Definitely elevator pitch your game.
"It's a Lovecraftian cyberpunk game that focuses more on action than horror, with the good guys thwarting sinister incursions left and right."
If nobody bites, they're not interested. Include the genre and feel, as well as, if necessary, hints about the type of game. If they're veteran roleplayers, this is probably only necessary for the little first bits.
It's really hard to screen player compatibility beforehand. I've had mixed luck with this myself in my games; try to find a way for people to submit anonymous feedback-I've had players hate my games but be afraid of saying it to my face (and some who haven't, but they're not going to be a recurring issue because you can fix the game if it's broken or simply acknowledge that it's not going to be for them). I've used Google Docs for this, since it allows people to submit feedback relatively quickly and, more importantly, anonymously (if they choose to do so). It also reinforces the fact that you're listening to them, and want to see what they're going to enjoy at the table. Unfortunately, the game has to start for this to work, though you can do a demo session easily enough.
Alternatively, know your players beforehand. If you don't, you'll have to accept that the group just may not be in the game for the same reasons and you won't be able to get a feel for what they like-most of my players are all pretty happy with the standard "run-and-gun" feel of a hack-n-slash game, though one is much more interested in diplomacy (but not to the exclusion of firefights) and another is heavily invested in setting lore (which can preclude certain settings, and lead to some unfortunate metagaming). When I first ran Shadowrun with them, I hardly knew them, but it came together fairly well because those that I knew well got along with the style of the game, and it turned out that the other players were like-minded.
As far as the screening process goes, it's hard to do it without making it into an interview. You'll basically either have to get to know your prospective players, or you need to set up an interview. As a general rule, if it sounds interesting to them, they'll do well in it, so you can try with the elevator pitch thing. That said, tabletop gaming isn't set in stone, so you're likely to have a catastrophic-seeming failure.
Sometimes, as a GM, the importance is not finding the right group for the game, but finding the right story for the group. My Shadowrun players, for instance, went into the game wide-eyed and guns blazing, but by the end of the campaign they were still combat monsters and kings of the world, but they'd learned that royalty has its limits, and embraced the paranoid and dark nature of the setting, in part through constant betrayal from people they trusted who had been suborned by their enemies. This from a campaign whose second session involved the troll taking a leak on a (severely injured) unconscious guard. They went from maniacs out for a good time to careful, professional runners, and enjoyed the game just as much even though subtle methods had turned it from what they'd originally wanted to play into a much more serious, dark, but still epic campaign.