Ten tips on how to sort CVs
You are advertising a job vacancy in your workplace. You have just listed the position online and you already have 50 applications, and counting, piling up in your inbox, plus a heavy workload.
If you are a business owner, then this scenario may sound all too familiar. Hiring new staff can often be difficult, stressful and time-consuming. Due to these reasons, the task can be carried out poorly, resulting in numerous inefficiencies.
However, sorting through CVs quickly, efficiently and reliably is easier said than done. So here are 10 tips on how to streamline the CV sorting process, avoid recruitment blunders, and hire the right person for the job every time.
1. Prepare a list of the top three skills or experiences the successful person must already have, as well as 3 – 6 things that would be useful, and use this when going through CVs. Look at the actual tasks the candidate has done rather than the job title. There might be transferable skills.
2. If you’re receiving email applications, set up a folder in your inbox and move applications into it. At the end of each day, do a quick read through and highlight in red those without any of your top three necessary attributes, orange if they have 1 – 2 and green if they have all three (or print them off and put some time aside at the end of each day to do this manually).
3. When you turn people down, send a nice rejection letter. They may end up being a client or a good fit for another job.
4. Get back to your shortlisted candidates ASAP and organise an interview; otherwise, you could lose good candidates if you take too long.
5. If you think you’ll get lots of applications, ask people to include something specific in their application. Those who don’t bother probably aren’t going to be the right person. For example, we asked people applying for our marketing role to do a quick mock-up of a website page for us.
6. Take preference over candidates who are progressing their career, this shows they’re eager to learn, rather than those who have had five different jobs all in the same role.
7. Don’t get too caught up on grammar or spelling in younger candidates or migrant’s CVs unless that’s a key part of the job.
8. If you’ve got more than four people to interview, do a 10-minute phone interview with each person first and ask why they applied and what they’ll bring to the role to narrow it down.
9. Use computer testing or other skill testing, as well as an interview, to check if they really do have the right background.
10. Always call at least two referees. This will help to verify their work history and provide a second opinion on their personality. Ensure the referee's number is a landline, preferably to a business. If the number is a cell phone, this often indicates that it is not authentic.