AI interviews vs resume screening

Resume screening is faster and asks nothing of candidates, while a first-round interview shows how people describe their work, so most teams should use resumes to check the basics and interviews to compare people.

Topic	Resume screening	Vettika
What it looks at	Job history, education and how well someone writes a resume.	What the candidate says about their real work.
Effort for candidates	Better. They've already sent it.	They need to take part in an interview.
Speed for your team	Better for a quick check.	Slower to set up, then reports arrive as candidates finish.
Hard requirements	Better for checking licences, degrees or years in a field.	Not the right tool for this.
People with unusual backgrounds	Easy to overlook.	They can show what they've done in their own words.
Same basis for everyone	Depends on who reads and what catches their eye.	Same questions and the same rubric.
Cost	Your team's reading time.	Prepaid minutes for the time used.

What resumes do well

A resume is fast, it's free to collect, and candidates have already written one. For hard requirements, it's the right first check. If a role needs a nursing licence or a specific degree, you don't need an interview to learn that.

It also costs candidates nothing extra. Asking everyone who applies to sit an interview is a real request on their time, and it should be saved for people who meet the basics.

What resumes can't show

A resume lists what someone did, as they chose to describe it. It says little about how they did it or what they would do next. It can also reward people who are good at writing resumes.

The research on the things resumes highlight is modest. Schmidt and Hunter's 1998 review put the validity of years of job experience at .18 and years of education at .10 for predicting job performance. Sackett and colleagues later estimated structured interviews at .42. These come from different reviews and aren't a clean side-by-side, and they describe methods in general, not any one product, including ours. Still, the direction is worth noticing.

What an interview adds

A structured interview asks everyone to explain real work. A person with a thin resume can show they solved hard problems. A person with a polished one has to back it up. You also get evidence in the candidate's own words, which is easier to compare than job titles.

Use them in order

For most roles, this order works:

Use the resume to check hard requirements, and keep that check short.
Invite everyone who meets them to a structured first round.
Use the interview evidence to decide who moves forward.

When a resume is enough

If you have a handful of applicants, or the role depends on specific and visible experience, you may not need an extra step. Read the resumes and call the good ones.

Where Vettika fits

Vettika doesn't read or score resumes. It runs the interview after your own check, and scores only the transcript. If you have more qualified applicants than you can call, that's when it helps. People on your team make every decision.

Sources

Watch a sample interview