The Danger of the Soft Screen

There are two common mistakes many companies make when screening candidates.

During my time at Palantir Technologies, I conducted around 500 screening interviews (via both phone and Zoom). I also shadowed—and was shadowed by—dozens of interviewers at the company so I got to see the patterns around what does and does not work.

Let’s discuss them, and how you can help your company avoid them.

1. Confusing the recruiter conversation with the first real screen.

If you’re doing things right, you really only need one quality screening interview. I do not count the initial recruiter conversation (sometimes referred to as a “recruiter screen”) against this number. The purpose of the recruiter conversation is multi-fold, but it’s generally to ensure there is a high-level meeting of the minds (i.e. the person knows what job they are applying for) plus some light selling.

And most importantly: inviting the person to enter the assessment process. This means that the next conversation will be an interview (an assessment) and the candidate knows it.

This clarity will allow the screening interview that follows (we call ours the “Prospector”) to be a high-quality use of time. In about 45 minutes you can learn enough about someone’s motivations and past performance to know if it’s worth continuing the process with them. And you can spend the bulk of the time actually interviewing them instead of the more open-ended, unstructured conversations that we sometimes see companies using as “screening” interviews.

Action step: Clearly separate the “recruiter convo” from the first—and only—substantive screening interview. Make sure you divide responsibilities clearly to minimize overlapping of questions.

2. Being afraid to cut “meh” candidates.

In the hundreds of interview queues I got to see, I never once saw an instance of a candidate who was merely “meh” at the Prospector stage who ended up getting hired at the end of the process. I saw a lot of “well, there’s nothing wrong with this person…” thinking that led the new interviewer to recommend either 1) another screen or 2) moving them forward in the process. As hinted at above, this always resulted in a waste of time.

The root cause of this is typically a lack of training, exacerbated by insecurity (“I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I feel afraid to pass on a potentially great candidate”).

Here’s a heuristic I like to use: There should be at least something that impresses you or intrigues you about the candidate after a well-conducted 45-minute screening interview.

If it’s all plain vanilla or “just ok” that is not enough to merit further interviews. In other words, an absence of red flags does not move someone further in the process. Remember, there is a cost to both your “yes” vote as well as your “no” vote—moving a medicore candidate deeper into your interview process is a waste of everyone else’s time (including the candidate’s) and has other pernicious effects when it comes to calibration and decision-making later on.

Here’s what I’m generally looking for at the screening stage: 1) reasonable motivation fit, 2) strong evidence of past performance in at least some relevant dimensions (at Palantir we referred to these strengths as “spikes”) and 3) no cripplingly relevant weaknesses.

As an extremely rough estimate, I would be concerned if more than 1 in 3 candidates are making it through your screening interview. (There will be exceptions such as companies who source heavily through their internal, well-calibrated networks), but it’s a decent heuristic. The more important point is that the default presumption is that someone has to earn their way to the next stage of the process.

Action step: Train your interviewers who conduct the screening interview. Get them calibrated on what questions to ask, how to manage their time, and how to interpret the data they gather. Socialize the idea that it’s ok to say no to most candidates.

Following this advice will be an enormous service to the future interviewers in each queue. They’ll be dealing with a higher average caliber of candidate which will increase their fine-grained accuracy in decision making as well as help prevent interviewer burnout.

If you’ve got curiosity about getting your team training on how to execute and implement the Prospector interview, email me at [email protected].