A pre-screening questionnaire is a short form you send to a candidate after they apply, with the short list of questions you would normally ask on the phone screen. Eligibility, location, salary expectation, certifications, availability, deal-breaker conditions. The SHRM screening toolkit walks through the legal frame for these questions, and our orientation here is the same: keep them structured, keep them lawful, keep them tied to the role. Candidates answer in their own time, the answers come back on the candidate profile, and the call later is spent on the parts that actually need a human voice.
100Hires keeps the questionnaire inside the applicant tracking system where the rest of hiring lives, alongside the rest of the candidate record. Build the form once in Settings. Open any screening email template, click the Questionnaire dropdown, and the link drops into the body. When you send, 100Hires generates a personalized URL for that specific candidate, the link disables the moment they submit, and the answers land on the profile timeline. Wire a workflow rule, and a single answer can advance the stage and email a teammate.
What is a pre-screening questionnaire
A pre-screening questionnaire sits between the application form and the phone screen. The application form captures resume, contact info, and one or two knockout questions that the candidate sees before they submit. The questionnaire is the next step: a short follow-up you send to a candidate worth a closer look, asking for the structured facts that decide whether the phone screen is worth a 30-minute slot. Work authorization, target salary, location, required certifications, start-date window. Five to ten questions, binary or numeric where possible, so the answers feed an automation cleanly. Anything that needs nuance, judgment, or a back-and-forth conversation belongs in the call.
The questionnaire is not an assessment. Asking thirty essay questions about a candidate's leadership philosophy turns a five-minute checkpoint into homework, and good candidates abandon. The format is short, binary, and tied to a workflow downstream.
Pre-screening questionnaire vs phone screen
The questionnaire does not replace the phone screen. It decides who gets the phone screen. Two different jobs, in sequence.
The questionnaire is for binary, numeric, or single-choice facts that gate the conversation. Work authorization, location, salary range, required certification, start date, comfort with a deal-breaker condition. The candidate answers when it suits them, the answer feeds an automation if the rule fits, and by the time you read the profile you know whether the call is worth scheduling. The phone screen is for everything the questionnaire cannot do well. Motivation, communication style, how they describe a hard project, the small judgment calls that decide whether they fit a specific team. The interview scheduling after the questionnaire is the human moment that the questionnaire made room for.
The volume math is the reason this split is worth setting up. A role that pulls 400 applications might land 15 or 20 truly qualified candidates on the other side - recruiters in the recruiting subreddits trade that math back and forth, and it shows up in our own sales calls too. The questionnaire is the cheap first cut that takes the obvious mismatches off the phone-screen list, so the calls you do schedule are the calls worth taking. The 100Hires angle here is that the questionnaire answers are already on the profile when you open the call brief, alongside the resume, the AI score, and the timeline of every prior touch. The 30 seconds you used to spend hunting for the salary expectation are 30 seconds you spend reading the answer.
Ten questions that gate the phone screen for you
The questions below are written for workflow automation, not for collecting sample questions. Each one returns a binary or numeric answer that a 100Hires workflow rule can read, and each one maps to a specific downstream action. Use them as starting blocks - the actual wording belongs to your role and your tone.
If a question needs more than one of those answer types, it is probably a phone-screen question. Move it there and keep the questionnaire short.
How 100Hires compares to a typical ATS for pre-screening
Most ATS pages bury screening inside the application form or general candidate management. The eight rows below are the differences that show up in day-to-day use - who the link belongs to, what happens after a submission, where the answers go, and what the workflow can do with them.