5 things to remember while shortlisting candidates for interview

Posted by Postajob Uk on April 27th, 2021

The process of boarding the right candidates for a job role obviously starts with short listing candidates for an interview. Of course, with a job advertisement on leading job portals, you can draw several applicants.

In this article, Post a Job helps you with 5 tips to identify the right candidates from a large pool of applicants which is the hardest part of recruitment. Let’s look at the basics before we get into the actual topic.

What is a short listing?
It is the process of picking the candidates that meet the criteria set in the job listing. You take into account this list to move forward with in the recruitment process. This will allow recruiters to have an initial talk or interview as part of the recruitment process.

How to create a strong shortlisting process?
Shortlisting can sound great. However, just knowing the definition doesn’t help narrow down your growing pool of candidates. Take these tips into consideration to build a shortlisting process and interview the right candidates at the right time.

1. Determine your criteria
Advertise Jobs and categorize the candidates with strong, average, and affordable. These qualifications will become the criteria for your shortlist. Strong candidates can be the basic formula to invite for an interview and later going with the rest of the categories.

If you’re not sure what your criteria should be, you can take a look at the individuals already operating in that position, or if you’re replacing someone. Ask them what skills they believe are most important to their job.

2. Drop candidates who are missing your criteria
There’s no meaning in wasting your time by shortlisting a candidate who doesn’t have the minimum criteria you’re looking for. If you’re expecting a high volume of applicants, you can automate this process.

Keyword identifying tools can be the best solution to weed candidates who don’t meet your basics. But just be careful that your automation process is working appropriately. You can’t accidentally remove any qualified candidates.

3. Try drawing in candidates
There might be some job roles that don’t have the candidates exactly fitting into the criteria, and lag very few kills apart from the major ones. When you Advertise a Job, you might haven’t thought of such a situation occurring.

In such special cases, there’s no other option except trying to draw or shortlist candidates who are meeting most of the set standards. However, it’s more responsible to have interaction with the technical team before you invite them for the interview.

4. Make screening a parameter of success
You might feel some natural pull towards certain candidates, and this is common while the subconscious bias is in. So screening applicants for anything other than the criteria you’ve established, you might end up with the wrong team member.

Make sure the screening you do removes all demographic data from resumes and applications. Just focusing on the relevant criteria, you can reduce hiring bias and prevent it from creeping into your hiring process.

5. Finalize the count number
If you’re cutting down your applicant pool, you can make the further process of getting in a candidate much faster and easier. That’s the reason you need to set a list of candidates at the initial stage.

There might be a set number or it could be a percentage of applicants. You can also find this number by estimating for a certain role, and how many candidates you’ve interviewed in the past out of everyone.