Building a Better Funnel: Screening Applicants With 360Candidate

The hiring process, as it has been said before, is a bit like a funnel. In the initial stages, scores of candidates enter through the funnel’s wide mouth as the company collects resumes. The funnel grows narrower as fewer and fewer candidates make it through the rounds of qualification assessments, interviews, background checks, and so on, until, finally, the company is left with (hopefully) the right person for the job.

In theory, this is a great model; in practice, it doesn’t always work the way that it should. That’s because so many companies rely solely on their applicant tracking systems to help them screen candidates. ATSs are great for collecting resumes and tracking candidate progress through the hiring process, but they’re very limited when used as screening tools. 

“An ATS really enables you to make binary decisions on the mass amount of resumes that you have, but it doesn’t give you any insight into who the candidates are,” says Andrew Jacobson, founder and CEO of 360Candidate, a digital interviewing and candidate screening solution designed to address this very problem.

 When Jacobson says that ATSs can really only make “binary decisions,” he means they can sort candidates, but they can’t give you any insight into who they are. An ATS can tell you who has an Ivy League education and who has worked for a Fortune 500 company, but it can’t tell you about a candidate’s personality, professionalism, and execution abilities. It can’t give you the sort of crucial information you really need before you fly a candidate halfway across the country to come interview with you. 

That’s where 360Candidate comes in. “We’re a tool for in-house recruiters to screen candidates and make better and more efficient decisions on their candidates,” Jacobson explains. “If you look at the funnel of hiring, we’re near the bottom. We enable companies to make smarter decisions with the resumes that they already have.”

Collecting Information With 360Candidate

When a recruiter logs into 360Candidate, they can create a new job screening. These job screenings are wholly customizable. Recruiters can ask for cover letters, resumes, and work samples. They can request that candidates answer written response questions, either choosing questions from 360Candidate’s preloaded list or entering their own. Similarly, recruiters can also pose video response questions as well. 360Candidate can also collect third-party references and job-relevant social media data from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Once a customized job screening is created, recruiters can choose which candidates are invited to complete the screening. Candidates are then emailed links to the screening, which bring them to co-branded (360Candidate + your company) landing pages, where they proceed to create accounts. These accounts allow candidates to complete their job screenings over time, rather than all at once, for maximum candidate convenience.

As the candidate progresses through the screening process, they basically build a candidate media profile, a la Facebook or LinkedIn. The difference is that the 360Candidate profile caters to recruiters, offering easy access to all the information they need to evaluate candidates. Recruiters can make comments on candidate profiles (which others on the team can see) and also rate the candidates directly. 

“The goal is to give insight into a candidate’s personality, cultural fit, execution ability, articulation, professionalism, reputation – things that are incredibly important in hiring decisions, and none of them which you can get out of a resume itself,” Jacobson says.

360Candidate makes data collection and collaboration between recruiters easier. As a result, it improves the screening process, making sure that the candidate who comes out the other end of your funnel is the right person after all.

To learn more about 360Candidate,take a look at this product demonstration .