Marginal Applicant Phone Screening Protocol
Expert TheoryReview
Employers frequently pass over qualified candidates with non-traditional or foreign backgrounds due to unverified assumptions about spoken language skills and accent, despite the extremely low financial and time cost of a preliminary phone conversation.
Picture this
Imagine a restaurant manager throwing away letters from foreign food suppliers because of minor grammar errors on the envelope, instead of spending two minutes on a brief phone call to check whether the supplier can supply the needed ingredients. Employers toss out foreign resumes based on paper assumptions rather than taking two minutes to call and confirm actual spoken communication skills.
What the evidence says
Recruiters cite spoken language uncertainty as the primary reason for foreign resume rejections, yet systematically decline to perform 2-minute screening phone calls to verify language ability, resulting in severe misallocation of skilled labor.
- Who was studied
- Qualitative field inquiry with 29 human resource recruiters combined with quantitative analysis across 12,910 resume submissions in Toronto and Montreal.
- How
- Evaluation of qualitative recruiter rationalizations regarding language concerns compared against economic decision models to propose low-cost procedural screening interventions.
What to do
Hiring departments should adopt a mandatory 3-to-5 minute phone screening step for all candidates who meet baseline technical criteria prior to rejecting resumes based on language skill concerns.
From the source
"If employers are interested in a candidate but concerned about the applicant's language skills, they could contact the applicant by telephone to determine whether an interview would be worthwhile... Another implication is to develop hiring policies that involve contacting marginal applicants to initially assess language abilities, when in doubt."
Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Thirteen Thousand Resumes