What Goes into Quality Employee Screening?

Employee screening functions to ensure only the right candidates make it to interviews. This serves the dual purpose of reducing time and investment spent at later steps and reducing the risk of a wrong hire. Screening can be as simple as a background check or as complex as a multi-pronged behavior, competency, and personality assessments alongside those (mandatory) checks.

In either case, your employee screening will determine who moves into hiring processes. Having quality screening in place will save your organization time and money and will work to ensure you don’t accidentally turn away quality candidates. These steps will help you to set up a quality screening process so your organization can hire the people it needs to succeed.

Conduct and Background

It’s always important to run assessments determining the quality of conduct, previous behavior, previous performance, validity of degrees and qualifications, and so on. This process is standard in most organizations and you likely already have it in place.

Personality and Behavior

Using employee screening to test personality and behavior is a relatively new process, but it can help you to determine if a candidate actually meets your needs. Here, it’s important to have extensive competency frameworks and job profiling in place, so you can pinpoint what is desirable for a role, team, or for future change. Personality and behavior assessment should follow employee screening and results should be linked to individual roles and teams, even if you’re hiring for several comparable roles. This screening can involve:

• Competency testing
• Soft-skill testing
• EQ assessment
• Personality testing

In most cases, you want to choose one or two of the most relevant assessments to hand to a candidate so that they don’t invest too much time in a role. However, you do want enough information that you can make a quality decision, so the more important the role, the more time the candidate should be willing to invest upfront.

Culture-Fit

Culture-fit tells you if a candidate is likely to fit into an organization and team based on their personality, actual behavior, and how they get along with team members. Some culture-fit can be determined from personality and competency testing. Once a candidate has passed this, they should actually meet your teams.

Here, it’s valuable to host open days at your offices, so prospective candidates can come in, meet each other, and meet teams with no pressure. From there, you can bring final candidates in for single or two-day work assignments in-office to see how things work out.

This will tell you exactly how well everyone will get along, what the individual looks like in a casual as well as a work environment, and how they react to their prospective team-members in person.

Employee screening is your only chance to determine whether a candidate will perform. Today, some 93% of employers in the United States require background checks but fewer check for job-fit, culture-fit, and competency-fit. Doing so will improve the quality of employee screening, will help you to better match individuals to specific roles and teams.