How to shortlist candidates: a practical guide with a worked example

To shortlist candidates, decide how many people you can actually interview, take everyone who clearly meets your must-haves, put them in order by the evidence for your nice-to-haves, and write down a reason for every name on the list and every near miss that isn’t. A shortlist is a decision about where to spend interview time. It isn’t a verdict on who is good enough, and treating it that way makes it both faster and fairer.

This guide picks up where screening a large pile of resumes leaves off. You’ve read every application against the same requirements. Now you have to decide who gets a call.

What a shortlist is for

Interviews cost time: preparing, an hour or so each, writing up, and coordinating calendars. You can’t interview everyone who could do the job, so you choose. The risk is in how you choose.

Two shortcuts are common. The first is shortlisting by impression: the applications that read best, or the first good ones you found. The second is shortlisting by a single easy signal, such as years of experience or a well-known previous employer. Both select the people who are easiest to evaluate, not necessarily the best. Years of job experience, for example, correlated just .07 with later performance in a 2022 re-analysis of selection research.

Step 1: Set the size before you look

Work backwards from your interview capacity. If you can run six first interviews next week, and you expect one or two people to withdraw or accept another offer, a shortlist of six to eight is about right.

There is no research-backed ideal shortlist size. Capacity is the honest constraint, and setting the number first stops it drifting to fit whoever you happen to like. If far more people qualify than you can see, add a short step that tells you more, such as a 15-minute phone screen or a short work sample, rather than cutting the group arbitrarily.

Step 2: Start from the must-haves, not the best resume

Sort every screened application into three groups:

Group	What it means	What to do
Meets every must-have	Clear evidence for each must-have in the application	Eligible for the shortlist
Unclear on one or more	Nothing contradicts a must-have, but nothing confirms it	Ask, before deciding
Clearly misses a must-have	Evidence shows a must-have isn’t met	Not shortlisted; reason written down

Only the first group goes straight to ranking. The middle group is where qualified people get lost. An application that doesn’t mention a requirement hasn’t shown that the person lacks it, and a one-line question by email often settles it.

This matters at scale. In a survey of 2,275 employers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, Harvard Business School and Accenture (2021) found that 88% of employers who used recruiting software to filter or rank applicants said it screened out qualified high-skills candidates at least some of the time, because they didn’t match the exact criteria in the job description. A person reading quickly does the same thing.

If you don’t have a written list of must-haves yet, start with must-have vs nice-to-have.

Step 3: Rank within the eligible group

Everyone in the first group can do the essentials, so rank them on what is left:

1. Nice-to-haves with evidence. Count how many each person shows, using the same list for everyone.
2. Strength of the evidence. “Ran the month-end close for a 40-person company” is stronger than “involved in month-end activities”. Our guide to what counts as evidence has a simple ladder for this.
3. Ties stay tied. If two people are level at the cut-off, take both, or take neither and look again. Don’t break a tie on something you didn’t decide in advance.

A worked example

Larkspur Partners, a fictional accounting firm used throughout our guides, is hiring a Senior Accountant. Its two must-haves are a CPA designation and having run a month-end close independently. Its nice-to-haves are audit working papers, cloud accounting and a public accounting background. The partner can run six first interviews.

The figures below are invented for illustration. Of 180 applications, 31 met both must-haves, 14 were unclear on one, and the rest clearly missed at least one. Here are the applicants around the cut-off after ranking the 31:

Applicant	Must-haves	Audit papers	Cloud ledger	Public accounting	Evidence strength	Decision
A	Both	Yes	Yes	Yes	Owned the close and audit	Shortlist
B	Both	Yes	Yes	No	Owned the close	Shortlist
C	Both	Yes	No	Yes	Owned the close	Shortlist
F	Both	No	Yes	Yes	Led the close for a quarter	Shortlist (6th)
G	Both	No	Yes	Yes	Led the close for a quarter	Tie with F: shortlist both
H	Both	No	No	Yes	Owned the close	Near miss

Applicants D and E (not shown) also made the list. F and G were level on everything the firm had decided mattered, so the partner interviewed seven rather than inventing a tie-breaker. Meanwhile, the 14 unclear applicants were each sent one question. Three answered in a way that put them among the strongest eligible applicants, and they were added to the shortlist for a second round of calls the following week.

Step 4: Check the near misses

Before you send the list anywhere, read the applications just below the line once more and ask one question of each: is the only reason this person is below the line something we said doesn’t matter? If yes, swap them in.

Then look at the shortlist as a whole. If everyone on it went to the same two schools, worked at the same kind of company, or shares a background, ask whether your requirements produced that or your reading did. Field experiments show the reading can. In a study that sent more than 83,000 fictitious applications to jobs at 108 of the largest U.S. employers, Kline, Rose and Walters (2022) found that distinctively Black names reduced the chance of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points compared with distinctively white names, with large differences between companies. In Toronto, resumes with English-sounding names received interview requests 40% more often than otherwise identical resumes with Chinese, Indian or Pakistani names, 16% against 11% (Oreopoulos, NBER, 2009).

Neither study observed your process, and the gaps varied a great deal between employers. The practical point is that a written list of evidence, applied the same way to everyone, gives you something to check your instincts against.

Step 5: Write one line per decision

For each person on the shortlist, write the evidence that put them there. For each near miss, write why they aren’t on it. One line each:

• “B: CPA; ran the close for a 60-person distributor for three years; prepared audit files; uses a cloud ledger.”
• “H: meets both must-haves; no nice-to-haves shown. Next in line if anyone withdraws.”

This takes ten minutes. It lets someone else check your reasoning, it keeps the second round honest, and it’s the record you’ll want when you look back at the hire.

Step 6: Share it in a form someone else can check

If a hiring manager, partner or client is choosing who to interview from your list, send them the requirements, each candidate’s evidence against each one, anything still unclear, and the near misses. A list of names with “strong fit” next to each one asks them to trust you. A list with evidence lets them agree or disagree for a reason. Our guide to writing a candidate recommendation shows the format.

When the shortlist is too short

If fewer people meet your must-haves than you have interview slots, don’t lower the bar quietly by shortlisting people who miss one. Look upstream instead:

• Are the must-haves real? A requirement that is really a proxy, such as a degree or a year count, removes people who could do the job.
• Did the posting attract the right people? See how to write a job description.
• Is the problem the market or the process? Not finding qualified candidates? has five things to check.

Where SortTheStack fits

SortTheStack reads every application against your Must have and Nice to have requirements and marks each one met, not met or unclear, with the evidence quoted from the application. Applicants are grouped as Recommended, Possible, Needs review or Requirements not met, so the unclear ones are visible rather than silently dropped. You decide who moves to Shortlisted, compare finalists side by side, and share the shortlist with a hiring manager or client by link. See how the screening works.

Sources

• Fuller, J. B., Raman, M., Sage-Gavin, E., & Hines, K. (2021). Hidden workers: Untapped talent. Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work and Accenture.
• Kline, P., Rose, E. K., & Walters, C. R. (2022). Systemic discrimination among large U.S. employers. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(4), 1963–2036. doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac024
• Oreopoulos, P. (2009). Why do skilled immigrants struggle in the labor market? A field experiment with six thousand resumes (NBER Working Paper 15036), as summarised in the NBER Digest, September 2009.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068. doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994