Best Practices for Efficient Resume Screening

The average resume contains 800-1,200 words. If your team has a queue of 250 or more resumes, reading and reviewing so many words on resumes becomes time-consuming and tedious for your team. “Resume fatigue” is a real thing. At the same time, unconscious bias and evaluation errors cloud the hiring process and negatively impact your selection decisions, which can have legal and ethical ramifications for your company. 

But fear not! Digitized resume screening allows HR pros and hiring managers to quickly review top talent without reading hundreds of documents with hundreds of words. You can smooth your resume screening process, reduce time-to-hire, and improve the quality of your hires, all with automation. 

Below, learn the challenges of manually reviewing resumes, how technology can help, the best resume screening tools, and more. 

Why is resume screening so important?

In simplest terms, resume screening is quickly reviewing resumes to determine whether someone is qualified for one of your job roles. It involves scanning specific keywords, abilities, skills, and qualities, almost always with specialized software, so you don’t have to read hundreds or thousands of docs.

As you already know, talent acquisition (TA) teams spend way too many hours on administrative tasks, such as reviewing heaps of resumes. According to our 2024 Hiring Insights Report, 37% of recruiters across multiple industries want to improve their overall efficiency. On top of that, 20% of TA leaders say their teams struggle with unmanageable workloads, while 45% anticipate more challenges this year because of recruitment team turnover.

Digitizing resume screening won’t free up all the time your HR pros spend on interview management. However, it will dramatically reduce the hours they dedicate to resume reviewing and its many tasks, including identifying keywords, assessing skills, and shortlisting candidates. 

Think about the last time you advertised a job and the number of resumes you received. Now imagine you didn’t have to painstakingly review every one of these documents and almost instantaneously found the best talent to interview for that role. Wouldn’t life for your team have been so much easier? The best thing about screening resumes is it optimizes your time and resources, meaning HR experts can spend their time on far more valuable tasks.

Resume screening has other benefits. By automating the earliest stage of recruitment, you can ensure candidate quality and that the most qualified and talented applicants move on to the interview stage. You’ll also reduce some bad things that naturally happen when reviewing resumes, such as unconscious bias. We’ll explain why this is so important in the next section.

Challenges of reviewing resumes

Looking through resumes and selecting candidates for an interview used to be a simple process. Not anymore. HR teams need to deal with high volumes of applications while trying to identify niche skills. And they need to do all this while eliminating bias and adhering to ever-complicated hiring laws.

High volume of applications and longer-than-ever resumes

Gone are the days when employers received a handful of short, simple resumes and had the time and resources to review them. Over the last five years, the average resume has doubled in length from one page to two. Plus, with the increase in the American population, more candidates are in the job market in many industries than ever before. That means your HR team could receive hundreds or even thousands of resumes, many containing more information than necessary.

The sheer number of resumes you might receive can be daunting, especially if you have a small HR team. With limited resources, it’s easy to overlook candidates that would be perfect for a job, while time constraints may lead to inconsistent selection processes and costly hiring mistakes.

Say you get 500 resumes for a job position, but you only have a few people on your team to review them. A short hiring time means you may move faster than you should through the stack of resumes. Making a decision too quickly could mean you forward the wrong people to the interview stage.

Interview management tools, such as GoodTime Hire, trusted by big-name companies like HubSpot and Spotify, can help with high-volume hiring. By automating low-level tasks such as interview scheduling, you can focus on human decision-making and finding top talent that adds value to your company. Your HR team will thank you for making their lives so much easier!

Identifying key skills

It’s harder than ever to know whether candidates have the skills required for a job role.

Say you’re looking for someone with extensive customer service experience. Applicants might use different terminology for “customer service” that essentially mean the same thing, such as “customer support,” “customer success,” and “customer care.”

When time is of the essence, your brain might overlook these terms, meaning you’re passing on qualified candidates without realizing it. It can also be difficult to accurately pinpoint critical skills when resumes are so long.

Candidates might also use vague descriptions when writing about their skills and experience. For example, “strong communication skills” could mean anything, from simply talking on the phone to giving international TED talks. That makes it tricky to identify someone’s true abilities for a job role, and, again, you might pass on qualified candidates.

Resume-screening tools come to the rescue here, too. They automatically scan resumes for keywords—and all their variations—so you don’t have to, helping you find the most competent candidates for your company.

Unconscious bias

Now, here’s where things get serious. All HR professionals and hiring managers, even you, have deep-rooted unconscious biases. It’s just human nature. While you can’t help it, biases can seriously impact job candidates and overall recruitment processes and outcomes, especially when they lead to accidental discrimination.

“Unconscious bias in recruitment is not a new phenomenon,” says HR leader Mo Al-Tamimi. “It has been an undercurrent in the hiring landscape since the inception of organized employment. These biases, hidden beneath the surface of conscious thought, are shaped by our background, cultural environment, and personal experiences.”

There are various theories as to why humans have biases. Perhaps we organize “social worlds” by placing people into different categories. Our brains may also automatically make quick judgments because of our experiences and societal stereotypes. Whatever the reason, we should become aware of our biases so we don’t discriminate against people during the hiring process.

Resume-screening tools can help here, too. Of course, software might still discriminate because, ultimately, humanscreated it. However, well-designed computer algorithms frequently determine outcomes that are equally or more equitable than human decision-making processes. Ultimately, that may reduce biases.

You can reduce biases further post-screening by implementing advanced interview training. When HR teams receive proper training, they can interview candidates more fairly and make more equitable hiring decisions.

Complicated hiring laws

HR teams struggle to find eligible candidates when reviewing resumes and must comply with an ever-growing body of laws, rules, and regulations that often overlap each other. These include the:

• Americans With Disabilities Act
• Civil Rights Act (and subsequent laws)
• Age Discrimination in Employment Act
• State and local employment laws
• Industry-specific guidelines and regulations
• Internal fair employment practices

That’s a lot of stuff to comply with!

If you’re trying to fill a job position and receive resumes from a few hundred people, you’ll need to ensure you don’t discriminate against these candidates based on:

• Race, religion, gender, or other factors (as per the Civil Rights Act and other federal and state legislation)
• Age (Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
• Disability status (Americans With Disabilities Act)

So, how can you do this? Well, the best resume screening platforms remove all kinds of human biases and help you evaluate applicants based on objective criteria. As a result, you’ll improve compliance with equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation, industry regulations, and other rules. You can also avoid an anti-discrimination lawsuit, such as reputational damage and expensive penalties.

Best practices for resume screening

Right now, you have two options for reviewing resumes:

1. Continue manually screening them, which can be challenging with high volumes.
2. Invest in an automated tool that screens resumes for your team, helping you identify critical skills, remove biases, and comply with EEO laws and regulations.

Opting for the latter improves collaboration between team members by providing a centralized platform where users can access and review resumes in one place. However, it won’t magically solve all the challenges they face when reviewing these documents, and you’ll still need to fine-tune your recruitment workflows to guarantee a fair screening process.

Standardize screening

Structured resume screening is an assessment method that lets you measure job candidates’ competencies according to a standardized set of criteria. For example, you can evaluate all applicants based on their academic qualifications and work experience rather than their appearance, age, industry connections, or non-job-related activities. The best screening tools let you customize assessment criteria, allowing for fairer hiring outcomes.

Implement “blind” screening

Removing all personally identifiable information (PII) from resumes before you manually or digitally screen them further removes biases, ensuring a more equitable and impartial hiring process. For example, you can eliminate personal identifiers such as names, addresses, and photos so all candidates enter your screening process on an equal footing.

Use AI-based screening tools

Advanced screening tools use the latest AI algorithms and logic to automate resume reviewing and reduce human biases, ensuring fairness recruitment workflows that you can be proud of!

Although not a resume-screening tool, AI-powered GoodTime Hire lets you pre-screen candidates in later recruitment stages. You can set questions on experience, education, and abilities before the system determines whether someone is a good fit for a role. The platform also streamlines interview scheduling. 

“AI-based resume tools offer a compelling alternative, potentially revolutionizing the way HR representatives view applications,” says Aspen HR, which offers white glove HR, payroll, and benefits for the world’s leading alternative investment funds. “They offer a faster, more accurate, and significantly more efficient way to identify top talent and ensure your company doesn’t miss out on the perfect fit for your team.”

Best resume-screening tools

With so many resume screening platforms on the market, where do you start? Here are some of the most popular that you need to know about.

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit is a tool that automatically scans multiple resumes and transfers candidate information to your database, helping you find the best applicants quickly. You can also standardize resume details so data displays correctly in your ATS. 

Other features include saving resumes received through job board websites and tracking candidates at different stages of the hiring process. 

SmartAssistant

This AI-powered software reviews new and existing resumes at “lightning speed,” according to its creators. It then finds and scores talent based on custom criteria so you can forward the most successful candidates to the interview stage.

One of the best things about SmartAssistant is that it scrubs PII from resumes before assessing them. It also doesn’t factor your previous hiring decisions into its algorithm, further reducing human bias.

Freshteam

Freshteam manages various aspects of recruitment, including resume screening. It also integrates with skills testing applications, streamlines candidate reporting, and lets you create job ads directly from a simple dashboard.

Many popular ATSs now have resume-screening features. Workable, for example, enables anonymized screening to reduce bias when reviewing candidates’ documents.

How to choose the right tool

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the options available to you for automation and resume screening. So, how do you choose just the right software or tool for your business?

• Start by evaluating your specific requirements and why you want to digitize resume screening in the first place. 
• Consider investing in one of these technologies to improve candidate quality or free up time for your HR team. 
• Compare and contrast features that optimize resume reviewing, such as AI-powered candidate matching, customizable filters, data security, and integration with your applicant tracking system (ATS). 
• Read online reviews and customer testimonials to help you choose the best software.

Measure resume screening effectiveness

You’ve signed up for a resume screening tool and want to know whether it was worth the investment. Measuring different key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you do that. Here are some of the best ones to track:

• Cost per hire:Tells you how much money you spend hiring a new employee by considering all your recruitment costs, including marketing.
• Quality of hire: Reveals the overall value new hires bring to your company after onboarding by analyzing job performance, cultural fit, and other factors.
• Time to hire: Also known as time to fill, this KPI measures the time between when someone enters your recruitment funnel, typically just after they submit their resume, and when they accept a job offer.
• Offer acceptance rate: Measures the percentage of applicants who accept a job offer from your company.

Rather than calculating metrics like these manually, you can use an interview management tool to do it for you. GoodTime unlocks your hiring data by presenting it on dashboards, letting you access more insightful recruiting analytics.

Make resume screening less of a chore

Manually reading and reviewing resumes is hard work. Invest in a tool that:

• Handles high volumes of applications
• Identifies key skills
• Reduces unconscious bias
• Complies with EEO legislation, industry guidelines, and internal practices
• Lets you communicate with candidates via text recruiting software other technologies

[Graphic suggestion using the 4 bullet points above: “What to Look For in a Resume Screening Tool”]

Digitizing resume screening, which is far easier than you think, leads to more successful recruitment outcomes. It’s as simple as that.

However, you’ll still need to adopt best practices, such as standardizing your screening processes, to ensure fair hiring practices. We also recommend adopting AI recruitment tools, or preferably human-centric AI ones, when reviewing resumes so you can continue to automate and reduce biases.

Human-centric AI strives to augment human capabilities rather than replace them, which we passionately believe in. We know some HR professionals are worrying about the future of their jobs right now as AI takes over more industries. But no technology can substitute your talented team!

Ready to learn more about weaving human-centric AI into your workflows? See how GoodTime’s must-have-now software improves interview scheduling, reduces time to hire, enhances candidate quality, and frees up time for HR professionals in multiple industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services.

Additional resources to continue learning:

• Human-centric AI is the future of hiring
• The 7 Talent Acquisition Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2024
• Mastering Full Cycle Recruiting: A Comprehensive Guide