Resume screening
Also called CV screening
Reviewing submitted resumes to decide which candidates continue in a process, usually against criteria such as keywords, years of experience, education or employer history.
Last reviewed
In practice
Studies of recruiter attention consistently find that a first-pass review takes seconds per document. Whatever that process is measuring, it is not a careful assessment of capability.
It has also become substantially less informative. A polished, role-specific, entirely unverifiable resume is now free to generate at scale, so the correlation between application quality and candidate quality has weakened considerably in the sectors where volume is highest.
The usual defence is necessity: with four hundred applications, something has to reduce the number. That is a real constraint, and it is an argument for a different reduction method rather than for this one.
Related
Applicant tracking system
Software that stores and manages job applications through the stages of a hiring process, from application to offer.
Skills-based hiring
Selecting candidates on demonstrated ability to do the work, rather than on proxies for it such as degrees, job titles or previous employers.
Blind hiring
Removing identifying information such as name, photograph, age and school from an application so that it is evaluated without those signals.
Read further
Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
Does an ATS really reject your résumé? What actually happens
The "75% of résumés are rejected by robots" claim has no verifiable source. What an ATS actually does, where filtering really happens, and what to do about it.
ReadDropping the degree requirement: what has to replace it
Removing a degree requirement without replacing the signal makes hiring more subjective, not less. What the degree was doing, and what to measure instead.
Read