Define Must-Have Screening Criteria
An agent can only screen fairly on criteria that are written down and validated. Learn to turn a job into must-have rules the agent can apply.
Screening rules must be explicit and job-related
Experienced recruiters screen on instinct built from hundreds of placements. An agent has no instinct. It can only apply the rules you write down, so before any screening agent goes live, you have to turn the fuzzy sense of a good candidate into concrete, validated criteria. This is also where bias and compliance risk live, so it deserves care.
Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves
For any role, split requirements into two lists.
- Must-haves: criteria that genuinely disqualify a candidate if missing, such as a required certification, legal right to work in the location, or a hard minimum of relevant experience. These must be job-related and defensible.
- Nice-to-haves: everything that makes a candidate stronger but should never auto-reject them. These become scoring or summary points, not gates.
An agent should only screen out on must-haves, and only on must-haves you can justify. Everything else it surfaces for a recruiter to weigh.
Validate every rule before it gates anyone
A rule nobody checked can quietly reject good candidates and create legal exposure. For each must-have, ask: is this truly required to do the job, or is it a habit? Would you defend this filter to a client or a regulator? Run the rule against past placed candidates and confirm your best hires would have passed it.
Write rules the agent can actually detect
- State each must-have as something checkable against a field or a screening answer, such as "holds a valid CDL" or "available to start within four weeks."
- Avoid vague criteria like "strong communicator" as a gate, because the agent cannot judge it reliably. Capture those as notes for the recruiter instead.
- Define what happens when a criterion is unknown: the agent should flag it for a human, not assume a pass or a fail.
What good looks like
Each role has a short, validated must-have list the agent screens on, a longer nice-to-have list it summarizes, and a clear rule that anything uncertain goes to a recruiter. You could defend every gate as job-related.
Common mistake
Letting the agent reject candidates on rules nobody validated, then discovering weeks later it screened out qualified people on a filter that was never actually required.