The holy grail of recruitment is finding a quick, easy, and accurate way to automate candidate shortlisting.
As organizations start to embrace the idea that recruiting and retaining talented employees represents a competitive advantage, Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report finds that HR departments are being tasked to redesign everything they do to change the way organizations hire, manage, and support their people.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite these demands for change, the classic challenges of recruitment remain including how to find, attract, screen, and shortlist candidates.
Shortlisting is often the most challenging and time-consuming step in the recruitment process.
A survey of talent acquisition leaders found that while 46% struggle with attracting strong candidates in the current candidate-driven talent market, 52% said the most difficult part of recruitment was identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool.
While sourcing remains a major problem especially for high-demand roles, it’s a challenge that is largely being solved with modern recruitment marketing practices such as developing a strong talent brand, nurturing talent communities, and paying competitive wages.
Screening and shortlisting quickly and efficiently, on the other hand, are challenges that still remain.
To help you solve this talent acquisition bottleneck, we created this comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to effectively, efficiently, and accurately shortlist candidates to move forward in your recruitment process.
Watch our 2-minute video on shortlisting below:
Shortlisting is the process of identifying the candidates from your applicant pool who best meet the required and desired criteria for the open req and who you want to move forward onto the next step of your recruitment process, which is usually some form of interview.
In other words, creating a “short list” of candidates you want to talk to.
In the recruitment process, shortlisting comes after sourcing (finding and attracting) and before interviewing and further assessing. Screening and shortlisting often happens simultaneously: as you screen resumes from candidates, you shortlist the best ones to move forward.
There are a lot of technical and legal considerations that go into a proper shortlisting process. We’ll go over each issue below.
These are the essential and desirable criteria needed to do the job and the minimum level that the shortlisted candidate should have.
These criteria should be related to on-the-job performance and ideally should be captured in the job description.
Developing the right criteria is a balance between standards that are high enough to ensure good quality candidates move forward, but not too strict that you’d be unnecessarily screening out a lot of qualified candidates.
Your shortlist criteria should be based on:
Your shortlist criteria should not be based on:
A short note on legal and discrimination issues: Using criteria that are correlated with job performance to shortlist candidates helps you avoid legal and discrimination issues.
Make sure your criteria doesn’t discriminate against any legally protected classes in the first place. The important thing here is to apply your criteria consistently, fairly, and objectively across all candidates.
Essential criteria are the ones that a candidate must meet to be considered for the role.
A simple example of an essential criterion is whether the candidate is legally able to work in the country. These types of criteria are often called knockout questions because either the candidate has it and can move forward or they don’t and gets screened out immediately.
Desirable criteria, on the other hand, are ones that would make someone a stronger candidate for the role. These are often considered nice-to-haves. An example of a desirable criterion is a professional certification.
In a lot of cases, the difference between essential and desirable criteria often becomes blurred. For example, a hiring manager may desire a minimum of three years of experience in a particular role. If the majority of the candidates have at least three years of experience, that criterion becomes essential by default when candidates with less experience get screened out.
Remember to keep your process consistent across all candidates to avoid legal and discrimination issues.
Take the essential and desirable criteria you’ve identified above and create a shortlist scorecard for your candidates. The purpose of this scorecard is to list out each criteria so that you can assign a rating for each screened in candidate.
How many candidates do you have to shortlist to get a successful hire?
When it comes to deciding the length of your shortlist, most people have a pre-determined number in mind. For example, interviewing four to six candidates to get one successful hire.
For high volume recruitment roles like customer service representatives where you need to hire hundreds of people, you might shortlist any candidate that meets your criteria.
The best way to determine the length of your shortlist is to work backwards from the average conversion rates in your own recruitment process. As a reference point, the industry average application to interview conversion rate is 12%, the interview to offer conversion rate is 17%, and the offer to accepted conversion rate is 89%.
According to these numbers:
According to industry stats, 75% of applicants are unqualified and 88% are not strong enough to move forward to an interview.
When 75 to 88 percent of the resumes you receive for an open req are ones you have to screen out, it’s obvious why shortlisting is the most time-consuming part of recruitment.
Traditionally, screening and shortlisting candidates were manual processes. These days, a job opening receives 250 resumes on average, which can take up to 23 hours per hire just to screen resumes, rate each candidate using your scorecard, and determine your final candidate shortlist.
Recruiters and talent acquisition leaders realized long ago this was a major problem, so they turned to technology: the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) was invented. In many ways, ATS software has been a boon. Of the organizations who use one, 94% say an ATS improved their hiring process.
Unfortunately, some of these strengths of an ATS have become their weaknesses. It’s become common knowledge that most ATS software use keyword matching to screen resumes, which has led to candidates gaming the system through keyword stuffing on their resumes.
Traditional ATS software wasn’t designed to improve how it shortlists candidates by learning which ones went on to become successful and unsuccessful employees. That means each new req needs to re-invent the wheel, even for the same roles you’ve filled previously.
So while ATS software is virtually a must-have these days for recruitment and talent acquisition departments, their limited functionality is understandably frustrating.
But just like the invention of the ATS, technology is again coming to the rescue to enable the next generation of candidate shortlisting.
The current explosion in data analytics technology is enabling the next generation of shortlist tools. This is being called “intelligent shortlisting” or applying the “big data treatment” to candidate information.
Industry experts believe the adoption of automation tools that reduce — if not remove — time-consuming recruiting activities won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
In a nutshell, intelligent shortlisting is adding functionality to an existing ATS that allows it to rate, rank, and shortlist candidates beyond keyword matching.
Artificial intelligence comes to recruitment.
Initial results are extremely promising. Companies that have adopted these types of algorithms into their recruitment process have seen their turnover rates decrease by 35%, performance increase by 20%, and revenue per employee improve by 4%.
AI software that automates shortlisting lives inside your existing ATS so it doesn’t disrupt your workflow, the candidate workflow, nor require IT support.
Couple this with the 23 hours you save per hire by automating screening in the first place, AI-powered shortlisting represents the holy grail of recruitment.
Remember to bookmark this post and keep it as a resource to answer all of your shortlist questions!
6 tools and technologies to improve the efficiency of your candidate shortlist.
A list of the 5 best strategies to shortlist candidates
How speeding up how you shortlist candidates can improve candidate experience.