Survey Screening for Web Applicants

Companies these days receive hundreds, if not thousands of applicants for open positions. It doesn't matter if you have your own jobs portal or you simply advertise on the web – there are millions of people looking for jobs, and you are likely to get more applicants than you can handle for each open position. From a recruitment standpoint this can be overwhelming.

Some jobs posted on craigslist, for example, receive as many as 1000 applicants or more within just a few days, depending on the location. For hiring managers that hope to find the best available candidate, searching through every one of those resumes can be a serious struggle.

Here we see another potential use of surveys – providing an early screening for hiring managers. Surveys can be programmed to ask questions about aspects of a job that are important for the role, knowledge, etc. You can also look at the time it takes to complete the survey, read qualitative answers, and so on.

At the end of the survey, pre-programmed analysis can tell you which resumes/applicants are worth following up with, and which are probably better left ignored for the open position. Each survey can be created by those that know the job roles, and questions can be asked to gauge things like knowledge, intelligence, problem solving and more. These surveys can even be used as makeshift job interviews to give hiring managers something to look at before they review them.

Streamlining applicants in this manner can be highly beneficial, because it drastically cuts down on the number of surveys and resumes that the hiring manager has to review, as well as the amount of time necessary to find a good candidate. In addition, many of the problems that researchers have creating a survey (such as creating a short survey to reduce dropout rate or worrying about inauthentic answers) are rendered largely irrelevant. Anyone that drops out of applying because there were too many questions was likely not an employee you want hired at your company anyway, and those that rush their answers will be more likely to supply a response that meets the exclusion criteria. Overall, these surveys have a great deal of potential to make recruitment a much easier process, and by streamlining it you have the potential to drastically cut costs and find a better candidate than with the current recruiting methods.