Employee screening, which encompasses virtually everything that happens between a job opportunity being made available and the final selection of a candidate, is the area of employment I’m most familiar with, given that I spent most of my years in the assessment field selling to employers looking to filter down lists of job candidates.
In a traditional hiring process, screening begins before a job opportunity is even made public through the careful construction of language that will be used to advertise a position, language designed to allow applicants to self-screen themselves regarding whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.
Once past this hurdle, those who do decide to apply for a job tend to encounter assessments almost immediately after hitting the “Apply for Position” button.
At the simplest level, this might involve a short screening questionnaire containing so-called “knock-out” questions delivered BEFORE an application is filled out, questions designed to ensure the applicant and everyone else involved with the hiring process are not wasting their time. These can include questions regarding legal matters (“Are you a US citizen?,” “If not, do you have a valid and up-to-date documentation for working in the US?”) or other showstoppers such as “Do you have a means of transportation to work every day?,” “Are you willing to relocate?”
Presuming you make it past this step, the job application (today delivered primarily online through one of thousands of job boards powered by an automated applicant tracking system or ATS) awaits. And for many jobs (particularly hourly positions), it’s not unusual for this application to be accompanied by a set of online assessments that might measure knowledge, skills, cognitive abilities or personality factors (such as attitude towards work or the ability to work in teams).
This information is used to winnow a candidate pool down to a manageable number of applicants who then face scrutiny by human beings who might make arrangements for more elaborate or complex assessment (depending on the nature of the position), interviews (often multiple), contacts to references, background checks (criminal, employment, and educational), and the increasingly popular peeing into a cup (i.e., drug screening).
In ancient times (i.e, anytime before the 1990s), all these steps were largely manual with applicants applying to jobs they saw in the newspaper mailing in a paper resume and cover letter which would usually be looked at by someone with a stake in the final hiring decision (such as the manager who began the hiring process, or a professional HR full timer or consultant intimate with the company doing the job search).
But just as automation has made massive scaling possible in online classes (creating a new entity – the MOOC – whose scale makes it fundamentally different than other forms of classroom or online learning), automating and scaling has massively transformed the process of finding and selecting people for positions.
Notably, those job boards/applicant tracking systems I just mentioned (coupled with the vast array of online means of communicating job openings which have replaced the newspaper classified ad section) means that hiring managers that might have once received dozens of envelopes in reply to a single job posting might now get hundreds or thousands of online applications, simply because automation makes applying for any job mostly a matter of cutting and pasting.
This is why those knock out questions and other assessments are often placed within the online application process, in order to automatically winnow thousands of applications to mere hundreds before a human being has to start looking over a candidate pool.
But most hiring managers are still just interested in looking over a manageable number of final candidates (ideally no more than a dozen or two). Which is why you’ll often see third parties take on the task of turning the couple of hundred resumes that make it through automated screening into a Top 10 or 20 pile that get passed onto those who will move the process onto the interview stage.
The trouble is, these third parties are not necessarily intimate (or even familiar) with all the nuances of the company they are helping, or the jobs they are screening for. Which means if a job requisition says “Masters Degree preferable,” they may simply throw out every resume that does not come from someone with an MA (including those whose vast experience might overwhelm the need for such a degree).
This is where the use of non-traditional credentials (such as completion certificates from MOOC classes) become particularly tricky within a traditional hiring process. For in theory, you might be able to convince the person making a final selection that enrolling in and completing lots of MOOCs demonstrates your ability to work hard and learn independently. But if someone in the Philippians has been hired to throw out every resume that doesn’t have an Ivy League college listed under Education, you are not likely to get the chance to make your case to someone who might understand the unique value of self-directed education.
This is an extreme (and possibly fanciful) worst case scenario. But the noise that needs to be overcome during the process outlined above coupled with the inherently conservative nature of employers vis-à-vis recognizing new or unique credentials makes it all the more important that those with non-standard backgrounds find alternative means of signaling their accomplishments to potential employers.
In fact, for the last several years I’ve counseled friends and family members (and now blog readers) looking for a job to put just as much (if not more) effort into networking with employers they’d like to work for who are not hiring (yet) as they do into filling out online applications for posted openings. For not only is it easy to fall through the cracks of a screening process like the one described in this piece, but in many cases a job search is just a formality companies must go through even when they already have a candidate for the position in mind (or even chosen).
Which means that if you are a remarkable person with an unusual background (such as an independent, non-traditional education), better to be the person with the inside track before a job is posted than one of the thousands of unknowns throwing the resume into the wind and hoping it lands on the right person’s desk.
“the inherently conservative nature of employers vis-à-vis recognizing new or unique credential”
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between recruiters, whether internal or external, and hiring managers (this is actually implicit in what you later say about networking). Recruiters certainly tend towards traditional qualifications and career paths but my experience with hiring managers is that they are far more interested in experience and fitness for task than in academic background.
The majority of vacancies, certainly in the UK job market, are never publicly advertised. Many are filled through word of mouth recommendations or through existing contacts. Ultimately, you have to be able to prove that you can be an asset to the employer but having contacts allows you the scope to make that case when you might otherwise be excluded.
Now that you’ve provided a look-see into the recruitment side of a job hunt, I’m better equipped to be answering those knock-out questions and facing interviewers. Thanks.