What is vetting?

Employee vetting involves screening candidates and verifying their qualifications during the hiring process. It helps you efficiently narrow down applicants and proceed with those whose skills and experience match the job requirements. Insights from the vetting process enable you to make more informed hiring decisions.

Why creating a vetting process is important

The process of vetting may improve the hiring process in the following ways:

• Saves time by scheduling interviews with candidates who closely match your requirements
• Increases business efficiency by onboarding and training new hires who are more likely to be successful
• Improves employee retention by choosing candidates who add to your company culture
• Drives positive company morale by hiring employees with exceptional talents
• Creates a consistent evaluation process for fairer hiring
• Helps you choose candidates who can meet compliance requirements for the role, such as having the necessary licensing or certification
• Verifies that the information provided in the resume and application is accurate

Vetting process before the interview

To vet candidates, consider including the following components in your process before you schedule interviews.

Job description and screener questions

A well-written job description can attract job seekers by highlighting the details of the job and the benefits of working for your organization. To narrow down the applicant pool, consider adding screener questions to assess experience, certifications and hard or soft skills required for the role.

Answers to the screener questions can help you identify the candidates you want to interview based on their qualifications. Indeed offers a premade list of screener questions, or you can create your own.

Aptitude assessments

You can also send applicants aptitude assessments to look for specific job-related skills and check competency levels on those skills. Pre-employment assessments can test a candidate’s language, computer, cognitive and on-the-job skills (e.g., business math, retail shelf stocking, first aid). Standardized assessments help you evaluate all candidates equally to reduce bias in the hiring process.

Related: How Personality Tests Solve 3 Major Hiring Challenges

Resume and cover letter

Unconscious bias in resume screening could influence which candidates you choose for an interview. Conducting masked screening and using a diverse screening team can help you assess resumes more fairly. Look for the following when reviewing resumes and cover letters:

• Qualifications that meet the minimum requirements for the position
• Skills that will support the candidate’s success in the role
• Values that align with the organization

Phone screen

Creating a set of questions you can ask during a phone screen is another way to evaluate candidates fairly and determine who gets a full interview. Common topics include work availability, salary expectations, interest in the position and qualification-related questions. These interviews are typically 15 to 30 minutes long, so you may need five to 10 questions.

Read more: What are Interview Screening Phone Calls? Best Practices

Vetting during the interview

The pre-interview vetting process helps you select applicants who have the necessary qualifications for the full interview process. A targeted list of questions to ask during interviews helps you screen the interviewees more thoroughly.

Here are a few things to consider when developing interview questions:

• Focus on specific information a candidate shared in their resume, such as previous employment, education and certifications.
• Address the demands your company needs to meet, along with how the candidate can help you achieve them.

As you interview candidates, you can evaluate soft skills, such as interpersonal communication, and hard skills, such as technical abilities. It can also help to look for culture add to improve the diversity of your team.

If you plan on hiring several new employees for the same job, you may want to conduct a group interview. This allows you to screen several candidates at once and determine how well they collaborate.

Vetting after the interview

Before you make your selection and send a job offer letter, you’ll typically complete a few final steps in the vetting process to verify the candidate’s qualifications. These help you ensure the information the candidate provided is true. Additional steps may include:

• Contacting the candidate’s character or professional references
• Verifying required certifications and employment history
• Completing necessary background checks or drug tests

FAQS about the process of vetting candidates

Who is involved in the candidate vetting process?

The vetting process often starts in the HR department. The team is responsible for creating a job description and screener questions to narrow down candidates. They may also handle the initial resume screening and support the interview process. Hiring managers often conduct the interview. The process may then go back to HR to handle assessment scheduling and perform verifications.

How can you improve your vetting process?

Having well-defined expectations and qualifications for the role helps make the vetting process more effective. Being consistent with how you vet all applicants helps you maintain high standards and makes the process fair to eliminate potential bias. You can do this by creating written procedures on how to vet a candidate.

How do you evaluate the vetting process?

Evaluating the effectiveness of your vetting process can help you make improvements. One way to do this is by looking at recruitment metrics. This data can provide insight into how well new hires work for the company. For example, if the data reveals that the quality of new hires is high, you may have an effective candidate vetting process in place. If not, you may need to adjust how you evaluate potential employees.