Screening questions that are worth a candidate's time

Screening questions are the part of an application employers most often get wrong, because they are cheap to add and expensive to answer. Every question you add is multiplied by every applicant. Three good ones beat ten.

Start from the decision, not the role

Ask yourself what you will actually be uncertain about when you look at a shortlist of ten résumés. That uncertainty is your question set. Usually it is two or three things: a hard constraint, a specific kind of experience, and how someone thinks about a common situation in the role.

Three question types that earn their place

• Constraint questions — availability, authorisation, licence, location. Short, factual, unambiguous.
• Evidence questions — 'Describe a time you owned X', where X is genuinely central to the role.
• Judgement questions — a realistic situation from the job, asking what the candidate would consider. Answers are far more revealing than credentials.

What to avoid

• Questions your résumé screen already answers.
• Puzzle or trick questions with no relationship to the work.
• Essay prompts at the first stage; you are asking for unpaid work before showing any interest.
• Anything that touches protected characteristics, directly or by proxy.

Say what you are looking for

A sentence of help text — 'a short paragraph is fine; we care about the reasoning, not the format' — improves answers noticeably and reduces the length of everything you have to read.

Read them consistently

Decide in advance what a strong answer contains, and read every candidate against that rather than against the previous applicant. Consistency is what makes a screening stage defensible, and it is also what makes it useful.

On Rice & Bean

Questions attach to the job, answers arrive attached to the application, and requirement responses appear beside the requirement they answer. Nothing scores or ranks candidates for you, and no automated step rejects anyone. Humans decide. Always.