How Many Candidates To Shortlist For An Interview?

When you are recruiting for a role, getting lots of qualified candidates is the best way to find the right person for the job - but it can be overwhelming sifting through dozens of applicants to try and find the perfect candidate.

To overcome this, you need to be able to whittle down the candidates to create a shortlist - a manageable number of applicants who meet the criteria for the role and should be invited to the final stage of the process; the interview.

What is candidate shortlisting?

Candidate shortlisting is a process where the recruitment team filters and sorts applicants to create a list of those that are most suitable for the role.

To make the shortlist, candidates need to meet certain criteria - usually, the skills, traits, qualifications, and experience that are listed in the job description.

Creating a candidate shortlist makes recruitment more streamlined, as interviewing dozens of candidates without some sort of basic screening would be a very long-winded and expensive process, making the time to recruit much longer, and risking missing out on the best person for the role.

The candidate shortlist should be a handful of people who have applied for the role and are already pre-qualified by meeting both essential and desirable criteria.

Why is candidate shortlisting important?

Candidate shortlisting is one of the most important steps of the recruitment process, especially if you are looking to save time and money while also getting the best person hired for the job.

A popular job posting could receive dozens if not hundreds of applicants, and without some sort of structure to streamline and filter these applicants, managing the recruitment process soon becomes unwieldy and much more difficult, which is obviously something that you want to avoid.

Every stage of the process needs to be undertaken with the idea of selecting the best candidates at the end. This should begin from the resume or the application form, and follow through right to the final stage interviews, with the idea that the only candidates left by that stage are the ones who have demonstrated that they have what it takes to be successful in the role.

What to consider when shortlisting candidates

The criteria that you choose for the role you are recruiting for will change depending on what you need.

In most cases, you should base that criteria on the traits, skills, and qualifications of people who are already successful in the role.

Most recruiters will have two distinct lists of criteria: essential criteria and desirable criteria. Some examples of these are below.

Essential criteria are the non-negotiables of the role. These are the basics needed that every candidate should have, and if they do not their application will be rejected. They might include specific qualifications, length of experience, or leadership skills, for example.

The desirable criteria are the ‘nice-to-haves’. These are not critical to the role, but they will make the candidate a better choice overall. Some examples of this include industry-relevant certification, teamwork skills, or knowledge of a particular software.

The other things to think about when creating a candidate shortlist are more personal to the business you are recruiting for.

Volume hiring might be less restrictive on criteria because they need to hire multiple people for the same role, whereas a management role needs very selective criteria. The type of role makes a real difference.

You also need to consider the culture of the workplace as well as diversity and inclusion policies - you might need to add certain criteria based on the type of person that is needed for the role.

The way you shortlist candidates will also depend on the amount of time and resources you have for recruitment. For example, you might be able to use pre-employment assessments, but you might not have the budget for a top-of-the-range Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

Pros and cons of shortlisting a large number of candidates

Getting lots of responses to a job posting is excellent - it means that there is a lot of interest in the position you have advertised.

In some cases, you might only use some very basic criteria - like English as a first language or a right to work in the country - and then invite everyone who passes to interview.

While this ensures that there is no chance of a hidden gem falling by the wayside in the process, it is a very labor-intensive way of getting a result and probably only really suitable for roles that are considered volume hiring, such as in a call center.

Pros and cons of shortlisting a small number of candidates

Getting a shortlist down to a more manageable number is the aim - being able to focus on just a handful of candidates for a more thorough interview process means that the recruitment team and the employers can get to know more about the candidates.

However, if the caliber of candidates that have applied for the role is not good enough, then a smaller shortlist might mean that you have no quality candidates after the interview process. This can be due to a number of reasons - but if you come out of the shortlisting process with just one candidate who isn't successful in the interview, you might need to look at the whole process and the criteria you are using.

Different approaches to shortlisting candidates

The way you shortlist candidates will change depending on a number of factors, including the type of role, the timeframe you need to hire in, and the budget you have available.

Smaller businesses might be able to get away with a simple manual paper sift, comparing candidates to a list of essential and desirable criteria and rejecting the ones that don't make the grade - but that is time-consuming and can lead to biased decisions being made, so there are other options available.

Some of the best ways to shortlist candidates are below.

Using an applicant tracking system (ATS)

The traditional manual reading of the resume or application form is pretty outdated, not to mention time-consuming.

When recruiting, using ATS throughout will make each stage much more simple - and that includes resume screening.

The ATS can filter through all the application forms and resumes, picking out the keywords related to the essential criteria that you have requested, rejecting those that don't make the grade.

The ATS can also provide a ranking system on the remaining candidates, putting the applicants who meet more than one of the desirable criteria as well - so you will already have a shortlist to hand before you move on to the next stage.

Conducting pre-employment assessments

In most recruitment processes, pre-employment screening tests tend to be used directly after the paper sift, and they are another unbiased way to filter out the less qualified candidates if you use the right aptitude, psychometric, and personality tests.

Some of the tests that are popular include:

• Numerical reasoning

• Verbal reasoning

• Logical reasoning

You might want to test soft skills in your candidates, which means looking at communication, teamwork, leadership, and situational judgment.

You might be looking for specific hard skills like software knowledge, or coding ability, or even things like error checking and organization.

The tests will have benchmarks that you can use, rejecting any applicants who have not reached the required score as this means that they have not demonstrated the right level of skill or competency that you are looking for.

Reviewing work samples and portfolios

The next stage, which is particularly useful for creative roles, is looking at work samples and portfolios.

You want to know that the candidate is not only qualified to do the daily tasks, but also capable of doing it too. This is not easy to gauge in a typical way when it comes to roles like content creation, graphic design, marketing, and copywriting.

Using a portfolio to see what the candidate has done before can help, as can looking at samples of work that they have completed for other businesses.

Best practices in shortlisting candidates

The most important part of shortlisting is that you have clear criteria that you are using.

Both the essential and desirable criteria need to have a business case - there needs to be a job-related reason that you are looking for that specific trait or skill.

Using clear criteria for the role also ensures that you do not risk falling into a bias trap - whether conscious or unconscious. By taking the risk of human error out of the equation, especially in the early part of the process, the candidates that are on the shortlist will have made it there because they have demonstrated that they are right for the job - ready for the interview stage.

The machine learning of the ATS and the benchmark scores of the aptitude tests in particular do not take into account any characteristics that might be discriminatory or even protected.

The ATS in particular is a great tool for recruitment, streamlining the process, ensuring that metrics are measured, and giving recruiters all the data they need about each candidate - including contact details.

A streamlined and effective recruitment process is good for the business, but it is also good for the candidate, and they want to be kept in the loop about what is happening at each stage.

While you are working through the shortlisting process, make sure that you are contacting each candidate, whether that is to let them know that they have got through to the next stage or that their application has been rejected.

Shortlisting candidates: is there a right number?

When you are shortlisting candidates, the key points to remember are:

• Create clear criteria, both essential and desirable, and use this to filter through applicants.

• Make use of technology like ATS and pre-employment assessments to streamline the process and remove bias.

• Keep in contact with candidates throughout the process.

When you have followed all the steps to reduce the number of candidates and distill the applicant pool, you should have between **3-5 **candidates left to take to the interview stage (although this does depend on the position and seniority).