How to Shortlist Candidates

You’ve written a stellar job ad for a fundraising vacancy you're looking to fill. It’s been live for 30 days and has received an encouraging number of applications.

Your next team member is waiting to greet you like a warm hug on a winter’s night, however, to find that individual you need to trawl through 80 CVs and cover letters. Of the 80 hopefuls, you want to whittle it down to say, five or six people to interview.

It’s an arduous and time-consuming process. But it’s a vital piece of the recruitment puzzle.

For those of you who are new to the process, what’s the best way to shortlist candidates? Here’s a short guide.

1. Decide how many candidates you want on your shortlist

There’s no ideal number to shortlist to find your dream hire, nor is there a minimum or limit on how many people you can interview. So, it all comes down to how much time you have to invest in the shortlisting and interviews.

2. Determine your shortlist criteria

Once you’ve determined the length of your shortlist, you need to decide on the skills and knowledge you feel are needed for the role (incidentally, these details should at least in part, have been captured in the job description and person specification).

The criteria should correlate with job performance, based on the qualities and traits of the top performing employees in your charity who work in a similar role.

In broad terms, your shortlist criteria should include the following:

• Education: Does your new hire need to meet a minimum entry requirement, such as a degree with a minimum classification?

• Work experience: Do they need to have had experience at a particular type of charity, or in a particular field, such as corporate or major donor fundraising?

• Skills and knowledge: Do they need job-related expertise, such as data analysis or project management skills?

• Personality traits: Are interpersonal skills, effective team-working, or the ability to negotiate and influence people important for the role? If not, what is?

• Competencies: Does the candidate need to excel at certain things, such as problem-solving, decision making or leadership?

Once narrowed down, you’ll need to categorise the criteria into ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’.

Essential criteria are the things a candidate must meet to be considered for the role. While desirable criteria are those that would make someone a stronger candidate for the role but are not deal-breakers.

Bear in mind that, by law, the criteria you use must not discriminate against legally protected categories of applicants such as their age, sex, religion, or any disabilities they may have.

3. Create a shortlist scorecard

The next stage is to take your essential and desirable criteria and create a scorecard.

If you’re hiring someone for a community fundraising role, for example, your scorecard might include excellent organisational skills, strong interpersonal skills, and volunteer coordination experience. In each case, you’d provide a score of say 1-3 based on how well they fit each criterion.

Having a shortlist scorecard serves two purposes: it will ensure you’re applying each criterion fairly and consistently across all candidates and enable you to easily identify the strongest candidates.

4. Rank candidates against the scorecard

You’re now ready to start shortlisting. Firstly, reject all the applications that are missing essential criteria. Next, consider your desired criteria. Your approach here will depend on how far away you are from your target shortlist number. If you’ve got a lot of candidates to exclude, start by rejecting the ones with the fewest desirable criteria. Once you’re nearer your target, score each candidate based on how many of the desirable criteria they meet. You can then compare candidates and keep the best ones on your shortlist.

5. Pick up the phone

If, after all of the above steps, you still need to eliminate more candidates, you can always introduce a further screening aspect into your shortlisting process, such as a Skype chat or phone call.

If you go down this route, prepare a set of job-specific questions and be sure to ask each candidate the same questions in the same order. Make notes on their responses and score each answer in a matrix.

6. Let unsuccessful applicants know the score

This final point is an important one that many employers don’t bother with - and that’s to make sure you inform unsuccessful applicants that they’ve been… well, unsuccessful.

An email or short phone call is all it takes. It’s an act of courtesy that will make all the difference to the jobseeker and will do wonders for brand perception and public relations.

Final Word

These are a few of the basic steps you need to take to shortlist candidates. But the best way to ensure you get the best person for the job is to enlist the help of an expert.

This is where Bamboo comes in. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the process started.