Creating a pre-screening questionnaire
A pre-screening questionnaire is a useful and powerful tool to allow you to screen your candidates more efficiently. They can assist your teams in sifting out candidates that you would not want to consider shortlisting, for example someone who doesn’t have the right to work in the country where the job is based, or hold a driving license if you are recruiting for a driving role.
It will ask the applicant a series of questions at the same point of applying for the role. You are able to customise and choose the questions that you would like to ask the applicant and these can be changed for each role that you post.
Once completed, you will be able to easily see how the candidate scored, whether they passed/failed key questions and the ability to filter candidates based on the answers that they chose when completing the questionnaire.
Apply multiple pre-screening questionnaires to your job advert!
You can now apply multiple pre-screening questionnaires to a role, which enables you to add a standard company one, ie which covers ‘right to work’, diversity and more, then more specific role-related questions around the skillset needed for the position. Both questionnaires can be a mix of killer, competency-based, radio button,/drop-down list and open text boxes. How you use them is down to you.
Let’s take a look at the settings that you can use within the aptly named Questionnaire Builder.
The top two sections are fairly self-explanatory, Questionnaire Name allows you to name your questionnaire and Questionnaire Description allows you to enter a short description of the questionnaire that you are building. Questionnaire Group is also fairly clear, you need to choose the right type of questionnaire from the group. In this case, selecting “Pre-screening”.
One of the more powerful features of the pre-screening questionnaire comes in the other settings available to you.
Applicant score threshold gives you the ability to set a score threshold based on the scoring that you have implemented within your pre-screening questionnaire. This, coupled with selecting either the Auto reject below threshold and/or Auto shortlist above threshold means that you can automatically reject any candidates who score below your threshold score, and/or shortlist candidates who score at least the threshold score as soon as they have completed their pre-screening questionnaire, thus saving your recruiters considerable periods of time sifting through all applications.
Auto reject failed killer questions also means that you can automatically rejected any candidate who answers a designated questions (or questions) incorrectly, regardless of their overall questionnaire score. A common example of this is from asking the applicants the question of whether or not they are legally entitled to work in the country where the role is based.
In order to build the questions in which you would like to add into the questionnaire, you just need to click on “Add Question” found in the bottom right hand corner of the screen as pictured.
From here, you will then be able to select one of your pre-built questions to enter into your questionnaire, as shown below. You can do this as many times as you require until you have the desired number of questions. Should you feel that you have too many questions within one page, you can enter a page break, to move all questions below the line onto a new page by using the “Insert Page Break” button.
Once you are satisfied that you have created all of your questions, you can simply click on the “Finish” button in the bottom left hand corner. Don’t worry though, you can always come back to edit your questionnaire by selecting the edit icon in the questionnaire list page.
