CV Screening: best practices and practical tips
You’re hiring for a new role and you’re braced and ready to receive that influx of CVs heading your way. But what’s the best way to filter through them? How do you find the perfect candidate when every application looks so similar?
The best way to get started on your journey to finding your ideal candidate is with CV screening. Read on to discover what CV screening is, why you need a standardised process for it, and how you can streamline the experience for everyone involved.
What is CV screening?
CV screening is the process of reviewing potential candidates’ CVs to find those that meet your requirements. Those that do can move on to the next stage of your recruitment process, and those that aren’t quite right don’t progress forward.
Sometimes CV screening is a manual process, where the recruiter or HR team carefully considers each CV before deciding whether to move forward with that applicant or not. Other times, it’s a fully automated process where software is used to scan for key words and phrases.
Many companies opt for a mix of the two — using artificial intelligence and automation to save time and remove bias, with manual screening for culture fit or to check any valuable candidates haven’t been skipped over.
The benefits of a CV screening process
Hiring for a new role without a CV screening process or workflow can be a real challenge. You’re faced with a pile of CVs and the daunting task of figuring out who makes the cut and who doesn’t, without any real direction or guidance.
Introducing a CV screening process allows you to:
- Quickly sort through a high volume of job applications and dig through your talent pool if needed
- Reduce hiring bias and increase diversity within your organisation
- Standardise the hiring process across the company
- Build a shortlist of candidates to bring to the next stage of the journey
- Lower the cost of hiring through a quicker, simpler, fully or semi-automated process
- Reduce your time to hire
- Make smarter hiring decisions based on individuals’ skills and experience
Having a standard way to approach CV screening is a must-have for any company that is hiring for an in-demand role or recruits to new positions regularly. It saves time, money, and contributes to a better recruitment experience for everyone involved.
6 tips on how to approach the CV screening process
You know that the CV screening process is essential, but what’s the best way to do it? Here’s how to screen candidates confidently, effectively, and fairly.
1. Standardise your CV screening criteria
Candidates should get a similar experience, no matter which role they’re applying for or who the hiring manager is. Create a standard CV screening workflow that’s clear and easy to follow, along with guidance on how to apply it.
Advise hiring managers on how to screen CVs manually, or how to use your chosen software to run this step automatically. Give guidance on how to filter CVs, group candidates, and build a shortlist for the next stage of the process.
2. Consider DE&I at every stage
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) should always be on your mind as a human resources professional — and it’s especially important during the recruitment journey. Review your current process and look for ways to make it more inclusive.
Update your job descriptions to remove any unintended bias and introduce inclusive language. Introduce a way for potential candidates to share any individual requirements, or request reasonable adjustments during the process. Use blind hiring and weighted scorecard features within software like Charlie Recruit to remove unconscious bias, score candidates fairly, and find the best-fit candidate.
Another valuable way you can check that you’re being as inclusive as possible is to regularly audit the way you hire — from the way you write job ads to how you handle the onboarding process. At Charlie, we engage with an agency to do this every year as part of our ongoing commitment to DE&I.
3. Write a better job description and advert
You’ll always get some candidates that apply for anything they see on LinkedIn or job boards, but writing a clear job description and job ad increases your chances of finding the right applicants and saves you time later on.
Carefully review the way you prepare job ads and descriptions and consider how you can make them clearer and more concise. Be direct about the job requirements, hours of work, location of work, any educational background or years of experience requirements, and what you’re looking for in an ideal candidate. Say whether you’d like to see a cover letter, or whether just a CV is fine. Our job description template is a great place to start.
4. Identify key skills
As you’re writing the job description, think about any relevant skills or qualifications that are essential or nice to have. This allows you to keep these in mind while manually reviewing CVs, or you can add them to your CV screening software to get a more tailored shortlist.
Identifying the skills and experience that makes someone a qualified candidate helps you save time when reviewing CVs. With the right screening tool, you can quickly evaluate whether a candidate has mentioned experience in a specific software tool, language, or technical area — surfacing best-fit candidates instantly.
5. Use an applicant tracking system
Managing the hiring process is almost impossible these days without a good applicant tracking system (ATS). This recruitment software gives you a central place to store candidate data, score applicants, screen CVs, schedule interviews, and communicate with candidates.
With Charlie Recruit, you get access to all these features and more — including blind hiring, candidate match scoring, built-in eSignatures, and even a custom careers site. It’s designed not just to make the CV screening process easier, but to also enhance the recruitment experience for you and your candidates.
6. Group candidates into categories
A traditional approach to CV screening might involve sorting CVs into a “yes” and “no” pile. While this still works for an initial pass-through, you’ll often want to categorise your applicants even further to find the perfect candidate for now — and also the best candidates for the future.
Create a shortlist for your current role, but also consider grouping candidates together that might be a good fit for a future hiring round, a more junior or senior position, or a role within another department. You might also identify potential interns, contractors, or freelancers. Use software like Charlie Recruit to store and categorise your candidate data, for easier access in future hiring rounds.
6 things to look for when screening CVs
Whether you’ve been a recruiter for years or you’re embracing your first role within human resources, it’s always good to refresh your knowledge on best practice. As you sort through potential candidates’ CVs looking for your perfect new hire, here’s what to keep in mind.
1. Relevant work experience
An easy way to filter candidates is to review their work experience and history. This will give you a good overview of the amount of time the applicant has been working within this role or industry, which roles they’ve held before, and what level of experience they have.
If you’re hiring for a senior role, the ideal candidate should have real world experience (not just a degree or certification). For more junior roles, you might be looking to see whether they’ve been an intern, studied a relevant course, or worked in another industry before.
2. Specific skills or software knowledge
When you’re hiring for a technical role, specific certifications or software experience is a must-have. Filtering for these skills within your CV screening process allows you to surface suitable candidates that can jump straight in without requiring weeks or months of training on new software.
Even if you’re hiring for a non-technical role, it’s still important to identify key soft skills that your candidates should have. Look out for words and phrases that align with your core values and culture, like teamwork, good communication, creativity, problem solving, or anything that’s a good match for the way you work.
3. Standout achievements
If you’re lucky, lots of candidates will pass a few basic checks and have the right type or amount of experience that you’re looking for. At this stage, it’s helpful to manually review CVs to look for any standout achievements.
Review CVs for language that mentions growth, percentage increases in sales, award wins, project successes, and any other key metrics that are valuable to you. These achievements might be strictly role-based, or be related to professional development — like learning a new software language or building their own startup.
4. Employment patterns
In the past it wasn’t uncommon for people to stay with the same organisation for decades. Now, it’s much more usual for candidates to move between roles every few years or have a varied work history. As you review CVs, look over the candidate’s employment history for any interesting details.
Every hiring manager is different, and for one a gap in someone’s work history is a red flag while for another it’s a complete non-issue. Often, people experience breaks in employment while they’re experiencing ill health or caring for others — which can impact some groups more than others — or for a period of self-discovery or travel. With diversity and inclusion in mind, a non-standard employment history pattern shouldn’t be seen as a reason to disqualify a good candidate.
5. Keyword stuffing
With a rise in companies using automated systems to screen CVs, some candidates have taken an approach to stuff their CVs with as many keywords as possible. While it’s a good idea to mention relevant skills and experience, be wary of candidates that fill their CV with corporate buzzwords.
If you notice that a CV contains lots of irrelevant phrases or feels unnatural to read, the applicant may have used keyword stuffing or artificial intelligence to try and get their CV through the automated process. This should prompt you to examine their work experience and skills more closely, to see if they accurately match what you’re looking for or not.
6. Layout and presentation
Many CVs come in a standard format these days, to make it easier for them to be “read” by CV screening tools. Standard CVs tend to be 1-2 pages long and clearly lay out experience, history, skills, and attributes. A stack of very similar looking CVs may be unexciting to read through, but it helps make the process easier and more standardised.
This doesn’t mean you should automatically discount a non-standard CV, though. The sender may not know the “correct” format, be more used to another culture’s resume standards, or this could be their first step into the world of work. For some roles, an unusual layout can be a bonus too — for example if you have a quirky company culture and you’re hiring for a graphic design role.
An easy to read, well formatted CV aids the screening process — but don’t be immediately put off if you receive a CV that isn’t quite what you expected. Review their application to understand why, and manually filter it into the right selection pool.
Streamline your CV screening and recruitment process with Charlie Recruit
Manually reviewing CVs is time consuming and it’s easy to miss a great candidate by mistake. With Charlie Recruit, you can simplify, streamline, and improve the process — and find your way to the best-fit candidate even faster. That’s specifically useful if you’re a small business looking to hire and grow. We’ve built our features just right for small businesses who are looking for their first ATS.
Book a demo of Charlie Recruit now to see how it can help you enhance your recruitment process by making it easier, fairer, more efficient, and more effective.
