How many candidates should I interview for an open position?

Question:

I’ve posted for an open job and gotten hundreds of applications. How many candidates should I interview?

Answer:

The core tension in this scenario is not having enough time to interview lots of candidates but needing to interview enough that you won’t be back at it again soon.

Explanation:

When you have an open role, you likely don’t have a ton of time to screen and interview candidates. For this reason, employers understandably want to interview as few candidates as possible. But, to quote John Wooden, “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

What happens if you only interview a couple of candidates and none of them are great fits? Well, most likely, you’ll have to go through the entire process again, hopefully having learned an important lesson. Or, even worse, you’ll hire someone who isn’t a great fit and then be stuck going through the entire process again, only this time, six months later after paying a poor candidate thousands of dollars to do work they weren’t well-suited to do.

For that reason, I suggest the following screening system to employers. [NOTE: this advice doesn’t apply to executive positions, which will have much fewer applicants (and probably even fewer high-quality ones) or to entry-level jobs where you have many positions open (e.g., customer service reps at a large company). This advice is for all the jobs somewhere in between those two extremes.]

Phase 1: Recruiter Application Review

Have a recruiter or dedicated HR person review the applications. In an ideal world, he or she should review them all. They should then speak with any candidates who stand out to them. And I mean that…don’t give your recruiter a hard ceiling. You never know who is going to turn out to be a great candidate or when you’ll be hiring for another role again soon. Your recruiter is a low-cost way to talk to as many people as possible.

Phase 2: Hiring Manager Resume Review

Next, the recruiter should pass along the resumes of any candidates who are highly promising. If you don’t like the resumes you’re seeing, then you need to have a calibration conversation with your recruiter. He or she should be sending you sufficiently high-quality candidates that you want to talk to at least 50% of them. If they’re sending you more bad apples than good, that’s a sign you have a recruiter problem. Ideally, you should review at least 20 resumes, but if you have the bandwidth and your candidate pool is strong enough to support more, I recommend reviewing up to 50.

Phase 3: Hiring Manager Interview

After you’ve reviewed those resumes, put ALL the candidates who you think would be able to do the job well into the “yes” pile. Even if there are 20 of them. Then, rank them. Bring in your top 5-10 candidates for a 30-60 minute interview with you, the hiring manager. Schedule them as close together as possible so everyone is fresh in your mind. First candidate and last candidate bias are real. The reason to include all the strong candidates in the “yes” pile is so that you can go back to the pile if your other candidates don’t work out or in case you need to hire for a similar job soon.

Phase 4: Second/Panel Interviews

I generally recommend a second, more in-depth interview. Sometimes this is with the hiring manager, sometimes someone higher up the chain, and sometimes a panel with a mixed group of coworkers and/or superiors. I NEVER recommend putting future subordinates on a panel interview. This round might consist of a single, standout candidate. Or it might be your top three. But out of respect for your boss’s and/or coworkers’ time, I wouldn’t do more than that.

To sum up:

• Recruiter reviews as many (ideally all) applications as possible.
• Recruiter talks to as many candidates as he or she thinks are worth talking to.
• Recruiter forwards 20-50 resumes for the hiring manager’s review.
• Hiring manager bookmarks ALL candidates worth interviewing, ranks them, and brings in the top 5-10 for an initial interview.
• Hiring manager chooses top 1-3 for second or panel interviews.