What is the Applied AI Screening Assistant?

In this article:

- What is the AI Screening Assistant?
- Role requirements for using the AI Screener (and what happens if I don't meet them);
- Question types that can and can't be used with the AI Screener;
- How the AI Screener works and what goes into our AI Screening Assistant.

What is the Applied AI Screening Assistant?

The AI Screening Assistant significantly reduces the time it takes to shortlist large numbers of candidate Sift answers for high-volume roles. Our AI model combines years of research on candidate skills and skills-based questions, plus data points from over a million candidate answers and scores. It is customised and calibrated to score reliably, efficiently and accurately according to your organisation’s needs, expectations, and requirements. 

Role requirements

For the best and most accurate results, we require that a role meets the following criteria to enable the AI Screening Assistant. 
 

1. The role receives at least 100 applications

We aim to supply your hiring team with the most accurate and fair assessment of each candidate answer. The AI model requires a larger subset of candidate applications (100 minimum*) to best apply your personalised AI model, in order to effectively and efficiently score the answers. 

*If your role doesn't meet the 100 applications minimum threshold whilst the AI Screener is enabled, contact your Customer Success Manager.

2. The role uses 'Work Sample' Sift questions

Skills-based scenario or 'Work Sample' Sift questions are essential for the AI Screener. The work sample question design is considered one of the most powerful and predictive methods of assessing a candidate’s role fit. 

Our AI model takes a candidate's 'Work Sample' Sift answers, removes all personal information or identifying data, and then reviews each candidate based on various research-backed criteria, personalised benchmarks/requirements and team calibration. 

Which types of questions can be used with the AI Screener?

✅ Work sample questions that review how a candidate will deal with a specific tasks / project. 

✅ Work sample questions revolving around certain work scenarios / challenges or question to specifically assess specific skills 

Work Sample questions work well with the AI Screener because they allow candidates to express their personal skills, thoughts and approaches.

For in platform guidance for setting Work Sample Sift questions, we recommend exploring the AI Question Generator. 

Once you've set up your role with skills-based 'Work Sample' Sift questions, you will also set up review guides for each question, clearly outlining what a 1, 3 and 5 star answer means for your team. These review guides can describe the ways in which you'd like candidates to handle certain situations or set out the thought processes or behaviours you'd expect to see. 

Which types of questions can't be scored by the AI Screener?

The AI Screening Assistant provides less accurate results for responses to the following types of questions, which is why these aren't compatible:

🚫 Motivation questions (e.g. why do you want to work at ... ?)

🚫 Past behavioural questions (e.g. tell me about a time when you … ?)

🚫 CV type questions (e.g. tell me about your experience as a Product Manager and what were your main achievements…?). 

These questions tend to show high variability in answers, and the AI Screener has not been trained on these types of questions. Therefore, we will recommend not running these questions through the AI Screening Assistant. 

If you need additional support or you're unsure whether a question you've drafted would be compatible, check in with your Customer Success Manager before you launch your role.

How does the AI Screener work? 

Request the AI Screener by role in Build > Assessments to get started. Your draft role is now on Applied's radar.

Your sift questions get reviewed by Applied - you'll receive an email confirmation, if your role and questions are compatible (or advice for changes to the questions, if they're not yet). You can ask a combination of both AI Screener approved questions and non-compatible questions on a role, if you want to.

Once your role reaches 50 applications, 20-30 randomly selected candidates will be sent to your hiring team for Sift review on the platform as usual. Once complete, these scores will be used to calibrate your personalised AI model, so that when the automated scoring takes over, it will be as if your team was scoring all the candidates. 

Once your role reaches 100 applications and the calibrations are complete, your scores will become available on your candidate dashboard and AI Screener insights will be listed within the candidate profile. 

Please note, there is an additional cost to this feature.

What goes into our smart AI Screening Assistant?

The AI model combines years of research and data points from:

• across 20,000+ live roles and 80+ different industries;
• over 8 million scores across candidates' answers to skills-based questions; and
• over 1.2 million candidate applications.

All of this combines with your detailed and personalised review guides and calibration scores from your company's hiring team to create a strong and customised AI scoring model. Together, this work to ensure results are accurate, fair, and informed. 

And, of course, the reviewing process itself combines the best practices from behavioural science research, providing a structured and ethical background to the scoring and hiring process at Applied.