We don’t have a scarcity here. We have an abundance of people with skills and qualities that could really benefit our organization.
Steven BarrettHR Manager @ City of Bloomington, MNMany hiring processes are built to narrow a large applicant pool fast. Applicants are scored against required and preferred qualifications, ranked, and the top scorers get interviews. Everyone below the cutoff is eliminated, usually before anyone at the organization has spoken to them.
Steven Barrett, the HR manager for the City of Bloomington, Minnesota, thinks that cutoff costs employers good candidates. The approach assumes one best candidate is hidden in the pool and the rest need to be screened out. "It’s going into hiring with a scarcity mindset that there can only be one best candidate. We don’t have a scarcity here. We have an abundance of people with skills and qualities that could really benefit our organization," Barrett says.
Barrett has spent nearly 30 years in HR, including senior roles at Minneapolis Public Schools, Minnesota State University, Mankato and Metropolitan State University, and he is a lawyer by training. In Bloomington, he replaced applicant scoring with a process he calls discovery hiring. Every applicant who meets the minimum qualifications gets an interview. The rounds are short, held a week apart, and each one tests a single skill, starting with the one the job needs most. Only candidates who stand out in a round move to the next. For a recent coordinator opening, his team held 72 first-round interviews and still filled the job faster than under the old process, he says.
Where traditional hiring falls short
Many organizations screen applicants with a points-based questionnaire. Candidates answer questions about the job’s minimum and preferred qualifications, earn points for each one they say they meet, and the highest scorers move on to interviews. Barrett says the ranking is appealing because it’s easy and visual, but it has limits. A point total shows how many listed qualifications a candidate claims, so skills the list never asked about don’t count toward it. "We see it on a list. These five candidates scored 90 or above, so let’s interview them," he says. "But that candidate number six, candidate number seven, they might have some awesome skills that we’re overlooking and we’re not asking about. The only way to find out about it is by talking to them."
The qualification lists behind the points add to the problem, he says. They tfend to grow long, and managers often write them around the person who just left. "These were the qualities that the person who left had, so we want someone just like that who can hit the ground running," Barrett says. In his experience, the result is finalists who look qualified on paper but may not be able to do the job the way it needs to be done.
In Criteria’s 2026-2027 Hiring Benchmark Report, a survey of 1,027 U.S. hiring professionals, 24% said they’ve lost confidence in resumes as a reliable signal. Forty-one percent said candidates use AI to misrepresent themselves, and more than a third said their process can’t reliably detect it. Points-based screening runs on the same self-reported information.
How discovery hiring works
Barrett emails every applicant to thank them for applying and ask for a one-page summary of how they meet each minimum qualification. The summary doesn’t need to be polished, and a bullet list is fine. It gives each applicant a chance to make their case in their own words, and it starts a relationship before any interview takes place. "We begin to engage with the candidate on a personal level," Barrett says.
The team commits to interviewing every applicant whose summary shows they meet the minimums. Before interviews begin, the team ranks the skills that matter most for the role. For the coordinator role, the first round focused on managing several projects at once. Interviews ran 15 to 20 minutes, with four or five behavioral questions about how candidates have handled that kind of work.
Candidates know the weekly schedule from the start. "If we do round one on a Monday, we have to do round two the following Monday," he says. "Otherwise it can drag out forever." Most searches finish in two or three rounds.
Because the earlier rounds cover the role’s key skills, the finalist round is a conversation. Each finalist talks one-on-one with Barrett about the job and why they want it, then meets informally with the HR team. "We want to learn about the person behind the resume," Barrett says. The team then discusses who would bring what it needs most, and Barrett makes the decision.
Getting managers on board
Hiring managers used to ranked lists may be skeptical of a process that puts dozens of candidates in front of them. Barrett says discovery hiring takes less time than the city’s traditional process. "You’re through interviewing people in two to three weeks, and then you’re making a selection," he says.
He recommends proving the process somewhere you control before asking others to adopt it. Barrett used discovery hiring for the last three hires in his own department, and once managers in other departments saw the results, some asked to try it for hard-to-fill roles. "They needed to see it in action," he says.
Barrett also recommends introducing the process as an option managers choose. In Bloomington, HR works with each hiring manager to decide which process fits the role, and managers who have tried discovery hiring haven’t wanted to go back. "Once you do this alternate process, you’re never going to want to hire people differently again," he says.
Keeping in touch with finalists
Discovery hiring produces more strong finalists than open jobs. Barrett reaches out to each finalist who isn’t selected, tells them what impressed the team and usually connects with them on LinkedIn. "It’s a deeply personal hiring process from the beginning," he says. "Every applicant got a personal email from me. If you’re going to have a personal process, it’s important to not make it impersonal at the end."
Those relationships also give the city a bench of candidates. When a similar role opens elsewhere in the city, Barrett can contact past finalists directly and send them the posting. In Criteria’s survey, 64% of hiring professionals expect to hire more next year. For teams in that position, a group of candidates who have already been interviewed and vetted gives the next search a head start. "We want to maintain that personal connection because we were impressed with these people," Barrett says.
