Overview

LINKEDIN CUSTOM SCREENING QUESTIONS

When posting jobs on LinkedIn, hirers add screening questions to establish minimum requirements for qualified applicants. While helpful, the library of templated questions doesn’t always meet the needs of hirers who have to do additional screening offline. The custom screening question feature allows hirers to improve the relevancy of their questions while streamlining the candidate review process.

Role

Product Design Lead — End-to-end UX & UI design, user flows, rapid prototyping, conducted usability testing

Timeline & status

2 months // Launched

Screening questions 101

The product space

Screening questions (SQs) enable hirers to screen candidates for specific parameters in the hiring process, ~60% of job posters add SQs to their job posts on LinkedIn. Jobs posters can choose from a library of 20+ templated questions across a range of topics, including skill experience, work authorization, and certification status. Hirers can then set questions as ‘must-have’ or ‘preferred’ hiring criteria, which helps quickly screen applicants based on their self-reported qualifications.

There is high demand for custom screening questions. There are nearly 50 customer cases a week through the field, making it the 2nd most requested feature in Talent Hub (LinkedIn’s applicant tracking system). Following the launch of an in-product feedback module, we received nearly 10,000 custom question suggestions in less than a month. Hirers have also come to expect this feature as part of a robust screening question experience, as it is already offered by competitors (i.e., Indeed), and is often a selling point within ATS software.

Previous screening question experience

Reviewing hirer suggestions

Digging into the details

After reviewing customer suggestions from the feedback module, we were able to organize job poster use cases for custom screening questions into three buckets:

  • Questions that we do not have templates for but are Yes/No or numerical answer questions

  • Questions for which we already have templates

  • Open-ended questions

Hirer suggestions for questions

Custom SQ’s North Star

With the findings from research, I proposed a set of design principles that helped guide conversations with stakeholders and leadership. 

Design principles

Ensure bad actors cannot abuse custom SQ

Using a combination of a Universal Content Filter, an API that checks for explicit content, and the ‘Report a job’ feature (ex: to flag if the poster asks discriminating questions) we ensure posters do not violate LinkedIn platform guidelines.

By limiting the answers that job applicants can provide to custom SQ (Yes/No and numerical) we are removing most ways bad actors can exploit this feature.

Allow customers to add custom questions without sacrificing structured data collection

Custom SQ answers will correspond to existing response types supported by today’s templates of Yes/No or numerical answers. This decision was made to ensure we do not sacrifice our ability to know if an applicant has correctly answered the question. As a result, we will not support custom answers or open-ended questions.

Encourage job posters to use templated questions

Whenever possible we should guide hirers to use templated questions rather than add a custom SQ for an existing question. This allows LinkedIn to standardize the question/answer pair and helps improve matching hirers to qualified applicants.

Custom Screening Question

Design solution

We added a custom screening question option to the list of 20+ templated SQs in product. Hirers can write their own question in the text box and customize their response type to Yes/No or numerical format. They can also indicate if their question is a must-have qualification to help automatically reject candidates who do not meet their criteria. To promote LinkedIn standards, we included a prominent footer linking to best practices when submitting custom screening questions.

Custom SQ module

Add Custom SQ 
User flow

Recommended templated question

Final designs

10-15% of custom screening questions created in job posts can be replaced by an existing templated screening question. The custom SQ module guides hirers to use templates whenever we detect they are asking a similar question. This allows LinkedIn to standardize the question/answer pair and helps improve matching hirers to qualified applicants.

Trust & safety

Final designs

Content filter APIs check custom question content to ensure it passes LinkedIn standards. Jobs cannot be posted with these errors, keeping our members safe.

v2 features

Future designs

I revved on an idea to build a library of recent custom questions a hirer could reuse across job posts. This feature was deprioritized for the MVP.

I also explored multiple-choice questions as a response type, but this feature was dropped to maintain our structured data collection.

Wide adoption

Results & reflections

Since launch, ~38% of jobs that use screening questions have a custom question. Top themes include salary and notice period. We will ramp new templates based on these questions to meet demand. Critically, custom questions are associated with +32% higher confirmed hired probability than job posts with only templated questions. A Trust and Safety team led an audit on custom SQs focused on finding abuse and found no major issues. Additionally, we saw a reduction in custom screening questions that match pre-written templates and a 70% acceptance rate for recommended templated questions. 

In hindsight, I would have liked to make a stronger case with my cross-functional partners to ensure the recent custom questions feature was prioritized for MVP. We’ve seen that hirers tend to ask the same custom questions across job posts and I think allowing them to quickly add custom questions from a library would alleviate that pain point. I would have also liked to work more closely with the UCF team to enhance the content guideline experience with a focus on diversity and anti-discrimination.