Poor Mental Health at Work!
Drawing up your final shortlist
Prior to your recruitment campaign, you should have a good idea of how many CVs you’d like to receive for the role, and from those CVs, an idea of how many candidates you would like to see for interview.
Key points:
- When faced with a large volume of CVs, it’s important to re-visit your job description and home in on the skills, experience and qualities you are looking for when compiling your shortlist.
- Compare applicants against your job specification and person specification, and eliminate candidates that do not meet the basic requirements of the role.
- If you’re finding it difficult to differentiate between the most suitable candidates, a good idea is to draw up a table listing each candidate against the essential requirements of the role. Then, you grade each candidate by giving them a mark out of ten for each requirement. Those who score most highly across the board form your shortlist. If you are still left with too many candidates then do the same exercise with non-essential requirements to narrow your list down further.
- If you’re undecided on whether to invite a particular candidate to a face-to-face interview, a telephone interview can be an effective way of narrowing down your shortlist. This is particularly useful when the role demands a lot of communication via telephone. During the phone interview, the candidate will have to demonstrate their communication skills to you.
Using these techniques will help you to decide on the best shortlist for first interviews
From then, you can then narrow down how many candidates you would like to select for a second interview, again those that most closely match the requirements of the role, and highlighted from the first stage interview, those that will be a good fit for your company.
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