I'm currently recruiting for a position in my team and the company uses one of those hideous Web 1.0 HR systems. One of its features is to set screening questions that you can use to rule out candidates who aren't worth wasting your time over. Because I'm distrustful of automation in such a human process, I set all my questions to optional so that none of the candidates is automatically screened out. However seeing some of the answers come in, I think next time I might raise the bar a little.
The position is for a data analyst who can primarily build automated reports and dashboards. I've had a few candidates apply with answers like this:
1. Rate your experience building automatically-updating dashboards in Excel.ExpertProficientX Minimal2. Have you used any web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture or WebTrends?YesX No3. Have you used any visualisation tools like Tableau or Spotfire?YesX No4. Rate your experience with SQLExpertProficientX Minimal5. Describe your experience with an online marketing campaign and the insights that you provided?n/a
I now see that I don't even need to open the CV attached to these applications. If you haven't got anything I've asked for, why bother applying?