It varies from employer to employer. We used to reject long c.v s (more than two sides of A4 and badly spelled and puntuated letters. If you have a lot of replies, there have to be several ways of eliminating some. Eventually you arrive at the most likely candidates because they have the right qualifications and experience. If you have applied to a local authority, there will be a points system for answers given and if you have met all of the criteria, they will be forced to give an interview. It s supposed to be in the name of equal opportunities but from my experience usually leads to the wrong person being taken on.
Hi there.You Have to make a decision on how many top quality candidates you can handle for the full-on interview process.Setting up full-scale interviews - booking rooms, making the right people available, getting HR ready, taking the references up etc - is expensive and time-consuming, so you want to do it all together and keep the costs to a minimum - shortlisting is a good way to do this.So let us say you decide you can afford to handle 6 genuine candidates over two days.You are likely to get a lot more than 6 candidates for a job, so you decide you have a short-list of 6 to fill. The applicants will need to be whittled down to maximum 6, so you would start by discounting anybody who misses the deadline, then you would go through the CV s to spot any obvious mismatches.You would have to sift the CVs again and again, rejecting on whatever grounds necessary (too highly paid, too inexperienced, whatever it is)until only the strongest 6 remain.That is your shortlist, you can then call those people for the interview process. To make it work, though, you have to absolutely sure what you really want for the post - if you get your terms of reference wrong, you won t find the right candidate.Cheers, Steve.
