TALENT ACQUISITION AND RECRUITMENT CAREERS

Once candidates apply or express interest, you screen them to identify the best fits. Initial screening involves reviewing resumes and applications, conducting phone or video screening interviews (15-30 minutes), assessing basic qualifications and cultural fit, and evaluating candidate interest and expectations around salary and timeline.

For promising candidates, you coordinate deeper assessments including technical evaluations, case studies or work samples, behavioral interview rounds, team fit conversations, and sometimes psychometric or personality assessments.

Your screening quality determines your hiring manager’s experience. Send only strong candidates, and managers trust your judgment. Send too many weak candidates, and they’ll question your effectiveness or insist on screening everyone themselves, creating bottlenecks.

What does this look like in practice? Let’s walk through a typical day:

Morning (9:00 AM – 12:00 PM): Your day starts reviewing applications that came in overnight—about 40 resumes for three open positions. You quickly screen these, identifying 8 candidates worth phone screening and rejecting the rest with template emails.

You conduct three 20-minute phone screens for a marketing manager position, assessing candidates’ experience, cultural fit, salary expectations, and genuine interest. One candidate stands out—you schedule them for first-round interviews with the hiring manager.

Between screens, you source candidates on LinkedIn for a difficult-to-fill data scientist role. Using Boolean searches (“data scientist” AND (Python OR R) AND “machine learning” AND Bangalore), you identify 15 promising profiles and send personalized InMails introducing the opportunity.

Midday (12:00 PM – 2:00 PM): You have lunch with your hiring manager for the sales team to discuss their evolving needs. They’re now prioritizing candidates with enterprise sales experience rather than SMB. You adjust your sourcing strategy accordingly.[6figr]​

After lunch, you update your ATS (Applicant Tracking System) with interview feedback from yesterday’s interviews, moving candidates through the pipeline and sending status updates to those who were rejected.

Afternoon (2:00 PM – 6:00 PM): You extend a job offer over the phone to your top candidate for the software engineering role. They’re excited but want to discuss it with their spouse before accepting. You follow up with a formal offer email and supportive note about why you think they’ll love the team.

You spend an hour in your weekly recruitment team meeting, discussing challenging requisitions, sharing sourcing strategies that are working, and reviewing hiring metrics. Your time-to-fill has increased to 42 days from 35 days last month—you discuss causes and solutions.

You coordinate interview schedules for next week, playing calendar Tetris to find times when candidates and 3-4 interviewers are all available. This takes longer than it should because two interviewers are traveling.

Late Afternoon (4:00 PM – 6:00 PM): You screen three more candidates via phone, check your email and respond to candidate questions, review a hiring manager’s request to adjust a job description, and prepare your daily report showing the number of screens conducted, interviews scheduled, and offers extended.

Before leaving, you check LinkedIn to see if any of your earlier InMails got responses. Two candidates replied interested—you schedule phone screens for tomorrow morning.

This day is relatively smooth. Some days involve crisis management—a candidate accepts another offer hours before their start date, an urgent requisition drops requiring immediate attention, or multiple hiring managers simultaneously escalate that their positions are taking too long.