Shortlisting Candidates: The All-In-One Guide (+ Matrix Template)

Organizations are beginning to recognize that recruiting and retaining top talent is essential for meeting business goals and maintaining a competitive advantage. Shortlisting is arguably the most challenging and lengthy step in the hiring journey. Although marketing and employer branding practices can help in sourcing candidates, successfully screening and shortlisting candidates still presents a challenge for most companies. But shortlisting effectively is essential for finding (and hiring) the right person for the right role.

In addition, research has found that 50% of applicants surveyed turned down a job offer because the hiring process took too long, so shortlisting at speed is equally important to ensure you don’t miss out on your best candidates.

In this article, we’ll explore what candidate shortlisting is and how to design an efficient shortlisting process.

The criteria for shortlisting candidates is a crucial part of the recruitment process, where recruiters and hiring managers must identify which candidates from their talent pool are best suited to the role in question and a good cultural fit for the organization.

The aim is to narrow down the list and determine a set of qualified candidates who will progress to the next stage of the hiring journey. Typically, organizations will have a list of essential skills and experience and desirable skills and experience for each role. If candidates tick all these boxes and look like a good cultural fit, they will be shortlisted for the position.

Shortlisting happens at multiple stages in the recruitment process. There is resume shortlisting, skills test shortlisting, and interview shortlisting (including at the phone, video, and in-person stages).

In the table below, you can see the different screening types and the stage they occur during the hiring process.

The first step in the shortlisting process is for HR and/or hiring managers to review candidate resumes to assess the overall quality of the received applications. They will evaluate the CVs to see whether the candidates have the required qualifications, skills, and experience for the role they have applied for.

Professionalism and attention to detail (sloppy grammatical mistakes on a resume or cover letter) will often lead to a candidate being automatically disqualified, particularly if there is a surplus of candidates.

The next step is to determine your criteria for shortlisting candidates. There will typically be a mix of essential criteria and desirable criteria that you’ve defined at the beginning of the recruitment process.

Essential criteria are anything you consider vital for a candidate to succeed in the role, for example, a minimum qualification. Desirable criteria is something that is not essential but will give a candidate a competitive advantage, for example, the number of years of experience they have.

The next step in the shortlisting process is to create a candidate shortlisting matrix or scorecard. This scorecard will consider your essential and desirable criteria so that you can assign a numerical rating for each criterion for all screened candidates.

For example, let’s say you’re hiring for a trainee buying position. Your scorecard might include:

For each of these criteria, the candidate will be given a score (for example, between 1-10) based on how well they fit that criteria. Each criterion can be given a “weighting” – a percentage figure to determine how important these criteria are against all other criteria.

A scorecard ensures that you assess all candidates fairly and against the criteria rather than each other. This allows for a more objective evaluation and for identifying the strongest candidates.

The next stage is to assess your candidates against the criteria in your matrix.

Perform an initial screening to eliminate any applications that lack your essential criteria. In cases where you have many applications, you may need to move to your desirable criteria list and use this to determine who will progress to the next round.

You may need to add an extra screening aspect, such as a short phone call before the interview stage to shortlist further. Keep doing this until your number of candidates is as close as possible to your target shortlist number.

From here, you can conduct a detailed evaluation of each candidate based on your predetermined criteria. Be sure to maintain consistency throughout the scoring process.

Once you have assessed all your applications, the final step is to create a shortlist of your top candidates using a shortlisting matrix. Take the candidates you’ve evaluated and compare them side by side to each other.

That helps you make decisions about who you want to move to the next stage of the recruitment process or who your top candidate is.

Using a shortlisting matrix template helps you save time in calculating candidate scores, making the shortlisting process more efficient. What’s more, such a document creates a record of how decisions were made, providing clarity and accountability, especially if hiring decisions are ever questioned.

Here’s what a shortlisting matrix template in Excel could look like: