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SmartRecruiters

Screening Questions

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Included in:
  • SmartStart
  • SmartRecruit

 

SmartRecruiters makes it easy to manage and assign screening questions to applications to help you select the right candidates and report on candidate demographics for diversity and compliance reporting.

 

Introduction

When a candidate applies to a job that's assigned a screening question set, the last step in the application is providing answers.

Default Sets

Requires:
  • SmartStart
  • or
  • SmartRecruit

Each SmartRecruiters company has access to:

  • a screening questions library, which contains a list of default standard and diversity questions. 
  • a default screening question set. When activated, SmartRecruiters adds it to all applications.

All Admins can:

  • add custom questions to the library,
  • configure who can see each question on a candidate's profile, and
  • make the question required on the application.
  • configure specific questions as knockout questions to automatically disqualify and reject candidates based on their answers.

Custom sets

Requires:
  • SmartRecruit

Admins can create additional question sets, and configure them to apply to specific jobs, e.g., by using Org fields like Country, Brand, and Department.

Internal vs Public

Requires:
  • SmartRecruit
  • +
  • SmartMobility

Accounts with SmartMobility also have the option to mark specific sets as Internal or Public, and to enable the Default Internal or Default Public question set. 

InternalSetList.png

Admins may set up an Internal set and/or Public set for the same job by selecting the same Org Field values.

Resources

FAQs

  • Are screening questions localized to a candidate’s language?

    SmartRecruiters will automatically translate standard screening questions and answers from the default library, and present a localized version on a job’s application according to the candidate’s application language. Their application language is determined by the language of the job ad they applied to. SmartRecruiters supports the following languages for screening questions and their answers:

    • Afrikaans
    • Arabic
    • Bulgarian
    • Chinese (Simplified)
    • Chinese (Traditional)
    • Czech
    • Danish
    • Dutch
    • English (US)
    • Finnish
    • French (France)
    • French (Canadian)
    • German
    • Greek
    • Hebrew
    • Hungarian
    • Indonesian
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Lithuanian
    • Norwegian
    • Polish
    • Portuguese (Portugal)
    • Portuguese (Brasil)
    • Romanian
    • Russian
    • Slovak
    • Spanish (Spain)
    • Spanish (Latin America)
    • Swedish
    • Turkish
    • Ukrainian

  • Can a candidate change their answers to screening questions?

    Yes.  As part of April 2019 release, candidates can update their answers to all screening questions after submitting their application in their candidate portal.

    This will appear under the candidate profile as different versions under the "Screening" tab.

  • Can I prevent candidates from uploading a photo when applying?

    By default, candidates can upload a photo with their application when applying to a job. Admins can disable this option for specific jobs by creating a custom screening question set and deselecting the Allow applicants to submit pictures option in the set configuration page.

    TurnOffPhotoUpload.png

    Assign this screening question set to a job to prevent candidates from attaching a photo. 

    You can also disable this option for a pre-existing question set that is already assigned to a group of jobs.

  • How do I ask candidates to upload a cover letter?

    SmartRecruiters' candidate application includes a Message to Hiring Manager field. Candidates can copy and paste their cover letter into this field.

    If you'd like to also give candidates the ability to upload a cover letter as a file:

    1. Create a custom screening question with the Information text type, and add instructions to the candidate.
    2. Add that screening question and the Additional Attachment screening question to a screening question set. Make sure they're in this order:

  • Who can see a candidate’s answers to screening questions?

    By default, a candidate’s answers to any standard screening questions are visible on their profile to anyone with access to the candidate.

    • Administrators can choose to restrict the visibility of individual screening questions (and their answers) to only users with full access to the candidate.
    • Candidates may not change their answers to standard screening questions after submitting an application.
    • Answers to standard questions are displayed in a candidate’s profile and in the candidates’ portal.
    • Candidate answers to standard questions do not show up in the Applicant Flow report.

    In general, questions marked as Diversity (and candidate answers) are omitted from the candidate profile, and only Administrators can see the answers in the Applicant Flow (EEO only) and Diversity reports. There is one exception for EEO questions, which are partially visible to users who have access to the candidate. These users can:

    • see whether the candidate has answered EEO questions,
    • enter answers to EEO questions on behalf of the candidate if the candidate has not provided them.

    However, if a candidate actually answers an EEO question, the answer is not visible on their profile to any user.

 

Can you reset existing screening questions as diversity questions?
No - questions need to be recreated altogether. Some of the reasons: It may lead to data inconsistency and potential leaks in diversity questions. Also downstream impacts in reporting. Also, non-diversity questions might have been added to KnockOut rules and now it will look like we KO on diversity.

Can we export the screening questions?
It is not possible to export the screening questions via the user interface or the API.