Applicants for vacant positions have first had to get through an automated telephone screening interview. The company sorted through 561 candidates before taking on 15 recruits and claimed that the screening system saved 143 work days. The phone lines were open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The system, developed by Gallop, was tested on 100 existing staff and looked for six generic performance attributes: achiever, conscientiousness, responsibility, agreeableness, numeracy and stability
A further example of automated short-listing is the use of equipment to electronically read CVs using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. The system’s artificial intelligence reads the texts and, by using search criteria such as qualifications, job titles and companies where the applicant has worked, will produce a ranking list of applicants against the mandatory and optional aspects of the person specification. This system is quicker and more consistent than if it were carried out manually but will only be efficient as the search engine and will certainly miss many potential candidates, let alone the difficulty the technology faces in trying to understand poor handwriting. An interesting argument in favour of telephone screening is that it can actually reduce discrimination, as the example of Nationwide Building Society’s system shown in Case study 5.2.
