Automated Candidate Rejection

Automated Candidate Rejection within Alooba allows you to efficiently manage your candidates and improve the candidate experience. By configuring qualifying criteria and score thresholds, we can automatically reject candidates who do not meet your specific requirements, saving the candidates' time and effort while ensuring a smooth hiring process. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to set up and utilize automated candidate rejection in Alooba, empowering you to optimize your hiring process, enhance your recruitment efficiency, and improve the candidate experience.

Why Use Automated Candidate Rejection?

1. Time and Resource Savings: Automated rejection saves valuable time for your hiring teams and your candidates. It prevents unqualified candidates from proceeding further in the assessment process, ensuring that resources are focused on more suitable candidates.
2. Enhanced Candidate Experience: Candidates receive prompt feedback on their qualification status, providing transparency and clarity in the hiring process. Even if they do not meet the qualifying criteria, candidates are still informed and given the opportunity to continue if they wish.
3. Avoid Ghosting Candidates: When a candidate has gone through the effort of applying for your job and going through the assessment, they want to know if they have made it through to the next stage of the hiring process. Nothing's worse than hearing nothing back and being unsure if they just need to wait longer, or if you have already decided to pass on them. Letting candidates know that they haven't made it through to the next stage will provide them closure, and coupled with Alooba's assessment results can provide them with clear indications as to what areas they need to improve on to succeed in the future.
4. Improved Efficiency: With automated rejection, the system handles the process of notifying candidates, ensuring consistent candidate feedback quality, and eliminating the need for manual intervention. This streamlines the hiring process and reduces the administrative burden for your recruiters and hiring managers.

How to Use Automated Candidate Rejection?

There are three different types of Automated Rejection in Alooba:

1. Automated Disqualification based on Qualifying Criteria: You can configure candidate information fields for each assessment and set up qualifying criteria for specific fields. This ensures that candidates who do not meet certain requirements, such as having the appropriate working visa or being located in a certain area, are promptly informed that they do not qualify. However, candidates are given the option to continue with the assessment if they wish. This feature is primarily used to inform candidates that regardless of their performance they are unlikely to be able to get the job due to logistical hard requirements.
2. Automated Rejection based on Individual Test Scores: For multiple-choice tests like Concepts & Knowledge and Data Analysis, you can set a minimum score threshold. This is beneficial when these tests are critical for evaluating a candidate's suitability for the role and there are more tests that come after it. If a candidate's score falls below the set threshold for these specific tests, they will be automatically rejected from consideration. This saves the candidate time and effort in completing subsequent tests if they have already failed to meet the minimum requirements for the role. This is especially useful when there's a Free Response test that will require manual evaluation later in the process. Having an automated rejection setup on the earlier test(s) will reduce the amount of manual evaluation needed, making sure that your team focuses on evaluating the responses from candidates that have already passed the threshold of the other test(s).
3. Automated Rejection based on Overall Score: You also have the option to implement automated rejection based on candidates' overall assessment scores. When a candidate's overall score fails to meet the predetermined threshold, they will be automatically rejected from further consideration. In this case, the system handles the communication to the candidate that they have been unsuccessful.

Automated Disqualification Based on Qualifying Criteria

During the process of creating or editing the assessment configuration, you have the option to add qualifying criteria for specific candidate information fields, such as "Location," "Availability," or "Working Rights".

Qualifying criteria can only be added to candidate information that is non-anonymized and is required.

It should only be used to disqualify candidates based on hard logistical requirements, and shouldn't be used on things that would be better determined from a skills assessment. For example "years of experience" is not as good of an indicator of skill level, as actually testing them in those skills, so it shouldn't be used to disqualify candidates. However, not having a current working visa, could be a hard blocker if you aren't prepared or set up for visa sponsorship.

Dropdown Fields

Non-anonymized, required dropdown fields can have qualifying criteria defined as either a whitelist (IS) or a blacklist (IS NOT) with a list of options.

Numeric Fields

Non-anonymized, required, numeric fields can have qualifying criteria defined as greater than or equal to a number (AT LEAST), less than or equal to a number (UP TO), precisely a given number (EXACTLY), or within a range between two numbers (BETWEEN).

Other Field Types

It's currently not possible to add qualifying criteria to other field types, such as Text or URL fields.

Candidate Experience with Automated Disqualification by Qualifying Criteria

Prior to taking the assessment, candidates will be asked to provide the specified information. If the candidate doesn't meet any of the set qualifying criteria, Alooba will immediately inform them that they do not qualify for the role.

This feature serves as a courtesy to candidates, offering them a clear understanding of their eligibility while allowing them to proceed if they still wish to continue.

If candidates decide not to continue with the assessment, their assessment status will be "Disqualified".

Automated Rejection Based on an Individual Test Score

During the process of creating or editing an assessment configuration, you have the option to specify minimum score thresholds for Concepts & Knowledge and Data Analysis tests. However, you will only be able to set this when the test isn't the last test in the assessment. If you want to automatically reject a candidate based on their score on the last test, you should use the overall score rejection instead.

After enabling the test auto rejection, you can change the rejection threshold in the dropdown.

You can choose to provide candidates with a high-level overview of their results after completing the assessment. This selection will determine how the automatic rejection feedback will be presented to them.

When rejected, the candidate's assessment status will change to "Incomplete Rejected" and their hiring status changes to "Rejected". All pending tests will be labeled as "Cancelled".

Candidate Experience with Rejection by Test Scores

When a candidate fails to meet the minimum score threshold of a test, they will be redirected to the end of the assessment immediately after completing the test regardless of any tests yet to be completed. We ask the candidate to provide their assessment feedback before showing them a message that they, unfortunately, didn't make the cut.

If you have opted to provide candidates with a high-level overview of their results, they will be redirected to the result page after leaving feedback. On the result page, they will see the following message informing them that they did not meet the minimum score to continue with the hiring process.

If you decide not to provide candidates with a high-level overview of their results, they will be redirected to the test completed page after leaving feedback. On this page, they will see a rejection message without any additional result details.

Automated Rejection based on Overall Score

During the process of creating or editing an assessment configuration, you have the option to specify minimum score thresholds for the assessment. This applies to the candidate's overall score and will only take effect once the candidate has completed all tests within the assessment.

Candidate Experience with Rejection by Overall Score

Having the overall score automatic rejection enabled will not have any effect on the assessment process, candidates will not experience any differences. The automatic rejection will take place as soon as the candidate's assessment score is available (some tests may require manual evaluation). If a candidate is rejected, the only change will be their hiring status, which will be updated to "Rejected". Their assessment status will remain unchanged.

Three days after completing the assessment, rejected candidates will receive an email notification informing them about the rejection, ensuring they are promptly informed about the outcome of their application.

Conclusion

Automated candidate rejection is a powerful tool in Alooba that empowers you to streamline your candidate selection process while improving the candidate experience, ensuring the candidates are well informed about the progress of their application. By setting up qualifying criteria and score thresholds, you can efficiently filter candidates who do not meet specific requirements, ensuring a more focused and efficient hiring process. Utilize this feature to save time, improve efficiency, and make the candidate selection process seamless and transparent. With automated candidate rejection in Alooba, you can elevate your recruitment process to new heights.