How to screen 200 applicants without losing your mind

You post a job. 200 people apply. You have a full time job already.

So here is what happens next, and be honest, you know it does.

The thing nobody admits about CV screening

You read the first 20 carefully. Really carefully. You feel great.

By number 60 you are scanning for company names.

By 120 you are looking at how long the CV is and making a decision in four seconds.

By 180 you have a headache and you are approving anyone who went to a school you recognise.

The last person to apply gets a completely different process than the first one. Same job, same role, wildly different bar.

Why this is worse than it sounds

It is not just unfair. It is expensive.

• Your best candidate might be number 147
• The people who apply fastest are usually the people currently unemployed, which is not the same as the people who are best
• Nice CVs and good work are two different skills, and only one of them shows up in a PDF
• You end up interviewing five people who are good at CVs

And then the actual interviews start. Thirty minutes each. Five people. Plus scheduling, which somehow takes longer than the interviews.

A first round that scales

The fix is not reading faster. It is not reading at all, at first.

Give everyone the same short conversation, before you look at a single CV.

Not a form. A conversation, where somebody asks about their actual experience and follows up when an answer is vague. Ten minutes. They can do it at 11pm if they want.

Then you read CVs. But you read 15 of them, and you already know something real about each one.

What to score

Pick three things. Not twelve. Three.

For most roles it is something like:

• Have they actually done this, or read about it
• Can they explain a decision they made and why
• Do they want this job or any job

Score every conversation on those three, the same way, every time. Now your shortlist is a shortlist, not a list of people who applied on Tuesday.

The fairness bit, quickly

Same questions for everyone. Same scoring. Nobody gets a tired reviewer at 6pm.

That is not a nice-to-have anymore in a lot of places, it is starting to be a legal expectation. Worth being ahead of.

One thing though. Do not let the score make the decision by itself. It picks who you talk to, a human decides who you hire. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Yeah, this is what we built

ColloAI does exactly that first round. Same questions for all 200, follow-ups when answers are thin, scored on the three things you picked.

Free with your own AI key. You could have it running before lunch.