This study evaluates employers’ motives for screening job applicants’ personal characteristics and investigates implications of this practice for applicants using the Korean Human Capital Corporate Panel for 568 firms and five biannual periods, 2004-2012. The number of stages in recruiting, and the importance attributed to screening of traits related more to applicants’ socio-economic background than to their productivity – birthplace, appearance and name of their alma mater – are linked to firms’ skill needs, and conditions and constraints in local labor markets. Screening of personal factors is thought to be gender-biased and to affect particularly female applicants. To investigate adverse impacts on applicants’ outcomes, screening practices are linked to women’s share among firms’ hires.Among skill needs, employers’ reliance on workers’ capacity for comprehension of work organization is found to affect the extent of screening positively. Reliance on workers’ other skills, however, does not explain screening practices as much as constraints on employers’ conduct do. Applicant pool size affects screening positively, confirming that the benefit of screening increases when firms face more choice in hiring. Existence of HR departments, and worker unionization diminish the influence of personal factors in recruiting, but add stages to the recruiting process, suggesting bureaucratic constraints on firms’ recruiting practices.Skill needs have the expected effect on female ratio among hires, positive for communication skills and comprehension of work organization, and negative for technical skills, reflecting true differences in the prevalence of skills across genders or employers’ perceptions of them. Existence of an HR department or a personnel committee on the board, foreign management and firm size favor women, suggesting that these factors serve as constraints on statistical or taste-based discrimination. Applicant pool size works against women: The more choice firms have whom to hire, the lower share of women they choose. Correspondingly, firms hiring more workers than planned select a lower share of women. These facts suggest that when the applicant pool includes many qualified workers, particularly men, firms screen workers more and as a byproduct hire fewer women. Stated differently, when firms hire a baseline number of women to satisfy anti-discrimination laws, they may continue hiring based on statistical and taste-based factors, and choose only men.