Job applicants may be skilled, experienced, and driven, but if there is one thing they are not, it is patient. If you have ever applied for a job before in your life, you might be familiar with the feeling of nervousness when waiting to hear if you’ve scored that position you’ve been vying for. What exactly is taking them so long? This article will show you what happens behind the screening process, and likely reasons why you still haven’t heard back after almost a month.
Review of all applications
After their recruitment advertising firms have given them all the job applications around the Bay Area, the recruiters now need to go through them one by one. This is to make sure they haven’t missed the best candidates’ application because you never know where the best ones are if you don’t go through all of them. This process can take a lot of time, understandably, and some recruiters won’t even go through everything in one day because they likely will have other things on their plate along with the recruiting process, especially if they don’t have a lot of staff in the HR department. Occasionally, the process will require more than one person’s presence, and without this person the whole thing might be stalled, further delaying the completion of the review.
This stage requires careful consideration of resumes, cover letters, and letters of reference. Are the candidates qualified? Do they have relevant experience? Do they sound genuine in their cover letters or are they sending the same template to twenty other companies? Are the letters of reference from five years ago at a job irrelevant to the position they are applying for? Going through all of this information will take up a large portion of the screening time.
Phone or video screening
Phone or video screenings are important to recruiters for all sorts of reasons. They give recruiters an idea of the candidates who might one day work alongside them, if their personalities match the company culture, and whether they are prepared and committed to this position. This also gives them a nice way of making a shortlist of the candidates that they want to call back for a face-to-face interview.
After the initial in-person interview, the recruiter might look deeper into each individual candidate’s work history, social media accounts, and even possible criminal records. A good way to give a good impression on this front is to make sure your online presence is professional. Having a good image online will make you more likely to survive the initial screening process.
