There’s a vacancy in your organization. You’ve posted a job ad online, told all your networks, and the applications have started rolling in. Next comes the daunting step of working through each cover letter and resumé to identify a short-list of people to interview.
For Canadian business owners with a million things on their plate, this step can be overwhelming. But with the right approach you can find great people out of that pile of resumés.
A few lemons might also slip through the net and end up at your interviews, but such is the nature of screening applicants. It’s not a precise process. Resumés are very easy to “dress-up”; the truth can easily be stretched, and a one- or two-page document doesn’t really tell you all you need to know to hire a person.
Also, if you’re hiring graduates or school leavers, there isn’t much to put on a resumé. Work experience may be limited to some holiday work in unrelated industries and referees will likely be sports coaches, family friends etc. So a resumé may have limited value.
For these reasons, you must be prepared for a decent interview process.
Remember: You are not looking to hire somebody straight from their job application. You are simply trying to identify the best potential applicants and quickly get rid of those who don't fit your needs.
Of course, all this assumes you have some applications to review! If nobody applied (or the wrong type of people applied), it might pay to review your whole recruitment approach and start again.
Applicant screening is the initial selection stage in the recruitment process where employers/managers review candidates’ job applications and resumés to evaluate if they meet the basic requirements for a role.
The key goals of applicant screening are to:
Applicant screening focuses on whether the qualifications, skills, and experience a candidate has will match the needs of the vacancy. Typically, you’re looking for things like:
Whether they’ve done similar work in the past.
Whether their employers have been similar to your organization.
If their qualifications will be useful for your vacancy.
If they’ve had unusual job changes, or unexplained gaps in their work history.
These factors can all help answer the question: “is this person likely to succeed in this role?”.
Reviewing resumés is all about finding applicants who - on paper - look to be the best match for the vacant position so you can move them to the next stage of your recruitment process. Here are qualities we recommend you look for, in order of priority:
Skills, experience, and qualifications/education relevant to the job.
Stable work history (no unexplained gaps).
Resumé targets the requirements of the role.
Concise, well formatted, and easy to follow.
Minimal spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.
Legal right to work in Canada (unless you can support or sponsor a visa).
Involving another manager or employee could be useful if you are dealing with a lot of applicants or if you have a number of people who might be a good fit for the job.
A short screening call can be useful if:
You have lots of suitable candidates and want to decide who’s best to invite to a longer interview.
You want to verify some details about their resumé, including that they are who they say they are.
You want to check that their language proficiency is sufficient for the needs of the job.
Ask the applicant questions that will gauge if they understand the position and have the skills and experience to perform the core tasks. Other basic questions around availability and eligibility will also help work out if the person is worth inviting to a more complete interview.
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) can make the task of screening applicants quicker and easier. Keyword filtering automatically scans and ranks job applications based on terms you determine (typically required and preferred keywords for the job), reducing the manual workload.
There is a risk of over-filtering good candidates, so be sure to review the keywords and results - especially if you end up with very few resumés in the shortlist.
Personality and cognitive ability (aptitude) tests can be great for some roles, especially if you need to measure problem-solving speed, learning agility, personality type, and cultural fit. They have been shown to be one of the most accurate predictors of success in a job, but need to be taken as one metric rather than a failsafe determinant.
Psychometric tests can also help remove any unconscious biases, but they should be properly administered and validated for diverse populations.
Depending on the role, skills or workplace tests can be an effective screening tool. These work particularly well for practical roles, so you can quickly gauge if the person has the skills to perform basic tasks e.g. making coffee in a cafe or cooking a dish in a kitchen. Be aware that there are some legal caveats around workplace trials, which we cover fully in this article.
Work samples are also effective for evaluating candidates who lack extensive work experience, as they highlight raw capability and transferable skills.
For technical or creative roles, reviewing a candidate’s portfolio of work can help evaluate whether they have the practical skills to perform the role (resumés typically aren’t enough to accurately predict this).
Most employers in Canada will conduct reference checks once they have decided on a preferred candidate. Reference checks are usually a short call to someone the candidate has worked with - e.g. a manager or senior colleague - who can verify key details about the candidate’s employment and speak to the quality of their work.
Be aware that reference checks aren’t the most accurate tool for predicting a person’s ability to perform in the role. Referees are typically chosen because they will have positive things to say, so ask questions that will help reveal the reality of the person’s performance and personality.
Asking for a cover letter can feel a bit old fashioned, and some employers choose not to ask for them at all. Whether you do (or don’t) want to receive them, you’ll likely get some candidates including them with their applications anyway.
A good cover letter should introduce the person, provide some detail about why they’re interested in your vacancy, and briefly explain why they think they’re a good fit for the role.
Done well, a cover letter gives you a chance to assess the quality of their writing (beyond the bullet-points that are likely to populate their resumé), provides a bit of colour to their application, and - ideally! - makes you more interested in them as a candidate.
With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, it’s easy for candidates to create dozens of “tailored” cover letters to apply to dozens of vacancies. Once you’ve read enough cover letters, however, you should be able to spot an AI-written letter a mile off. This might not be a deal-breaker for you (plenty of workplaces in Canada use AI in some shape or form) but it’s worth noting so you can decide whether it will affect your rating of candidates who use it.
Before you start your recruitment drive and sit down to look at the resumé, you should have a really clear picture of the person you’re looking for.
It sounds simple, but business owners are often not totally sure what they need for the role and end up discarding potentially good applicants or interviewing people who are not suitable.
Using the recruitment process to help define the job requirements is not an effective use of your time and it might cost you a quality person.
So take a step back and specify the current needs of the company and its future goals, then determine how the position will assist in delivering on these, and then define the skills, experience, and personal qualities of the sort of person who will excel in the role.
Doing the proper groundwork will make screening applicants easier, because you’ll know what you want before you even pick up the resumés. Candidates, too, will have a much better idea of whether they are suitable for the role, and the good ones will target their applications to the requirements of the job.
Define minimum vs. preferred qualifications and experience before posting the job ad.
Create a scorecard or checklist for consistent evaluation of resumés.
Assign clear ownership — who screens what, and by when.
Standardize screening calls with a scripted list of questions.
Set a screening timeframe and stick to it — speed can be important for securing top candidates.
Use a simple checklist to keep you focussed and start sorting through the pile. When you’re using a good checklist, 2 minutes per CV is plenty.
We recommend sorting the resumés into 3 categories: yes, no, and maybe. The “yes” resumés will have most of the skills, education, and/or experience you need, all articulated in a concise 2–3 page document that is easy to follow, with no spelling or grammatical errors.
The “no” resumés will have none of what you need (or not enough), possibly also badly formatted.
The “maybe” pile may not be essential, depending on the quality of applications, but they might be ones that have some relevant skills or experience, but not quite what you are looking for… difficult to make up your mind at first read.
If you don’t have enough “yes” resumés you might choose to look again at the “maybes”, but be very careful not to lower your standards too far. This could also be a symptom of not really knowing what you want. So it might be better to keep applications open for longer.
Remember: It is much better to take your time during the recruitment process to find the best applicant than to hire somebody who is not right. In the long run, the work you'll put into managing a person who doesn’t meet your needs is far greater than keeping a job open for a bit longer in order to find the right person. This can be harder to do than it sounds.
There are legal obligations you must consider during the screening and hiring process, notably around discrimination - it’s unlawful to treat someone differently or unfairly because of their race, sex, age, religion, gender identity or other protected grounds.
Also be careful with the privacy of people’s personal information. You can only collect personal information that’s necessary for a lawful purpose - in the case of pre-employment screening, to determine if the person is suitable for a role. You must also obtain explicit written consent from applicants to conduct reference, credit, or criminal checks.
Ideally, once you’ve screened all the job applications you want to end up with a shortlist of 3 (or 5 in some situations) suitable applicants to invite to the next step in your recruitment process. For larger employers, this might be a short phone interview, or some psychometric assessments. For smaller employers, this is likely to be a phone or in-person interview.
To be effective, interviews need to be well structured with insightful questions so you can objectively compare candidates’ responses. You will need to re-read the short-listed resumés in detail before you conduct interviews.
From there, you can select the best candidate, and complete pre-employment checks. If you’re happy with the checks, the final steps are making a job offer and completing employment documentation - e.g. employment agreement, tax and personal details, and other onboarding materials - if they accept.
Screening job applications can take time, and if you’re busy and struggling to do this on your own, consider engaging third-party help. There are a number options:
Online recruitment support - effective digital recruitment support tools (e.g. ATS) can provide cost-effective ways to help with the screening process and general applicant management. The pricing is often flexible and reasonable.
Recruitment consultancy - small business-owners will often eschew this path due to cost. But you’re engaging a professional, so you should expect some cost. Also the applicants are usually guaranteed for a period of time, e.g. 12 weeks, so if they don’t work out the consultant must replace them for free. Paying a consultant will save you time on screening and will enable you to leverage their database and recruitment expertise. As with all industries there are dodgy operators out there, but a good recruitment consultant can really help.
If you hit the job market with a very clear idea of what you want and do the upfront work to define the role requirements, the applicant screening process should be reasonably straightforward and you can start talking to the people behind the applications.
If you need recruitment assistance, MyHR has the expertise to ensure you attract and select the best talent. From creating precise position descriptions and job ads to targeted screening and interview guidance, you can be sure your next hire will perform. MyHR’s platform integrates with a range of applicant tracking software (ATS), saving you time and effort. Get in touch today.