Selection Process — Screening, Preliminary Interview and Employment Tests

Selection is carried out as a sequence of stages, each designed to progressively narrow the applicant pool. An applicant who is rejected at any stage does not proceed to the next — this is exactly what makes selection a process of elimination. The stages are usually explained in the following order, each stage feeding into the next, with rejected candidates dropping out at every stage rather than moving forward.

1. Receipt and screening of applications — every application form or resume received in response to a recruitment drive is scrutinised against the minimum requirements laid down for the job (qualification, experience, age, and other essential criteria). Applications that clearly fail to meet these basic requirements are rejected at this stage itself, without calling the candidate for any further step. This is the cheapest and quickest stage of elimination, and its purpose is simply to save the time and expense of processing candidates who were never going to be suitable to begin with.
2. Preliminary interview — applicants who clear the initial screening are usually called for a brief, informal preliminary interview (sometimes called a screening interview). Its purpose is limited: to eliminate candidates who are obviously unsuitable — for reasons that may not have been visible from the paper application alone, such as poor communication, an unrealistic salary expectation, or an evident mismatch with the job — before investing further time in a fuller selection process. A preliminary interview is deliberately quick and general; it is not meant to make the final hiring decision.
3. Employment/selection tests — candidates who pass the preliminary interview are commonly asked to take one or more standardised tests, designed to measure specific abilities in an objective, comparable way that a resume or a brief conversation cannot. The types of employment tests commonly used include:

• Aptitude tests — measure a candidate's potential or latent ability to learn a particular skill, rather than a skill they already possess; useful for judging how quickly and how well a candidate is likely to pick up the specific demands of a job with proper training.
• Intelligence tests — measure a candidate's general mental ability, such as reasoning, comprehension, and problem-solving capacity.
• Personality tests — assess personal qualities and traits such as emotional stability, self-confidence, sociability, and temperament, which matter for jobs requiring particular behavioural qualities (for example, patience in a customer-facing role). …