Pre-Qualify Applicants with a Pre-Interview Questionnaire

When you post a job online, you’re hoping to get noticed by that one person – the one who meets the criteria and will be the next rock star at your company. The one who’s a great fit in terms of both skills and culture.

The problem is that to get noticed by that one, you also get noticed by hundreds (or thousands) more. Resumes and applications come flooding in, and many of them aren’t appropriately qualified.

What can you do to thin out your applicants and focus only on the truly qualified? A pre-interview questionnaire could be just what you need.

What is a Pre-Interview Questionnaire?

Sometimes you need to screen candidates quickly and efficiently, but you don’t have the time, energy, or staff power to devote to doing it manually. Hiringcue’s Pre-Interview Questionnaire can give you an automated way to find the best of the best.

Let’s say that you get hundreds of resumes for your recent account manager posting. Your automated screening gives you 50 that look good. Instead of doing 50 interviews, which would take at least 38 hours, you can use a pre-interview questionnaire to narrow them down further.

You can ask questions about the required skills and experience, and quickly weed out the ones that don’t fit the bill. You can also use the questionnaire to ask questions about mindset, how they’d respond to a situation, and more.

In this way, you can quickly scan the form and find out who you’re interested in interviewing and who you’re not. It saves you an enormous amount of time.

What Does the Questionnaire Include?

When you choose to use an automated pre-screening questionnaire from Hiringcue.com, you have the option to choose from hundreds of existing questions or to create your own.

The form can be as wide-ranging as you like. Some companies do a phone interview before setting up an in-person meeting, but the questionnaire can take the place of the phone call, saving you both time and money.

You can ask them to answer questions about their experience, career goals, preferences, and motivations. You can even ask about their preferred management styles and find out why they’ve decided to apply with your company.

This can help you assess if a candidate truly knows their stuff and if they’d be an excellent cultural fit with your organization. Best of all, it doesn’t require nearly as much time, since you simply have to review responses as they come in.

You’ll want to be careful to keep the questions limited so that desirable candidates are still willing to fill it out. You also want to ensure you have the time and energy to review the replies, so try to keep the form short enough that a candidate can complete it in 15-20 minutes.

What’s Next After the Pre-Screening Questionnaire?

Once you’ve received the replies from your top candidates, you can review them and quickly decide who is the best fit for an in-person interview. In this way, the form takes the place of a first interview or phone interview.

Those who you invite to come in will be the best qualified and the best fit with your company. You can treat their visit as an advanced interview and focus on making a hiring choice since you’ve already separated the good from the bad.

Pre-qualifying applicants before they come in is a great way to find the very best candidates without spending dozens of hours interviewing. You can scan the pre-interview questionnaire to quickly determine who to focus on and who you don’t need to meet.

Automate Hiring and Save Time With Hiringcue.com

You want to make sure you make the best hiring decisions, but the process can be incredibly time-consuming. Is there any way to save time without skimping on the evaluation process?

The good news is that there is! With the tools provided by Hiringcue.com, you can check references in 60 seconds instead of spending hours playing phone tag.

You can also streamline interviews with pre-screening questions as we’ve discussed. Soon we’ll be introducing an interview debrief to make it easier to consolidate notes from interviewers so that hiring managers can make a strong decision.

If you struggle to find enough great candidates, mainly passive candidates with the most sought after skills — you’re not alone. Merely by reference checking your current candidates, you can begin to build a robust pipeline of passive candidates with Hiringcue’s passive candidate database.

If you’re ready to maintain a rigorous hiring process and save time and money, Sign-up today for a free trial.

Gary Kirksey
CEO
Hiringcue.com

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