What the real purpose of a pre-screening interview is
2 minutes
Find out what a pre-screening interview should be used for and how it saves you time.
Pre-screening interviews are often mis-used as an early opportunity to assess role-fit and candidate capability to trim down candidate numbers before a full interview. Using them this way as a light-interview is the wrong approach, and it commits significant time to calls that can't reliably tell you who's worth hiring.
We cover what a screening interview is actually for, the right questions to ask, and what should be doing the actual work of narrowing your candidate pool.
Screening interviews should only be used as a qualification and interest check
The role of a pre-screening interview is very limited. It should solely be used to confirm the candidate meets your basic requirements, give them a clear picture of the role, and establish whether there's genuine mutual interest before anyone commits to a full interview.
The filtering that happens at this stage is minimal and binary. Either the candidate realises the role isn't right for them and opts out, or you establish they don't meet a stated requirement - wrong location, unavailable start date, missing a must-have qualification. That's the extent of it, and why it's useful. The usefulness is in eliminating the scenario of a candidate turning up for a formal interview without those stated requirements or someone who is ill-informed on the job requirements.
A screening interview should not be used to assess the candidate's ability to do the job. Screening interviews are only 10-15 minutes and adding 'assessment' questions or scoring criteria into them conflates the two interview roles and adds inconsistencies into your process.
Questions to ask your candidates in a pre-screening interview
Good screening questions are logistical and motivational. They should help the candidate as much as they help you, letting candidates opt-out if the role doesn't match what they're looking for. Screening questions are there to save everyone's time.
Availability and logistics
- What's your notice period or earliest available start date?
- Are you happy with the location and working arrangements for this role? (probe on whether they can easily make it work each day)
- What are your salary expectations?
- Do you have the right to work in this country?
Basic qualifications
- Can you confirm you have [specific qualification or requirement]?
- Do you have experience with [essential requirement]?
- Is there anything in the job description that doesn't match your background, or you are unsure about?
Interest and motivation
- What attracted you to this role specifically?
- What do you know about us so far?
- What are you looking for in this job?
It's also useful to explain the role and requirements to the candidate. They may have applied to multiple roles and may not fully understand what is required. This allows them to be honest with whether they are interested or not.
Notice that none of them ask a candidate to demonstrate ability or prove their suitability. Your assessment of their ability should have already started earlier in the candidate assessment process, with objective tools which are designed to predict performance and suitability.
How to slim down your candidate pool the right way
If you're using screening calls to make your interview shortlist more manageable, you're using the wrong tool. Pre-screening interviews are not designed to evaluate who's worth interviewing. Relying on them to reduce candidate volume means you're spending significant time on calls that can't give you reliable data on candidate quality.
The work of building a high-quality interview shortlist needs to happen earlier in the process, without committing your time to qualify large applicant numbers via phone or CV screens.
For early careers and high-volume roles, cognitive ability tests are the right tool here. They're fast, objective, and consistently shown to be the strongest predictors of job performance available to hiring teams (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Every candidate can be assessed against the same criteria and can be infinitely scaled without any increase in time commitment from your hiring team. Read more on why you should be using ability tests in your hiring process.
For low-volume, experienced hire roles, CV screening is usually sufficient at this stage. You're screening on track record and relevance, not raw ability, so a structured CV review against your requirements does the job without adding unnecessary process.
The screening interview can then sit after this more effective screening method, just before the face-to-face interview. That way, by the time you're on a call with a candidate, they've already demonstrated their ability for the role, and the pre-screening interview is only being used for its short intended purpose.
Conclusion and next steps
Pre-screening interviews have a specific, limited role of confirming basic qualifications, explaining the role, and checking genuine interest. When used correctly they protect interview time and give candidates a fair chance to opt out early. However when they are used as a substitute for proper candidate screening, they create a heavy workload with little predictive value.
If you're hiring at volume and need to build a more manageable shortlist, pre-screening interviews are not the correct tool. The evidence points clearly towards cognitive assessments earlier in the process. Read our guide on the best early careers hiring strategy to find out how to optimise your candidate assessment process based on science and practicality.
Primary author
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over 7 years experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
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