensible ceiling. If you find yourself wanting fifteen, what you actually want is a phone screen.
Be careful what you ask
Some questions get you in trouble, and the trouble is not worth it.
Avoid anything that stands in for age, health, family, or background. Do not ask for date of birth or graduation year at screening. Do not ask about health or disability, other than whether someone needs adjustments to attend an interview. Do not ask about children or care arrangements. Ever.
Some of these are unlawful in many places. All of them are indefensible if someone asks why they were rejected. And you can usually get the same information properly. "Do you hold a current certificate?" is fine. "What year did you qualify?" is a proxy for age.
Tell people what happened
This is the part most systems handle badly and most agencies never notice.
If an automatic rule rejects someone, they should be told. Not with a lecture, and not immediately at midnight. Just a short, clear message that the application was not taken forward.
Many setups send nothing at all. The candidate is filtered out silently and waits three weeks for a reply that was never coming. That is where your reputation goes, one quiet applicant at a time, and none of them tell you why they stopped applying to your roles.
Check what your system does when a rule rejects someone. If the answer is "nothing", turn on a notification. A rejection people can see beats an efficient silence.
Check it is working
Screening rules go stale. A role gets copied, the questions come with it, and the copy screens for a certificate the new role does not need.
Two habits catch this:
Look at what got rejected. Once a month, read ten auto-rejected applications. If any of them look fine, a rule is wrong. This takes fifteen minutes and is the only reliable way to find a broken filter, because nobody complains about a rejection they never heard about.
Watch the drop-off. If far more people start your form than finish it, you are asking too much.
Check the questions when you clone a role. Copying a job copies its questions. Read them before it goes live.
The short version
- Ask facts, not opinions.
- Reject only on yes-or-no and pick-from-a-list answers.
- Never reject a blank answer.
- Five questions at most.
- Nothing about age, health, or family.
- Tell people when a rule turns them down.
- Read some rejections every month.
Screening should save you a day of reading. It should never be the reason you missed the person you were looking for, and the failure it causes is invisible unless you go looking for it. That is why it is worth checking.