The Screening Assistant supports hiring teams during one of the most time-consuming parts of the hiring process: early-stage candidate screening.
It reviews applications against the job criteria you set and shows how each candidate meets your requirements. This helps you screen candidates faster and more consistently while allowing your team to keep full control over decisions.
This guide shares best practices for using the Screening Assistant effectively and responsibly, including tips for writing good screening criteria.
Key takeaways: |
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Plan for scalability
You can set screening criteria for each job individually. But if you’re hiring for similar roles now or in the future, using job templates is the most effective way to stay consistent as you scale.
Templates let you reuse criteria across roles, making candidate screening fast, predictable, and easy to manage as hiring volume grows.
Use job templates to:
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Enable the Screening Assistant in a job template
1. Go to Settings > Templates > Jobs.
2. Click the edit icon next to the template you want to update.
3. Select the Workflow tab on the left side.
4. Scroll down to the Screening Assistant section and click Enable.
If the Screening Assistant is already enabled, you can click Edit in this same section to update your criteria.
📌 Note:
Changes to a job template do not automatically update jobs that are already live. To add new criteria to an existing job, you need to manually update that job’s settings.
Changes to the criteria apply only to new candidates, helping preserve clear, explainable results for those who have already been screened.
Write effective screening criteria
Imagine you’re onboarding a new recruiter. If you give them a checklist that simply says “find the best candidates,” they will likely have follow-up questions: How do I know if someone meets this bar? What should I look for in their CV?
The Screening Assistant works the same way, except it can’t ask clarifying questions. It relies entirely on the criteria you give it.
💡 A general guideline: Define screening criteria together with the hiring manager. This ensures everyone agrees on what “qualified” means for the role and avoids having to revise it later.
Each requirement should be verifiable and answerable with a simple “Yes” or “No” based on facts from the candidate’s application. If a requirement is open to interpretation, the results may be inconsistent.
Focus on the must-haves
The Screening Assistant is most effective at highlighting verifiable facts in a candidate’s application, helping you organize your review process.
Focus your criteria on the key requirements for the role, such as required experience or specific certifications, and let the Screening Assistant handle the baseline checks. This way, you can spend your time on the deeper evaluations that happen later in the process.
💡 Ask yourself: Is this a baseline requirement for the role?
One requirement at a time
Each criteria should evaluate a single requirement.
Combining multiple requirements makes it harder to produce clear results, especially when a candidate meets one but not the other.
💡 A general guideline: If your criteria includes multiple “and” statements, it probably needs to be split.
❌ Instead of: “Experience in social media and email marketing.”
✅ Try: “Experience managing social media accounts,” “Experience planning and executing email marketing campaigns.”
Be clear and specific
Words like “strong,” “expert,” or “experienced” mean different things to different people.
Well-written criteria are specific enough that any reviewer would reach the same conclusion as the Screening Assistant.
💡 Ask yourself: Could two people interpret this differently?
If yes, make it measurable:
Add timeframes (“3+ years” instead of “experienced”)
Name specific tools (“Angular” instead of “frontend frameworks”)
Use numbers (“team of 10” instead of “large team”)
❌ Instead of: “Has leadership skills.”
✅ Try: “Has managed a team of 5+ employees.”
❌ Instead of: “Has sales experience.”
✅ Try: “Has 3+ years of experience in B2B SaaS sales.”
❌ Instead of: “Strong expertise in Angular.”
✅ Try: “Has 5+ years of experience developing UI features using Angular.”
Use criteria you can verify from the application
The Screening Assistant reviews the candidate’s:
CV or resume
Cover letter
Answers to screening questions
The most effective criteria are those that can be clearly identified from these sources: skills, certifications, tools, or relevant experience.
💡 Ask yourself: Could I verify this without talking to the candidate?
If the answer is no, it’s probably not a good fit for AI screening.
What works well
✅ “Has experience with Ruby on Rails or other backend technologies like Python, Java, or PHP.”
✅ “Has 3+ years experience in B2B campaign management.”
✅ “Holds a CIPP/E credential.”
What to save for human review
❌ “Has a strong problem-solving mindset.”
❌ “Shows leadership potential.”
❌ “Is a culture add.”
These are best assessed by humans later in the process.
Avoid criteria that can lead to biases
The Screening Assistant automatically flags criteria that may introduce bias or raise legal or compliance concerns. When this happens, you’ll see a warning asking you to review and adjust the requirement before saving it.
Avoid criteria based on personal characteristics, such as:
Age
Race
Gender or gender identity
Family status
Nationality
These are unrelated to job performance and may exclude qualified candidates.
💡 Ask yourself: Is this a requirement for the job, or a description of a person?
Criteria that describe who someone is tend to introduce bias. Focus on what the candidate needs to do.
Examples
❌ Avoid | Bias type | ✅ Use instead |
“Under 30 years old.” | Age | “Candidate has 3+ years of relevant experience in [role/industry].” |
“Native German speaker.” | Nationality | “C1/C2 proficiency in German.” |
Keep human judgment at the center
The Screening Assistant speeds up the screening process by showing how many criteria each candidate meets.
It does not make hiring decisions for you, perform autonomous actions such as moving candidates forward, nor can it guarantee fair and unbiased screening. You stay in control at every step.
The golden rule: Every candidate should still be reviewed by a human.
Your role in responsible screening
Verify your criteria. Ensure requirements are job-related and based on verifiable facts rather than personal characteristics.
Use results to prioritize, not disqualify. Use screening results to decide which profiles to review first. Avoid using these results as a hard filter to disqualify candidates (e.g., rejecting anyone who meets fewer than 3 requirements).
Validate results in the candidate profile. Always open the candidate’s profile to review the details behind a screening result. Avoid making decisions based only on the pipeline summary view.
Override when needed. You can manually edit and override a result you think is incorrect or incomplete. Your decision always takes precedence.
For more guidance, see our notes on responsible use.
💡 Tip: While the screening score (e.g., 3/4) can help prioritize your review, you can hide it from the pipeline view. Some teams do this to ensure the hiring team reviews a candidate’s full profile before making a decision.
To hide the score:
1. Click the Adjust pipeline icon next to Add candidates.
2. Uncheck Screening score.
This optional step helps prevent quick judgments and supports a thorough, compliant, and defensible screening process.
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