How to shortlist candidates for interview when 200 CVs arrive at once

To shortlist candidates for interview, turn the job advert into a checklist of requirements, score every CV against that checklist with a note of the evidence behind each score, and invite the highest scorers who meet every essential requirement. Agree the checklist and the scoring scale before anyone opens a CV, and involve two people in the final cut.

That is close to the method Acas recommends, and it works whether you have 20 applications or 200. At 200 the difficulty is stamina. The fortieth CV gets less attention than the fourth, the criteria drift as the reader tires, and three weeks later nobody can say why one candidate made the list and another did not. The steps below are designed to hold up under that load.

Turn the advert into a checklist before you open a CV

Acas's guidance on choosing who to interview describes a simple scoring system. Turn each point in the job description and person specification into a checklist, assess each application against it, and score it. Its own example: an applicant who meets 17 of 20 points scores 17 out of 20.

Write the checklist from the advert you published. If it asked for weekend availability and experience running a till, those are criteria. Anything it did not ask for, such as a degree for a role that never mentioned one, stays off the list. Acas also says you should use the information you told applicants you would use, such as application forms and CVs, so new tests should not appear halfway through the pile.

Split hard requirements from weighted criteria

Some requirements are pass or fail, such as a personal licence for a bar manager or a forklift licence for a warehouse role. Everything else is a matter of degree and should carry a weight.

Keep the two lists apart. Give the weighted criteria points that add up to 100, so a score means the same thing on every CV. Treat a missing hard requirement as a flag. Mark the candidate as not eligible on that requirement, keep their score and evidence on the list, and let a person look at the case. CVs are often incomplete. The licence may be held and simply not mentioned, and a short phone call settles that faster than a rejection email.

Write down the evidence behind every score

The change that makes shortlisting defensible is recording the line of the CV that earned each score. Here is a worked example for a fictional warehouse team leader role with four weighted criteria. Each criterion gets a factor from 0 to 1 based on the evidence, and the factor multiplies the weight.

• Leading a shift team, weight 35. The CV says "Supervised a team of six pickers on the night shift for 18 months." Clear evidence, factor 0.9, so 35 × 0.9 = 31.5 points.
• Using a warehouse management system, weight 25. The CV says "Used handheld scanners and the WMS to pick and confirm orders." A user rather than an administrator, factor 0.7, so 17.5 points.
• Health and safety responsibility, weight 25. The CV says "Completed the site fire marshal course." Partial evidence, factor 0.5, so 12.5 points.
• Stock accuracy, weight 15. No supporting line anywhere in the CV, factor 0, so 0 points.

The total is 61.5 out of 100, and every point traces to a quote. The role also has one hard requirement, a valid counterbalance forklift licence, and this CV does not mention one. The candidate is marked not eligible on that requirement and keeps the 61.5 for a person to review.

When a second reader disagrees, the argument is now about whether a fire marshal course is worth 0.5 for safety responsibility, which is a useful conversation to have. When a candidate asks months later why they were not shortlisted, you can show them the rubric and the lines it scored.

Use a scale wide enough to separate people

Acas makes a point that many scorecards miss. If you only score between 1 and 5, "you might get a lot of 4s and 5s", which does not help you choose between candidates, while a range such as 1 to 20 gives clearer results. With 200 applicants this matters more. A five-point scale puts dozens of people on the same score and pushes the real decision into a tie-break nobody wrote down.

A factor from 0 to 1 per criterion, multiplied by weights out of 100, gives the same spread. Decide where the interview line sits before you start, for example the top eight eligible candidates or everyone above 70, so the cut-off is fixed before the first CV is read.

What not to score

The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination because of age, disability, gender reassignment, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant or on maternity leave, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation, according to gov.uk's guide to discrimination and your rights. Criteria that act as stand-ins for any of these cause trouble even when nobody meant them to.

In practice, leave out the things a tired reader drifts towards: the name at the top of the CV, the school, a photo, the length of the CV, and spelling and grammar unless writing is part of the job. Career gaps and part-time work are worth a question at interview and should carry no deduction at the sift. AI-writing detectors belong on the same list, for reasons we covered in why AI detectors cannot tell who wrote a CV.

Acas adds a specific warning about personal social media. Avoid using information from someone's Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profile to decide whether to interview them, and Acas notes you might be breaking the law if you looked at some applicants' profiles and not others. Information people put on jobs websites and on LinkedIn can usually be used, provided you use it in a way that does not discriminate.

Two readers, one record

Acas says that ideally two or more people should be involved in choosing who to interview, to reduce the risk of personal bias, and that the people involved should use a consistent process such as a scoring system. With an evidence trail, the second reader does not need to repeat the whole pile. They can check the shortlist, the candidates either side of the cut-off and every candidate flagged not eligible, and challenge any score whose quote does not support it.

Keep the record with the role: the checklist, the weights, the scores and the evidence, plus a date on which it will be deleted. If software does any of the reading, our post on AI CV screening compliance sets out what UK data protection rules expect.

Doing the first pass with HireSieve

HireSieve is Braivex's screening tool built on this method. You drop a folder of CVs on it and it screens them against a rubric written from your own job advert, and it refuses to load a rubric whose weights do not add up to 100. For each criterion the AI model supplies a factor between 0 and 1 and the CV line that justifies it, and a separate scoring engine turns those into points, so the same CV and rubric give the same score on every run. A candidate who misses a hard requirement is marked not eligible and keeps their full score. The software rejects nobody.

It will not score AI-written text, grammar, job-title plausibility, names, schools, photos or CV length, and it flags career gaps and part-time work for a person to ask about. Because it starts from the file, it works with any job board that lets you download or email applications, including Indeed, Reed, Totaljobs and LinkedIn, with no API or password to hand over. Braivex puts the cost at about 45 seconds and a few cents per CV, shown before anything is spent.

The Trial plan covers 5 screenings with no card. Starter is $19 a month for 100 screenings and Team is $49 a month for 400, billed in US dollars, with the AI model included. Start free on HireSieve with the role you are hiring for now: drop in five CVs and read the shortlist with its quotes. If the evidence under each score is what you would have written yourself, the other 195 can follow.