How is candidate screening changing

The big four accountancy firms; PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG receive thousands of applicants every year. It is common to have in excess of 100 applicants for each hire that is made. The high volume of applicants per job presents these companies with numerous hiring challenges including time to hire, filtering the candidate pool and removing biases. The big four are not alone in facing these challenges either as many other employers also boast significant application figures.

As multiple companies effectively compete for the same graduate talent, hiring companies have continued to iterate upon their hiring processes to find the balance between and effective due diligence in order to ensure they are hiring the best and most suitable talent possible. Due to the mismatch between volume of candidates and resources available to assess each one the need to reduce the candidate pool down to a manageable number is important. Historically this has been achieved through criteria-based filtering, for example removing applicants that have not achieved a certain level of academic grades or did not attend a preferred group of universities. Whilst effective, it was always known that good candidates would inevitably ‘slip through the net’.

A development upon criteria-based filtering was the introduction of reasoning tests, there are multiple types of reasoning tests such as logic, diagrammatical, numerical, verbal, but they all aim to reduce the candidate pool based on the results. These tests are still in use by the big four accounting firms but are now inter-twined within a bigger screening process that includes video interviews and psychometric games.

VIDEO INTERVIEWS
A video interview involves candidates sitting in front of a computer at home and recording answers to questions that appear on the screen. In 2018, both Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers used the HireVue video interview software. The questions are inter-twined with numerical and situational judgement questions and allow the candidate a set amount of thinking time followed by a set amount of answering time in which they must speak into the camera on their computer.

PSYCHOMETRIC GAMES
Whilst psychometric tests have existed for many years, hiring companies are now favouring games-based assessments. These involve the introduction of a simple game to the candidate in which there is a target such as blowing up a balloon in return for money; the larger the balloon the more money is received but if the balloon bursts then the candidate receives no money at all. Games like these draw out characteristics such as risk appetite and perseverance. The two providers dominating the psychometric game space are Arctic Shores and Pymetrics.

The screening assessments may also vary between areas of the business; for example, if the applicant has applied for the consulting division it is likely that a case interview will be included in their sequence. By automating the majority of these stages, the hiring companies reduce the required resources to assess each applicant and can remove or reduce the criteria thresholds previously enforced and instead use an increased amount of information per applicant to reduce the candidate pool down to a manageable size. In theory, this opening up of the talent pool reduces the number of applicants that ‘slip through the net’ unnecessarily and improves the quality of talent hired.

Whilst these screening methods are predominantly utilised for graduate hires at this point (due to their effectiveness at reducing large candidate pools) it is probable that they will follow the same growth as reasoning tests did previously. If this did transpire, could it mean that video interviews and psychometric games become increasingly integrated into the hiring process for applicants at all levels?