Screening applications without an applicant tracking system
Sixty applications and a spreadsheet is a workable position, provided the sorting happens against criteria fixed before you started reading.
Applicant tracking systems solve a volume problem and a compliance problem. Below roughly twenty hires a year, most small employers do not have enough of either to justify the cost or the setup, and a spreadsheet is genuinely adequate.
What is not adequate is reading applications in order and forming impressions, which is what happens by default. The order effects alone are substantial: the third application is judged against the first two, and the fortieth is judged by someone who is tired.
Fix the criteria before opening the pile
Take the essential list from the advert and turn it into columns. Three to five criteria, each scored on a deliberately coarse scale — met, partly met, not met — because finer scales imply a precision that reading a CV does not support.
Score every application against every column before ranking anything. The discipline sounds bureaucratic for sixty applications and takes about ninety minutes, which is less than the unstructured version takes and produces a decision you can explain.
A three-point scale forces a judgement and resists false precision. Scoring a CV out of ten invites you to distinguish a seven from an eight on evidence that cannot support the distinction.
Read the parts that carry information
CV formatting, design quality and the presence of a covering letter carry little signal for most roles and a great deal of noise about class, education and access to advice. The parts that carry information are narrower:
- What the person actually did, as distinct from what their team or employer did.
- Scope — how many, how much, over what period.
- Whether the trajectory makes sense, and if there are gaps, whether they are explained rather than hidden.
- Evidence against your specific essential criteria, wherever it appears.
Anything else is worth deliberately not weighting, because it will otherwise be weighted accidentally.
Keep a decision record
For each application, record the score, the outcome and a one-line reason. This takes seconds per candidate and serves three purposes: it makes the shortlist defensible, it lets you revisit the near-misses later, and in most jurisdictions it is the evidence you would need if a rejection were ever challenged. For a product-level comparison in this area, review mouse jiggler detection software. For broader independent guidance on this point, consult CareerOneStop.
Record retention has a limit. Decide how long you keep application data, write it down, and delete on schedule. Holding a folder of unsuccessful applications indefinitely is a data protection exposure with no offsetting benefit.
A screening call is worth fifteen minutes
Between paper screening and interview, a short structured call removes the mismatches that neither side can see on paper: salary expectations, notice period, working pattern, right to work, whether the location is actually feasible.
Keep it to a fixed list of the same questions for everyone, keep it to a quarter of an hour, and treat it as a filter rather than an assessment. It routinely halves the interview list, and the half it removes would mostly have withdrawn later anyway.
Reject promptly and plainly
Unsuccessful candidates should hear within the timeframe the advert promised. This is partly decency and partly self-interest: a small employer's reputation as a place to apply is formed by the people who did not get the job, and there are more of them.
The message does not need to contain detailed feedback, which is time-consuming and occasionally contentious. It needs to be prompt, clear and free of the implication that a decision is still open when it is not.