HR and Recruiting
Job Posting and Screening for roofing contractors
Putting the advert up takes an afternoon. Deciding about everything that answers it is the actual job, and almost every one of those decisions is a no.
A rule, a list, and a reason for everyone else
A written requirement, agreed before anything is advertised, phrased so that a person either meets it or does not. A shortlist of the people who met it, each one carrying the reason they are on the list. And a file covering everybody else, with the ground on which each was set aside recorded at the time it was decided.
The third of those is the one contractors have never had, and it is the one that turns the other two into something more than an opinion. A shortlist on its own is a claim. A shortlist next to the rule it was filtered by, and next to the people the rule excluded, is a description of a process somebody can follow and check.
Nearly all of it ends in no
This desk is unusual in the department because most of what it produces is negative. An advert for a roofing crew position — more so in the weeks after weather has moved through a region and every company in the county is advertising at once — brings replies in a quantity that has no relationship to the number of positions open. Each one still needs a decision. The overwhelming majority of those decisions are that this is not the person.
A yes creates its own evidence. Somebody is scheduled, somebody is met, eventually somebody starts, and the trail is obvious. A no creates nothing at all. It happens in somebody’s head, the application moves down the pile, and by the end of the week there is no record that a judgement was ever made — not that it was made badly, but that it was made.
So the discipline that matters is not working faster through the pile. It is that the reason exists in writing before the pile moves on. This is cheap at the moment of deciding and effectively impossible afterwards, which is the same asymmetry that governs most of the work this company does, showing up here in an unfamiliar place.
What makes a screen worth having
Filtering applications against a requirement is a defined activity rather than an informal one, and the federal guidance covering it is drawn wider than most owners expect. The 29 CFR Part 1607 — Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978) define the thing they govern as “Any measure, combination of measures, or procedure used as a basis for any employment decision.” The same definition reaches, in terms, “unscored application forms” — which is exactly what a roofing company’s screening usually is. Informality does not put a screen outside the description.
The guidance also speaks in terms of what a user keeps rather than what a user intends. Each user, say the same guidelines, “should maintain and have available for inspection records or other information which will disclose the impact which its tests and other selection procedures have upon employment opportunities”. Records are the unit. That is the same conclusion the shape of the work arrives at independently, which is the useful thing about it — the reason to write down why somebody was set aside is not that a rule demands it, but that a process which keeps no trace of its own reasoning cannot be described later by anybody.
In practice this makes the criterion the whole exercise. A requirement agreed in advance and applied to everything that arrives produces decisions that resemble each other. A requirement invented while reading produces decisions that resemble the reader’s mood, and no amount of care afterwards recovers the difference.
This describes how a screening process is documented and the federal guidance that treats it as a defined activity. It is not legal advice, it makes no determination about any company’s obligations or any applicant’s situation, and nothing here is a statement that a given process is or is not compliant. Those questions belong with your own counsel.
The desk the rest of the department starts at
Posting and screening is one desk inside HR and Recruiting, and the three things that cannot be handed to a back office at all — including who is chosen — are set out there rather than repeated here. This page covers only the filtering itself. What happens to the people who survive it is the next desk along.
What owners ask before advertising
Do you decide who gets hired?
No, and the line is worth stating exactly. We write the advert against a requirement you have agreed, we apply that requirement to everything that arrives, and we hand you a shortlist together with the reason each person is on it. Choosing is yours. The department page sets out why that boundary exists and what it is drawn against, and it is not a limit we invented for our own comfort — a choice made by somebody outside your company would not be your choice.
What do you need from us before an advert goes up?
A requirement that can actually be answered yes or no. Most of what owners first give us is a wish rather than a requirement — somebody reliable, somebody who turns up. Those cannot be screened against because every applicant believes they qualify. Converted into things a person can evidence, the same wish becomes usable, and the conversion takes about one conversation.
What happens to the applications that do not make the shortlist?
They get a recorded reason and they stay on file. This is the part most contractors have never had, because the natural end of a rejection is silence. A set-aside written at the moment it was decided takes a few seconds; reconstructed six months later from memory it is guesswork, and guesswork is what you would be relying on if anybody ever asked how the process ran.
Can you screen for a role we have never hired before?
Yes, and it is more work at the front and less afterwards. A role with no history in the company has no criterion to inherit, so the first job is building one from what the work actually requires rather than from a job title. That is slower for the first advert and faster for every one after it, because the criterion is reusable and the wish it replaced was not.
Do you contact applicants directly?
We handle the correspondence in your company name, at your direction — acknowledgements, requests for missing information, and the notes that come back to you. What we do not do is present ourselves as the employer or make any commitment on your behalf. Everyone we write to is applying to your company, and the record of what was sent sits with you.
How is this different from just posting on a job board?
Posting is the small half. Anybody can put an advert up, and the advert is not where the work is — the work is in what comes back, which arrives in bulk, arrives in no order, and needs a decision on each one. A board gives you the replies. This desk gives you the replies sorted against a rule you agreed, and a written trace of how the sorting went.
The selection guidelines cited here
- 29 CFR Part 1607 — Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (1978) — U.S. Office of the Federal Register (eCFR)
Write down what the role actually requires
Before any advert goes anywhere, put the requirement in a sentence a person could answer. If that turns out to be hard, the difficulty was never the applicants.