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Pre-selection is an essential part of every HR professional's life. I remember as a child seeing the HR department office in a huge, freshly privatized former national enterprise. I recall piles of papers with notes on other colored papers and an HR specialist who was copying forms and adding them to the piles. Then I was told that the piles were for individual candidates for the currently advertised positions and that the HR lady would call them or invite them to fill out the papers before coming for a personal interview. As a child, I naturally found it to be very entertaining work.

Why use pre-selection?

At the outset, it is necessary to mention that there are also reasons not to use pre-selection. This is primarily in situations that are more common in our labor market than before, where there are positions with a very low supply of qualified workers. For these positions, pre-selection could create an undesirable barrier.

The main reason for using pre-selection is the fact that in the vast majority of cases, a resume is not able to answer all questions relevant to the needs of our advertised position, or it is necessary to verify the information provided in the resume or elaborate on it in more detail and understand its relationship to the advertised position. This can of course be left until the personal interview, but that is not very efficient - after all, we don't want to go through the entire process of organizing an interview and find out within the first minute that the candidate is not suitable for the position. Pre-selection also allows comparing candidates who appear seemingly equal based on the provided resumes. In other words, pre-selection helps us verify and examine first impressions, experiences, knowledge, but also perhaps the personality of the candidate and their demeanor.

You certainly know this from your own HR practice - you invited a candidate, you open the door, and after one or two sentences you already know that the candidate is not at all suitable for the position. At that moment you realize that you underestimated the pre-selection phase, or you regret that you didn't do pre-selection at all. Paradoxically, the most common reason for omitting or underestimating pre-selection is the apparent lack of time. Based on my experience, however, it is primarily the fact that the HR professional doesn't know or doesn't have access to effective tools that would help them with pre-selection.

We can clearly realize the efficiency of pre-selection in situations where we managed to identify candidates who, based solely on their resume:

• Would not have been invited, but deserve an invitation
• Would have been invited, but don't deserve an invitation

Furthermore, pre-selection is also a very valuable source of materials for questions for the personal interview and a tool for comparing candidates with each other, if we already set appropriate criteria and their weights for pre-selection.

Forms of pre-selection

There are several forms of pre-selection, and each of them has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation or profession we are recruiting for. For the purposes of this article, I would divide them into two categories:

Traditional pre-selection methods:

• Printed questionnaire - a widely used method that allows standardizing questions for a large number of candidates and provides a prerequisite for fair comparison. Moreover, with the development of computer technology, automated processing is also possible, which eliminates the biggest problem with this type of pre-selection - the laboriousness of evaluation. It offers a whole range of added values, such as verification of spelling and grammar, diligence, attention to detail, etc.
• On-site test at the interview - essentially an alternative to the questionnaire that focuses directly on the candidate's knowledge. It is often combined with personal evaluation or presentation of results, which allows observing and evaluating other skills and abilities of the candidate. Especially for specialized or technical professions, it has great added value. It is necessary to watch out for the nervousness factor, which can distort results for some candidates.
• Phone - one of the most popular methods that brings interactive and immediate communication between the HR professional and the candidate. Unlike written forms, the phone allows verifying the quality of spoken expression, the ability to improvise, and also allows including test questions. It is an indispensable method for all positions where phone calling is their main content, but it can help estimate personality type for other positions as well, where, for example, we require a positive approach, good mood, etc.

Modern pre-selection methods:

• Online questionnaire - is a kind of modern form of the printed questionnaire. But not only that, unlike printed media, it also allows a certain form of interactivity, e.g., revealing and hiding questions based on previous answers or recording results directly into the candidate's card in the HR information system and automatic evaluation without the need for HR professional's work. In today's era of smartphones and tablets, it is also possible to answer anytime and anywhere, which significantly increases comfort not only for candidates but also for HR professionals and other people involved in the recruitment process - colleagues, managers, etc. The online form, unlike the written one, lacks the ability to evaluate handwriting and the visual aspect of written expression. On the other hand, it is incomparably more efficient than, for example, the phone - just imagine calling 30 candidates compared to sending one email to 30 candidates. Below I will introduce you to a tool that will enable you to create and send a questionnaire within five minutes, regardless of the number of recipients.
• Video interview - is an improved form of telephone questioning that also enables visual evaluation of the candidate. Thanks to technology, the video interview does not necessarily have to take place with both parties present at the same time - the candidate can respond to a recorded video question or a written question on a website or in an email sent from an online system according to their time availability. This allows the HR professional to "do" a larger number of pre-selections than they would be able to do in person or by phone. This form is one of the most progressive today because it comes closest to a personal interview and allows the HR professional to uncover a large amount of information about the candidate's personality. It is of course not a suitable method for all types of positions and it is necessary to consider especially the age profile of the candidate - this method will be welcomed especially by the younger generation. It is necessary to emphasize that this tool in no case replaces a personal interview. It truly serves only for the pre-selection phase, i.e., as a quality "sieve" for a large number of candidates or for candidates about whom you are not sure about inviting for a personal interview. Our recommendation is to use only one simple question from which you will get clear visual-communicative information.
• Social media screening - is the newest method that uses information freely available on candidates' profiles on social media. In addition to verifying professional information, contacts, and previous employment, social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram allow assessing the candidate's personality in terms of suitability for the employer's corporate culture and verifying information from the resume - in other words, does the candidate present themselves on social networks in accordance with the provided information or is there a visible discrepancy?

Traditional methods cannot be abandoned or rejected in any case because there are professions and types of interviews for which they are irreplaceable. The advantage of modern methods is not only the use of new technologies but also significantly better efficiency and the possibility of automatic integration with HR information systems.

Pre-selection efficiency

Once again I will return to the memory from the introduction of this article - progress from the times of the memory from the introduction of this article to today is not only about the development of computer technology that makes administrative work easier for us, but about reassessing our approach to individual parts of the hiring process, as well as to the whole. There are still many people, and this applies not only in HR, who even with computer technology continue to use approaches and procedures from the "paper era".

I also wrote that back then the HR specialist's work seemed very entertaining to me. I had a similar feeling of entertaining HR work, although obviously for opposite reasons, very recently when I had the opportunity to try the online employee recruitment system "Recruitis". From the first impressions of this system, it was clear to me that scenarios similar to the memory described above were somewhere in the subconscious of all those involved in its development as opposite extremes of what they wanted to achieve and offer to today's HR professionals. That is why I decided to present you with the pre-selection functionalities of this system in more detail.

Let's take an online questionnaire as an example. If I want to choose this form of pre-selection, I must first select a candidate or group of candidates, prepare questions for the questionnaire, create the questionnaire online, and send the selected candidates a link along with a cover letter.

So what would be the facilitation I would expect from a truly good system? First and foremost, effective question management, which should include the following:

• A predefined set of common questions (this helps both the less experienced in that they don't have to laboriously think up questions, and the more experienced as inspiration)
• The ability to edit existing questions or add custom questions (we want the system to "learn" along with us)
• The ability to easily assign a question to one or more selected candidates (if we define a questionnaire for 10 candidates, we don't want to do it ten times)
• Even if I have a selected group of candidates, I still have the option to add questions only for certain individuals (we don't want it to be necessary to create a different questionnaire just because one question for one candidate differs)
• The ability to use and define both open and closed questions (although closed ones should be used only very rarely because open ones allow us to gain more information than just an answer - e.g., way of thinking, analytical abilities, expression abilities, etc.)
• The ability to send the questionnaire in bulk (in other words, I don't have to send them individually to each of the candidates)

Despite all the advantages of an effective system, it is necessary to emphasize that the success of pre-selection is and will always be dependent primarily on our ability to select appropriate questions. Here I see primarily two main levels of consideration for effective questioning practices.

Candidates report by rejection method

This view offers a breakdown of recruitment activities by rejection method, i.e., shows how filtered candidates were rejected and in which phase. Rows are individual rejection methods and columns remain the values of individual states in the selected recruitment processes corresponding to all filter settings.

I can thus see what the frequencies of candidate rejection methods are in given states. The first column "Total" shows the sum for the entire row.

This tab also offers the option to switch the time filter to a mode where the rejection date is evaluated instead of the flow movement date, as is the case on other tabs.

Example of iframe output without applied CSS on your side: