What this stage is
“Screening” covers two different formats. The first is a short phone call: as hh.ru describes it, it lasts from one to ten minutes, five to six on average, and serves to check whether the candidate is still looking and whether the basic terms match. The second is a full interview with a recruiter, for which T-Bank officially allots 30 to 60 minutes. A tenfold difference in time also means a different conversation: five minutes fit only the formal terms, an hour covers motivation, experience and questions about the team.
Both formats share one goal, and Sber states it plainly: the recruiter calls to “find out the candidate’s expectations regarding working conditions and understand whether they are comparable with the team’s offer” (in Russian). Most Russian companies have no separate “HR interview” as a second stage — it is the same conversation. It should not be confused with the final round: that meeting is held by the team and the hiring manager after the technical sections, and it decides whether the candidate will work well with them. In hiring this check is called culture fit.
What gets candidates rejected here
The conventional explanation — “we couldn’t agree on money” — turns out to be a myth as soon as data appear. hh.ru and Talantix analyzed 2.7 million rejection reasons that recruiters themselves entered into the system over 2022 and January 2023, and published the breakdown. A mismatch in skills and qualifications: 58% of rejections. The candidate disappeared and stopped responding: 13%. Unsuitable working conditions: 10%. Discriminatory factors: 10%. A mismatch in salary expectations: 5%; other: 3%.
As a reason for rejection, money trails qualifications by an order of magnitude. Salary expectations matter, but they come into play earlier, at the resume stage, and the candidate may simply never reach a conversation. The head of recruiting at KODE describes a typical scenario: a candidate wants 100,000, puts 150,000 in the resume “with room to negotiate” and gets an automatic rejection, because filtering by salary range happens before anyone reads the text.
Discriminatory factors deserve separate attention: 10% of rejections, 8 points of which are age. It is the only line in the statistics that has nothing to do with either the candidate’s skills or their expectations.
What they ask and what lies behind it
The set of screening questions is stable, and almost every one of them checks something other than its literal meaning.
| Question | What it checks |
|---|---|
| “What kind of job are you looking for?” | Whether the candidate understands their own goals. hh.ru explicitly calls an answer like “oh, something in an office” a sign of uncertainty that lowers the candidate’s chances. |
| “Tell me about yourself” | The ability to talk about experience coherently and in a structured way. If the candidate has nothing to say and does not engage, the conversation wraps up within two or three minutes. |
| “What are your salary expectations?” | Whether the candidate fits the range. Rejection for this reason alone is rare (5%), but an inflated figure in the resume screens the candidate out before the conversation begins. |
| “Why are you leaving your current job?” | The tone of the answer, not the reason for leaving. Criticism of former colleagues and managers reads as a forecast: in a year they will talk about this company the same way. |
| “What do you know about the company?” | Whether this is a mass application. Two relevant sentences are enough, but they have to be there. |
| “Are you open to office or hybrid work?” | A formal filter behind 10% of all rejections — “unsuitable working conditions.” It is checked twice, at screening and at the final round. |
Salary expectations
The question comes up almost every time, and its weight is overestimated in both directions. Rejection specifically over money is rare. Dodging the answer is also not as fatal as commonly believed: recruiters are explicitly taught not to push. Huntflow’s guidance says that if one or two attempts to find out the desired income fail, the conversation is better postponed to later stages.
The reason the question comes up so early lies in the vacancies themselves. They rarely state a salary: an independent scrape of 62,000 Python vacancies on hh.ru from August 2025 to April 2026 found a salary range in only 38%. In the rest, the candidate names a figure blind, and the recruiter checks it against a budget the candidate cannot see. hh.ru considers a 15–20% increase on current income a normal raise when switching jobs.
The figure named in conversation is almost always understood as gross salary, and take-home pay is lower. The gap grows with income: since 2025 the personal income tax (NDFL) rate is no longer flat, and the part of year-to-date earnings above 2.4 million ₽ is taxed at 15%. How much smaller the amount on the card will be is shown by the salary calculator: it computes the tax on a cumulative basis and names the month from which the rate goes up.
What recruiters read in a resume
Most often things never get as far as a conversation: the candidate is rejected when the resume is reviewed. A recruiter at Infostart puts it this way: 5–7 seconds go into each resume, and 60–70% of applications are screened out at this point. The decision is made on what is visible at a glance.
Recruiters who describe their criteria publicly name roughly the same set of grounds for rejection. An IT researcher at MTS lists poor spelling and grammar, inflated skills — “four months ago he barely finished a course, and today he presents himself as an ML developer with three years of experience” — unexplained gaps in experience, and template cover letters where the company name was never changed. The head of recruiting at KODE adds resumes without specifics: a line like “developed backend for web applications” says nothing.
A separate source of distortion is the candidate’s internal profile, created during a previous contact with the company: recruiters often work from it, and its data go stale. A candidate who described their interviews in February 2026 ran into this at Yandex: the recruiter negotiated based on the salary figure from the old profile — one the candidate had not named this time. A fresh file attached to the application does not affect such a profile.
How long to wait for a reply
Lack of feedback is the most widespread complaint about hiring, and it has been measured. According to an hh.ru survey of 2,200 job seekers conducted in August 2023, 40% lose interest in a vacancy if there is no reply within three days. That deadline is met in roughly half of cases: 28% of job seekers waited longer, and 10% received no reply at all. Silence is harder to bear than rejection — 90% would rather be turned down right away.
AI in screening
On the candidate side, neural networks have entered hiring on a mass scale: according to an Anketolog survey (1,800 people, June 2026), 54% improve their resume with AI (in Russian), and 34% tailor it to a specific vacancy. The effect turned out to be the opposite of what was expected. Cloud.ru’s head of hiring sums up the result in one observation: “Resumes became perfect, even too perfect. Cover letters resembled each other: the same words, syntax and structure.” In a stream of identical texts, a generated resume no longer makes the candidate stand out. Whether it actually lowers their chances is unknown: nobody has measured it, and all there is so far is recruiters’ irritation.
On the employer side, automated screening exists but lives in high-volume hiring. In February 2026 Just AI and Potok Recruitment launched an AI recruiter that calls hundreds of candidates a day; such bots work in retail, logistics and call centers. There is no confirmation that developers are screened this way, and the overall picture is more modest than commonly assumed: by the estimate of the developers of these systems themselves, about 5% of Russian companies use AI in hiring.
Screen or camera monitoring during screening has not been recorded in Russian hiring: no major company publicly requires anything like sharing the whole screen. There is little to check here anyway — the conversation is about the candidate’s own experience, and outside prompting helps little. At this stage what stands out is not the prompt but a pause during which the person is clearly reading something.
FAQ
Should I name my salary expectations first?
Yes, if you know the market. hh.ru advises naming a specific amount: the decision is made by the hiring manager, not the recruiter, and a vague answer gives the recruiter nothing to pass on. The same source considers a 15–20% increase on current income a normal raise when switching jobs. Clarify right away which figure you mean — gross or take-home: Russian vacancies quote gross by default, and the take-home amount will be smaller by the personal income tax (NDFL).
What happens if I dodge the question about money?
Most likely, nothing serious. Recruiters are explicitly taught not to push: Huntflow’s guidance says that if one or two attempts to find out the desired income fail, the conversation is better postponed to later stages. Rejection specifically over salary expectations is rare: it accounts for 5% of rejections, against 58% for a skills mismatch.
How should I answer “tell me about yourself”?
It tests whether you can talk about your experience coherently. A formula that works: two minutes, three parts — what you do now and in what context, one or two projects with results in numbers, and why this vacancy interests you. Anything older than five years and unrelated to the role stays out.
How is an HR interview different from screening?
At most Russian companies it isn’t: it is the same conversation with a recruiter at the start of the funnel. A separate “HR interview” as a second stage is rare, and when it exists it is about motivation and expectations. Don’t confuse it with the final round — that takes place with the team and the hiring manager after the technical sections, and it decides whether you will work well together.
How long does screening take?
It depends on the kind of screening. A short phone call, according to hh.ru, lasts from one to ten minutes, five to six on average. A full HR interview takes longer: T-Bank officially allots 30 to 60 minutes to the first stage. If a short call runs long, that is usually a good sign: the recruiter is already selling the vacancy.
Should I write my resume with a neural network?
As an editor, yes; as an author, no. Cloud.ru’s head of hiring describes the effect like this: “Resumes became perfect, even too perfect. Cover letters resembled each other: the same words, syntax and structure.” There is no evidence yet that such a resume actually lowers your chances — nobody has measured it. But the project specifics and the numbers behind your results should be your own: those are exactly what will be taken apart in the experience section.
Sources
- hh.ru and Talantix: why employers reject candidates (in Russian) — March 2023, an analysis of 2.7 million rejection reasons entered by recruiters: skills 58%, salary expectations 5%, discriminatory factors 10%.
- hh.ru: the first phone conversation with a recruiter (in Russian) — call length, what the recruiter finds out and how they read the answers.
- hh.ru: how long candidates are willing to wait for a reply (in Russian) — a survey of 2,200 job seekers, August 2023.
- T-Bank: how the interview works (in Russian) — one of the few large employers that publish the length of the first stage: 30–60 minutes.
- Notes of an IT researcher at MTS (in Russian) — December 2025: red flags in resume screening, with examples.
- A recruiter’s view: 43,000 applications in a year (in Russian) — March 2026: 5–7 seconds per resume, 60–70% screened out at the first review. One company’s annual funnel (Infostart) and the author’s estimate, not a market-wide measurement.
- KODE’s head of recruiting: what gets you screened out in the first ten minutes (in Russian) — resumes without specifics and an inflated range “with room to negotiate.”
- Notes from HR: ChatGPT, what have you done to hiring? (in Russian) — June 2025, Cloud.ru’s head of hiring on “AI slop” in resumes and cover letters.
- Huntflow: how a recruiter should talk to a candidate about money (in Russian) — the method from the other side of the table, including the rule not to push on the income question.
The other stages of the funnel are covered in the overview of developer interview stages. Next in order is the live coding section, where every company sets its own environment rules.